There’s a learning curve to this book the way there’s a learning curve to a video game, and I mean that as neither compliment nor complaint, just the plainest description I’ve got. Rajaniemi drops you into a solar system full of gogol pirates and zoku hives and Sobornost minds without a glossary, and the first fifty pages or so are genuinely disorienting in a way that either wins you over or loses you depending on how much you like being confused on purpose.

It won me over, mostly. Jean le Flambeur, the thief, opens the book trapped in a prison built entirely out of an endless game of Prisoner’s Dilemma, his own personality fractured into competing versions of himself, which is a strong enough hook that I forgave a lot of the vocabulary fog that followed. The Oubliette, the city on Mars where privacy itself is currency and everyone’s memories are literally metered, is the best idea in the book and I wish more time had been spent there instead of moving the plot along. Isidore, the detective who gets tangled up in Jean’s heist, is doing some real character work amid all the worldbuilding, and his sections were the ones I actually slowed down for instead of skimming toward clarity.

Where it lost me a little was the back third, where the heist mechanics and the metaphysics both accelerate at once and I found myself rereading paragraphs to figure out what had actually just happened, not in a “this is a satisfying puzzle” way but in a “I think I missed a sentence somewhere” way. I’ve seen other readers call this a post-singularity novel in the truest sense, extrapolating past the point most science fiction is willing to go, and that’s fair, but it comes at a real cost to legibility. Three stars. I admired it more than I enjoyed reading it, and I’m not sure yet whether I’ll pick up the sequels.