The Quantum Thief

Jean le Flambeur is the galaxy's greatest thief, locked in a quantum Dilemma Prison where he repeatedly betrays copies of himself. A posthuman warrior named Mieli breaks him out at the behest of a goddess-like entity, then drops him into the Oubliette, a walking city on Mars where citizens trade memories, control their own privacy through a shared "exomemory," and budget the literal time they have left to live. To repay his debt, Jean must steal back something he hid from his own past, while a young detective named Isidore unravels the crimes Jean leaves in his wake. Rajaniemi builds a dense posthuman world of gevulot, gogols, and zoku, demanding the reader assemble the rules on the fly.