The Causal Angel
“We have received a communication from Jean le Flambeur. He claims that in precisely 57 minutes, he is going to steal a ring of Saturn.”
It’s all true, of course. The system’s greatest gentleman thief almost always gives fair warning when he’s about to commit a crime. The Causal Angel takes us into the white hot cultural heart of the system, the intricate games of the quantum Zoku posthumans, who have embraced quantum narrativism as a weapon against the cold computational simulational hyperpolitics of the Sobornost Founders. At stake is the Kaminari Gem, an ancient artifact with the power to unmake and remake universes, which might be the only thing that can protect post-humanity from the hegemonic ursine embrace of the All-Defector strategic parasite.
Okay, wow. I’ve got almost no idea what’s going on in this book, but it is GLORIOUS. The Saturnian Zoku don’t quite hold together as well as Mars and Earth from the previous books, but the sheer awesome of the cosmological war over the very nature of existence makes up for a story that seems to be blowing itself apart at the pieces, like a combat thoughtwisp shedding its outer armor against slowgun viral parasites. What Rajaniemi says is that we can imagine the other side of The Singularity, and even there a few people can make all the difference.
Rajaniemi has been teasing about his cosmology and its relation to the story since book one, and he lays it all out here. There is something deeply spooky at the interface of quantum mechanics and computation, certain answers that come out of nanoscale blackholes that indicate that the secrets to the universe are encrypted, and whoever holds that password will be the next best thing to gods. The key is the macguffin of the series, the Kaminari Jewel. Crafted by the Zoku, a clade of posthumans descended from gamers who use quantum effects to optimize their society, the Jewel has been presumed lost. Le Flambeur’s quest is to steal it, and to make himself someone who can use it. On a reread, this is more pessimistic than I remember. Both the Zoku and the Sobornost are thoroughly monstrous, the jargon does not fully conceal the more or less arbitrary nature of the Kaminari as the object, and the Zoku society feels incredibly dated in an internet culture circa 2014 kind of way, rather than hitting some eternal truth. It’s a solid conclusion, but not a stunning one.