From the start, readers know what they're letting themselves in for. Chapter 1, entitled "The Thief and the Prisoner's Dilemma", begins "As always, before the warmind and I shoot each other, I try to make small talk". Most of the action takes place in a walking city on Mars. With the aid of technology, people have control over how much of themselves they want others to see. People die at prescribed times and a reincarnated, often as dumb workers. The Web/cloud has developed in the exomemory.
It's a multi POV novel with 1st person and 3rd person-priviledged sections. There are allusions to other works - on p.157 for example there's mention of a magnifying glass and a locked room mystery; on p.161 there's "When you eliminate the impossible ...". There are hints of Proust, with Marcel and Gilbertine. And it might help if you've read Maurice Leblanc (I haven't). Cryptography's public/private keys are mentioned. Every so often there are short flashback chapters described as Intervals, whose common factor becomes clear later. There's a sleuth, a thief, and romance - enough momentum to keep readers interested while they're discovering the world they're in. Here are some extracts to give a flavour of the style -
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And this is good matter to turn into a Prison. Its mouth waters in anticipation of the taste of the patterns that the iterated Dilemmas will make. Its copyfather discovered a defector pattern that tastes like pecan ice cream: a replicating strategy family like a flyer in a Game of Life
(p.28)
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Isidore massages the entanglement ring he wears on the index finger of his right hand: a silver band with a tiny blue stone, speaking directly to his brain. He has yet to get used to the zoku method of qupting. Sending brain-to-brain messages directly through a quantum teleportation channel seems like a dirty, invasive way to communicate compared to Oubliette co-remembering
(p.38)
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His Watch tickles at his mind. She offers him a gevulot contract, like a cautious handshake. He accepts: the conversation over the next five minutes will not go into his exomemory
(p.44)
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The Resurrection Men are good. They will fix her, if they can. And then it will be early Quiet for her, I suspect, depending on what the Voice says
(p.54)
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He lets his mind wander through the crowd, looking through other eyes, looking for traces of manipulation in fresh memories like disturbed leaves in a forest
(p.57)
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It is a square where one of the Revolution monuments stands, a low slab of volcanic rock, sculpted by the Quiet. It is engraved with the billions of names of the gogols who were brought here from Earth
(p.60)
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I must have been an Obliette citizen, before, at least for some time. That means I had a Watch: and here, having a Watch also means having an exomemory, a repository for your thoughts and dreams, where they keep you as you flip between being a Noble and a Quiet
(p.61-2)
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I squirt some Time from my temporary Watch (a little silver circle on a transparent strap around my wrist; the hair-thin dial moves a millimetre) into the fabber next to the bench. It spits out a pair of dark sunglasses
(p.63)
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There must have been times when I flicked from one identity to another, posthuman, zoku, baseline, Sobornost
(p.147)
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Never good with names, I decided to make some notes about words and characters (some definitions appear hundreds of pages after a word's first used) -
- Archons - immortals
- 'blink - accessing "the WWW"
- copyfather
- cryptarchs - "There are people, one or more, who are manipulating [the exomemory] ... We call them cryptarchs" (p.196)
- Deveraux - a chocolateer, murdered
- Elodie - daughter of chocolateer
- fabber - 3D printer
- gevulot - a sensory/cyber access control. Its keys decrypt the owners mind.
- gogol piracy - uploading a mind without permission
- Jean le Flambeur - the thief. Begins in prison. Has a Sobornost body.
- Isidore Beautrelet- a Martian detective who reputedly found the missing city. An architecture student. Used to be Paul Sernine, friends with Raymode (who is now a tzaddik?)
- Miele - kidnaps the hero. Scarred. Perhonen is her ship. Brihane is her grandmother. Employed by the Sobornost
- millenniaire - someone rich in Time?
- Oubliette - A place on Mars
- pellegrini - goddess?
- phoboi - "hybrid biot/biological weapons, breeding themselves through billions of virtual generations and then modifying their own design accordingly" (p.305)
- Pixil - Isidore's girlfriend. A zoku. The 1st child created in Mars. Parents from Jupiter. Her mother is Drathdor
- a posthuman - The Eldest is one.
- q-dots - "artificial atoms capable of assuming any range of physical properties" (p.146)
- a Quiet - something Martians are transformed into; a speechless entity that performs community/military service
- Sebastian - boyfriend of Elodie
- Sobornost - they rule the inner solar system
- spime - an app?
- Sydan - a female?
- Time - money?
- tzaddiks
- vasilevs
- Voice - the Oubliette's e-democracy system
- Watch - "A device that stores Time as quantum cash - unforgeable, uncopyable quantum states that have finite lifetimes, counterfeit-proof, measures the time an Oubliette citizen is allowed in a baseline human body. Also responsible for their encrypted channel to the exomemory" (p.108)
- zoku - a race who lost a war to the Sobornost. They "have machines that turn thoughts into things" (p.220)
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