'A prison is a prison, even if you don't know it is one,' I say.

This story starts in a prison -- a prisoner's dilemma, actually, but the dilemma takes place in a prison, between prisoners:

As always, before the warmind and I shoot each other, I try to make small talk.
'Prisons are always the same, don't you think?'
I don't even know if it can hear me. It has no visible auditory organs, just eyes, human eyes, hundreds of them, in the ends of stalks that radiate from its body like some exotic fruit. It hovers on the other side of the glowing line that separates our cells. The huge silver Colt would look ridiculous in the grip of its twig-like manipulator limbs if it hadn't already shot me with it fourteen thousand times.

Our hero is the infamous Jean le Flambeur, the greatest thief to ever live. But he's stuck in an infinite prison and doesn't know how to break out. I would have been happy with a story that had some quantum whackadoodle puzzle stuff and featured the thief conning his way out of this prison to end all prisons. Unfortunately, that is not what we get.

While the rest of the story isn't quite so weird as the beginning, it gives you a taste. There really are some pretty fabulous things to think about in it: a privacy-minded society where everyone is constantly adjusting the level of person detail they reveal to others (even to the point of whether they can be seen as more than a gray blur) and memories are all stored in external data banks accessed with quantum cryptography:

'The Martians have a dedicated organ for it.' I tap my head. 'A privacy sense. They feel what they are sharing, what is private and what isn't. They also do something called co-remembering, sharing memories with others just y sharing the appropriate key with them. We just have the baby version. They give the visitors a bit of exomemory and an interface to it, reasonably well-defined. But there is no way we can appreciate the subtleties.'

And instead of dying, these privacy-minded people of Mars get made anew as Quiet -- speechless, mindless workers with freaky bodies but who will eventually return to normal human life when their time is back -- time being the currency here.

It's a Watch. A device that stores Time as quantum cash--unforgeable, uncopyable quantum states that have finite lifetimes, counterfeit-proof, measures the time an Oubliette citizen us allowed in a baseline human body. Also responsible for their encrypted channel to the exomemory. A very personal device.'

The really weird world that Rajaniemi makes definitely gets in the way of telling the story. There are a few too many made up terms and concepts and they're a little too foreign for a gentle reader. You feel like you're constantly re-constructing your understanding of some term or how gevolut works. Perhaps it would have been acceptable if the plot wasn't so reliant on understanding the nuances of how these things did work.

After all, what would you expect a thief to steal in such a place? It is far more complicated than you might think, even more complicated than necessary.

Isidore takes a deep breath. 'An interplanetary thief is building a picotech machine out of the city itself while the cryptarchs take over people's minds to try to destroy the zoku colony in order to stop the tzaddikim from breaking their power,' he says. 'I want to stop them both.' He pauses.

But, I have a feeling I'll be thinking about the way this world works for quite some time to come.