Gollancz, 2012, 302p.

In The Fractal Prince we meet once again characters from Rajaniemi’s debut novel The Quantum Thief in Jean le Flambeur, Mieli and the spaceship Perhonen. The Mars setting of the Oubliette has been left behind, though, as they travel to Earth to seek out Matjek Chen whose personality has been confined inside a Schrödinger box. Their adventures are interspersed with those of Earth dwellers Tawaddud and Dunyazad.

Where The Quantum Thief was concerned with memory The Fractal Prince is more about story, referencing – especially in the Earth sections – the tales of One Thousand and One Nights.

Rajaniemi’s prose is, as ever, dense. Don’t expect any info dumps. You will have to make sense for yourselves of terms such as zokus, jinni, Sobornost, hsien-kus, qutlinks, spimescapes, guberniyas, vasilevs and gogols though a familiarity with The Quantum Thief, where some of these appeared for the first time, will lighten that task.

I wouldn’t recommend this to anyone who is new to SF but techno-buffs will love it.

(There was a miniscule count of 1. You’d think someone at Gollancz would know.)

If you take a look at my sidebar you’ll see I’ve added a new page. It’s heading is exactly the same as on this post and I propose to put my Interzone reviews on that page after a decent interval has elapsed since publication in the magazine.

My first review there, of Hannu Rajaniemi’s The Quantum Thief, appeared a year ago. You can now read it on My Interzone Reviews page.

The latest BSFA mailing dropped onto my doormat today.

As well as the usual review magazine, Vector, which (unusually, since I’m normally slow at catching up with the latest thing) contains reviews of three books I’ve already read – Hannu Rajaniemi’s The Quantum Thief which I reviewed for Interzone, Ken MacLeod’s The Restoration Game and Ian McDonald’s The Dervish House – the envelope also spilled forth the A4 magazine of those short stories on the ballot for the BSFA Awards for 2010 and an A5 booklet published as a memorial to Robert Holdstock.

Apart from the book reviews this edition of Vector is a special Stephen Baxter issue.

Much of my reading for March is now more or less scheduled. As well as the short stories mentioned above, I have one more of the five novels shortlisted in the BSFA Award novel category in my to be read pile. I’ve just finished Paolo Bagicalupi’s The Windup Girl – review to come. For my thoughts on Ken MacLeod’s The Restoration Game and Ian McDonald’s The Dervish House see previous posts. Tricia Sullivan’s Lightborn awaits. Only Lauren Beukes’s Zoo City will escape my attention.

In addition Interzone has sent me Dominic Green’s Smallworld to review by the end of March. Busy, busy.

Gollancz, 2010, 267p

My review of this book has been delivered to Interzone. I’ll let you know the publication date in due course.

Btw, the cover image is arresting and ought to shift some copies.