Somebody described this to me once as “Neuromancer but you have to earn it” and honestly, yeah. Rajaniemi drops you into the Oubliette, a walking city on Mars run on gevulot and exomemory and about a dozen other terms nobody stops to define, and you’re just expected to keep up. There is no glossary, no character sitting down to explain the tech to a confused newcomer, you get one clue at a time and you build the picture yourself. I know a lot of people bounce off this in the first fifty pages and I get it, I nearly did too, the jargon density in the opening stretch is genuinely a wall.

Push through it though and there’s a real heist-mystery under all that, Jean le Flambeur busted out of a quantum prison to steal something from his own past self, with a warrior named Mieli hauling him around under obligation neither of them enjoys. The prose does this thing where it withholds information as a structural choice, not laziness, and once you clock that it’s a Poe’s Purloined Letter riff dressed up in post-human Mars politics, the whole design clicks into place. What actually got me was less the tech and more how much genuine feeling is buried in Mieli’s side of things, her reasons for doing any of this, which the plot mechanics almost distract you from noticing.

Where I’d dock it is the ending, which resolves faster and cleaner than the two hundred pages of buildup earned, some readers have called it a standard finish tacked onto a very nonstandard book and I can’t really argue. Also the characters outside Mieli stayed a little flat for me, more concept than person. Still, I don’t regret the effort it took to read this, and I went straight into the sequel within a week. Four stars, bring a notebook.