In The Quantum Thief, a man named Jean le Flambeur escapes a prison in which his captors force him to reenact versions of the prisoner’s dilemma every day, killing him and resurrecting him over and over again in hopes of gradually rewiring his brain. He escapes the prison early in the novel with the assistance of a mysterious woman named Mieli and her spacecraft, which itself is a sentient being, apparently female, and apparently in some kind of romantic relationship with Mieli. The two of them go to Mars, where in a constantly-moving city obsessed whose people are obsessed with privacy, a young art student/amateur detective is investigating the murder of a well-known chocolatier.

Le Flambeur is the titular thief in this novel, and it turns out that he’s been rescued/kidnapped by Mieli to help her with a heist. But what he needs to find is something he’s intentionally hidden from the one person who might be able to steal it – himself.

The plot in this novel is pretty engaging, and it has a clever twist at the end, but as is the case with so much of sci-fi, the real appeal here is in the ideas. There are just so many things going on in this book. In addition to the privacy concerns alluded to above, which are illustrated in creative ways, there are questions of mortality and what it takes to build a human(ish) society on a hostile planet. The book touches on the meaning of life and death in an era where computers can perfectly reconstruct your consciousness. And, as is suggested by the title, there are a lot of questions about how a society that has mastered the applications of quantum mechanics might look different from societies that are more recognizable to the reader. The characters in this book go around with sentient ammunition in their guns, and fire torpedoes from their ships that don’t cause explosions but instead rewrite the DNA of their targets.

To be brief, there are enough ideas in this novel to fill ten other novels. When books are this overstuffed, there’s always the risk that the essential story will suffer, that so many exciting scenes will be happening and so many interesting questions thrown at the reader that the pace will slacken to a near-stop, or, worse, that few if any of the storylines will ever be actually resolved to anyone’s satisfaction. With such books, I’ve found, you often really enjoy yourself until you’re about 3/4 of the way through. Around then, a sense of unease starts to fill the pit of your stomach. “This is fun,” you find yourself thinking, “but how in the world is the author going to wrap everything up in the time he has left?”

If you’ve read Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, which by comparison to The Quantum Thief is a much more straightforward and down-to-earth novel, you’ll know what I’m talking about. And (spoiler alert) in the case of WTF, that unease turned out to be well-felt, as the author unfortunately just basically stopped writing after about 400 pages without offering any kind of conclusion whatsoever. (Do I sound bitter? I don’t mean to sound bitter).

That is one way to end a book in which you’ve thrown too many balls into the air, I suppose: Just walk away, and let those balls fall wherever the reader imagines that they must. Luckily, it’s not the way that Rajaniemi chooses to wrap things up. I won’t give away the ending, but I will say that he handles it quite successfully, and if any reader should happen to be less than entirely satisfied by the conclusion, all I can say is that it won’t be because some important point was left unexplained.

The reason, I think, that Rajaniemi seems better able to wrap things up than some other authors of thousand-idea novels is that, notwithstanding the wealth of unique concepts and original set pieces The Quantum Thief boasts, its essential story is relatively straightforward. That story – a master thief must pull off one last heist in order to assure his future freedom/wealth/whatever – is all we really need to see resolved. Sure, the characters exist inside what seems to be a living, breathing world where complex machinations are being crept toward by disparate parties with individualized ends in mind, and no, these things are not irrelevant, but they never overpower the central action. In this book, when plot and subplot intersect, it’s for a reason, and if a subplot occasionally goes off on its own separate path, that too feels natural. The things we care about are seen through to the end, and the most important subplots converge and meld fluidly with the main storyline near the novel’s end.

All that said, the last chapter of the book is, I admit, mildly irritating — it unnecessarily sets everything up for a sequel (which was published in 2012 and seems to have gotten pretty good reviews). But it’s a minor distraction, only five or so pages in a novel of nearly 400, and one that only arises after the important plot points of this first novel have been resolved. So you can easily treat this as a standalone novel, which is exactly what I intend to do. I very much enjoyed The Quantum Thief, but to be honest it was a little exhausting. Now that I’ve read it, I think I could use a little time away from Rajaniemi’s awe-inspiring but mentally taxing universe.

The author, by the way, is Finnish, but according to the “About the Author” in the book, he writes his sci-fi in English (does he write in other genres in other languages? It’s left unclear). For a non-native speaker, he writes exceptionally well. And I don’t mean to damn him with faint praise by saying that – generally the writing is very good – but it’s true, also, that at times it becomes clear that English is not his first language, and that can break the immersion. I’m thinking mostly of scenes where scene description or dialogue is more formal than the situation calls for; as an example, people never seem to use contractions in dialogue in this novel. These issues are minor sins, completely forgivable but sadly not quite unnoticeable.

The Quantum Thief is an unusual book. It is a particularly daring feat, I think, for a first novel. Reading it, I was frequently reminded of the experience of reading Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange. The novels are not at all similar except that they both employ to a large extent an invented, utterly foreign vocabulary. So in The Quantum Thief you are constantly coming across invented words that describe a technology or a person. It’s very much a sink-or-swim situation, with little in the way of hints as to what these words might be intended to get at. Indeed, I made it to the end of the book without any clear sense of what, precisely, gevulot is – and it plays a major role in the novel. For the first 50 pages or so, the made-up words were so frequent and so annoying that I had serious doubts about whether I would be able to finish the book. Once the story gets underway, though, I learned to sort of let the words wash over me, and to be satisfied with just having a sense of their meanings. I felt like a person from the distant past trying to read a novel written in 2015, and that, I think, was the intended effect. If you can stick with it, your reward is a genuinely engaging adventure set in the most fully-fleshed out and believable universe I’ve found in a science fiction novel since Frank Herbert’s Dune. That’s not a bad bargain.