“Hannu Rajaniemi: the Science of Fiction”, 2010-11-09 (; backlinks):
The author of this year’s most exciting SF debut, The Quantum Thief, talks about how 24 pages of an unfinished first novel won him a 3-book deal, his split writing personality and why science fiction is more honest than the mainstream.
…Born in Ylivieska in 1978, as a child Rajaniemi dreamed of studying theoretical physics, a passion which led him to a degree in maths at Cambridge. But while he was working on a PhD in string theory and quantum gravity at Edinburgh, he went to a performance by the spoken-word group Writers’ Bloc and got chatting with some of the members over a beer after the show. He took a story along to one of their monthly workshop sessions, where he found writers such as Charlie Stross and Andrew Wilson, and was soon hooked.
“It’s a really professional group, with brutally honest feedback on your work, which was really excellent. There was some pain”, he says with a wry grin. But writing in English made the criticism a little less wounding because it gave him a bit of distance. “It made it easier to be an outsider and look at your own text in a problem-solving way.” He hesitates. “Maybe in a mathematical way.”
…The plot was inspired by one of Rajaniemi’s favorite characters as a teenager, Maurice Leblanc’s gentleman thief Arsène Lupin. A charismatic figure who operates on both sides of the law in a series of stories that began appearing in 1905, Lupin is a kind of anti-Sherlock Holmes—a master of disguise who burgles more for the love of a challenge than from any hope of personal gain. But what intrigued Rajaniemi were the cycles of redemption and relapse Lupin goes through as he tries to go straight, always falling gloriously short. At various stages in his career Lupin gets married, joins the French Foreign Legion and even spends 5 years as a chief of police, investigating himself—but always finds himself drawn to life on the wrong side of the law.
“It’s somehow clear that he’s never going to succeed, that the pull of the illicit is too strong, that somehow fundamentally, he is Arsène Lupin—though of course Arsène Lupin is not even his real name. Arsène Lupin is the identity he has created for himself, but he can no longer escape it.” This underlying thread offers an element of tragedy, Rajaniemi says. “He can break the rules, but in the end he’s also imprisoned by some higher order of rules, rules of identity.” What would become of Lupin in a future where people really can switch identities or bodies? Could he change at heart? Could he actually redeem himself? “That became the central theme not only of the first book, but probably the sequels that will be forthcoming.”
After examining questions of identity through memory in The Quantum Thief, the second installment [The Fractal Prince] will revolve around how we construct stories of ourselves—a theory of consciousness which offers intriguing possibilities for a novelist. According to Rajaniemi, who despaired of the increasing abstraction of string theory and set up a company to apply advanced mathematics to “real-life problems”, it’s coming along well in the gaps around the day job, with a third in prospect [The Causal Angel] that will focus on how game-playing allows us to adopt radically different selves.
He dismisses the suggestion that a physics PhD is becoming part and parcel of the science-fiction writer’s job description, arguing instead that what makes science fiction is “some sort of understanding of the scientific method—that if you make a hypothesis, you need to figure out what consequences that hypothesis has”.