Derek Künsken

The Quantum Garden is Derek Künsken’s sequel to The Quantum Magician (2018). All the usual suspects are back, zipping around the galaxy and the timelines in the good ship Calculated Risk. This time Belisarius and his crew are looking for a new home for the homo quantus. Along the way, they have to rescue a transtemporal vegetable consciousness dubbed the Hortus quantus. Saint Matthew is still convinced that he is not an AI. And our protagonist, Belisarius, is still as conflicted as ever: show more “His capacity for denial was pulling a con on his guilt, playing on his own desperation. People fell for cons because they wanted a quick fix, a magic bullet, something to shortcut slow suffering. He wanted to be conned, but he knew he couldn’t. He had to take responsibility for all that he’d done, intentional or not.”
Time travel is dangerous in the quantum realm. As the high-pressure specialist Vincent Stills, who I wish had more scenes, puts it: “I don’t know shit about time travel, but it seems to me that if some cocksucker sneezes wrong, history puts our huevos in the cutter.” But what do you expect from baseline humans who are, as Stills says, “spineless and chicken-shit.”
Post-human, time-traveling, quantum romance is also tricky. Consider this bit of marital discord: “I thought you invited me into your marriage because you saw something in me. And then, not even weeks ago, I realized you’d only married me to avoid a causal violation.”
Bottom line: The Quantum Evolution series continues to be fun. show less

I love a heist! There's nothing like a moment when a complicated plan falls to pieces, and then bam! actually the plan falling to pieces was step 23 of Plan D, and now the crew is stealing even more than they thought. The Quantum Magician is so quickly paced it's like sleight of hand, with big flashy space opera ideas. The verve of the writing papers over some pretty bad structural cracks, but I had a great time.

Belisarius Arjona is slumming it as an art dealer on a world ruled by the show more Puppets, a post-human subclade. Bel is himself a post-human, a fallen member of Homo quantus, an experiment to produce a natural physicist capable of directly and intuitive understanding 11-dimensional wormhole physics. An officer of the Sub-Saharan Union offers him a job too rich to pass up, and too dangerous to take. He needs to smuggle 12 warships equipped with incredibly powerful drives and weapons through the Puppet wormhole and back into main space. The payment is a runabout with the same drive, a ship the other governments will pay anything to get their hands on. To do the job, Bel needs to assemble a team, an old flame, a former partner on his deathbed, an AI with delusions of sainthood, a renegade geneticist, a Puppet traitor, a foul-mouth space pilot who can only survive under 700 atmospheres of pressure, and an eccentric explosive expert.

That's a sizable crew, and there are a lot of moving parts. A truly great story about a con has a few simple rules. First, the job is never about the payoff, the real trick is stealing something worth more than money. Second, a great heist involves a perfect read and deception of both the social and physical terrain of the heist; think the end of Ocean's 11. For the first, Bel is stealing access to quantum reality and perhaps a return to H. quantus society, but I never quite bought that as a motivation. For the second, Künsken gestures at a setting divided between great powers and client states based on control of the Wormhole Axis, alien artifacts that allow long distance space travel, but I was perennial confused about how transit through the axis was regulated and on which side our characters were. The social terrain plays out over the group psychology of the Puppets, who were genetically engineered slaves designed to serve a set of masters who they now imprison, but the whole BDSM theology of the Puppets was gross, sticky, and nowhere near as interesting as the author believes.

But hey, sometimes you need popcorn, and the basic swiftness and likeability of the writing kept me with the story. show less

I have no problems raving about this book. It has everything I love about SF and then I get the best things I love about the thriller/mystery genre.

HEISTS.

At first, I believed this was written as a homage or a more accessible version of Hannu Rajaniemi's Quantum Thief, and I was right... to a degree. It forwent the truly odd stuff and gave us a readable and full explanation of quantum mechanics and name-dropped a few more while throwing us into a more widespread future that never quite show more touched the singularity.

In other words, it had odd cultures and odder branches of humanity but it still felt a lot like everything we know. Bruisers coming in the form of gene-modded humans able to withstand punishing pressure, a technician in the form of insane AI who think he is a Saint from three thousand years ago or an inside man who is a part of a whole people modded to worship everything about self-torture as a religious experience.

Add our mastermind who is a broken quantum computer (in the old sense) who ought to be able to go into a fugue state and savant his way through any difficult problem except for the tiny detail that it hospitalizes him, and we've got an MC who needs a social challenge big enough to tax his brain without busting it.

There's a lot of great gallows humor here. A truly wild backdrop of space-opera with wormholes, big space-fleet conflict, and empires who all think they're the most formidable foes in the playground. What could go wrong?

Well, as it turns out, a lot, but the ride is fun as hell. After all, it's a HEIST! :) :) show less

I read this serialized in Analog. The far-future human race is subdivided into several subspecies. They make sense in context and fill the novel with some strange and disturbing images. Homo Quantus is like an attempt to make super-Vulcans out of people. When Arjona goes into the fugue it is clearly a different experinece but rendered in familiar terms to make it real. The other subspecies are given their own voices as well. The sfnal elements don't detract from the story.
It is a fun world show more to visit. show less