The setting takes place in an Aladdin / Arabian Nights -like world, where Islamic architecture filled with artfully-placed geometric mosaic patterns are tiled across every surface mixed with generous amounts of symbolic calligraphy-like words and phrases scrawled along every nook-and-cranny and tattooed across bodies as a norm. Now before you think this book just follows in the footsteps of its former sibling, it most definitely does not! Yeah, it might be just as concept-dense (yum!), but it’s stylistically and narratively a very different kind of story…įor instance, this novel is written very much in the vein of fantasy-inspired science fiction (somewhat Slipstream in sub-genre). They are headed to Earth to track down youthful innocence, which takes the form of one of the original copies of a mind thought to have eventually turned into the god-like being which now rules most of this universe. We follow our trio composed of our one-and-only (kinda) thief, Jean le Flambeur, his companion Mieli who is an angel-like warrior raised on a comet from the Oortian clouds, and her sentient ship Perhonen whom she sang to existence. In The Fractal Prince Hannu Rajaniemi builds upon the foundations set in the first book of this series, The Quantum Thief.

TL DR - Arabian nights + Islamic Penrose tiling geometries + fractal decompression + Hofstadter Strange Loops + True Names + stories as biological vectors + Annihilation-level Lovecraftian anatomical weirdness + No Cloning Theorem + Zen Buddhist Suiboku-gaĬross-posted from my Goodreads reviews found here. Topics: Mathematics, Computer Science, Linguistics, Philosophy, Cognitive Science

The Fractal Prince by Hannu Rajaniemi