Glossary of terms in The Quantum Thief
Encyclopedia
This is a glossary of terms in the science fiction
novel by Hannu Rajaniemi
, The Quantum Thief
.
, are public places in the Oubliette where gevulot is overridden. Thus, anyone who is in an agora can be seen by everyone in the vicinity, even by persons outside of the agora. This makes agoras popular places to meet people.
. They arrive by means of the beanstalk, which appears to be a space elevator
.
. To spice things up, prisoners may be presented with more elaborate scenarios of defection and cooperation, besides the above-mentioned default scenario.
has been settled, but all settlements are on mobile platforms in order to escape the ravage of the phoboi plague.
means tribe, clan, or family.
system that feeds the biological sensory information that one person generates to another. This information is usually experienced in the form of a muffled background sensation by the latter.
in front of "b", which denotes the Oubliette-specific action of blinking to access information from the exomemory. Possibly derived from "web link"
, along the same lines whereby "web log" became blog
.
environment. A spimescape is populated by objects called spimes. The name may be a reference to the notion, proposed by Bruce Sterling
, of a spime
, an object that can be tracked in space and time throughout the lifetime of the object.
Visitors have to purchase a temporary citizenship and Watch upon arrival, but when their Time is used up, they do not enter the Quiet. Instead, they are put into a state of suspended animation
and reanimated only after their deportation
from the Oubliette.
proposed by J. Storrs Hall
.
transferred between bodies, while artificial intelligence
has advanced to a point where artificial minds are almost indistinguishable from uploaded ones. Gogols (likely in reference to the Nikolai Gogol
novel, Dead Souls
) are used to refer to these sentient entities, which may be likened to souls or minds. They are also similar to software, as gogols can be cloned and transferred between bodies. A character offers the Oubliette-centric view that the concept of a gogol as "a dead soul, the uploaded mind of a human being, enslaved to carry out tasks, [is] anathema to anyone from the Oubliette."
) are a posthuman
upload collective
. Their main guberniya
appears to be in Venus
, but they appear to have control over many parts of the solar system. Gogols of the Sobornost place great importance on a common mission, the Great Common Task, which appears to be the uploading of all sentient minds in the solar system. It is implied that the Sobornost is controlled by the Founders, the original creators of the collective who have made millions of copies of themselves, giving them access to the combined computational abilities of their many copies. The combined copies of the founders are called copyclans. Individuals other than the founders uploaded into the Sobornost become slaves to the copyclans, and are used to maintain the computational processes of the Sobornost.
guilds, and their culture reflects these origins. They are warriors and mercenaries, and are primarily motivated by the desire to find new challenges and improve themselves through conflict. They dismiss people who believe in actual causes and movements as "meme
zombies." The zoku fought a war against the Sobornost called the protocol war, which they lost. They originally lived on Saturn, but after losing the war they sought asylum on the Oubliette on Mars in order to recover.
Science fiction
Science fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with imaginary but more or less plausible content such as future settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, aliens, and paranormal abilities...
novel by Hannu Rajaniemi
Hannu Rajaniemi
Hannu Rajaniemi is a Finnish author of science fiction and fantasy, who writes in both English and Finnish. He lives in Edinburgh, Scotland, and is a founding director of a commercial research organisation, ThinkTank Maths.-Biography:...
, The Quantum Thief
The Quantum Thief
The Quantum Thief is the first science fiction novel by Hannu Rajaniemi. It was published in Britain by Gollancz in 2010, and will be published in 2011 by Tor in the US. It is a heist story, set in a futuristic solar system, that features a protagonist modelled on Arsène Lupin, the gentleman thief...
.
Agoras
Agoras, similar to their Greek namesakeAgora
The Agora was an open "place of assembly" in ancient Greek city-states. Early in Greek history , free-born male land-owners who were citizens would gather in the Agora for military duty or to hear statements of the ruling king or council. Later, the Agora also served as a marketplace where...
, are public places in the Oubliette where gevulot is overridden. Thus, anyone who is in an agora can be seen by everyone in the vicinity, even by persons outside of the agora. This makes agoras popular places to meet people.
Beanstalk station
Visitors to the Oubliette pass through the beanstalk station or spaceportSpaceport
A spaceport or cosmodrome is a site for launching spacecraft, by analogy with seaport for ships or airport for aircraft. The word spaceport, and even more so cosmodrome, has traditionally been used for sites capable of launching spacecraft into orbit around Earth or on interplanetary trajectories...
. They arrive by means of the beanstalk, which appears to be a space elevator
Space elevator
A space elevator, also known as a geostationary orbital tether or a beanstalk, is a proposed non-rocket spacelaunch structure...
.
Dilemma Prisons
Dilemma Prisons are built and maintained by Archons, who are the creation of the Engineer-of-Souls. Prisoners there are condemned to play a perpetual game of iterated prisoner's dilemma, in which defection is shooting the occupier of an adjacent cell. Prisons are seeded with copies of the prisoners' gogols, as well as other gogols, such as warminds, and the composition of the prison population evolves, depending on the results of each round of prisoner's dilemma, according to rules similar to Conway's Game of LifeConway's Game of Life
The Game of Life, also known simply as Life, is a cellular automaton devised by the British mathematician John Horton Conway in 1970....
. To spice things up, prisoners may be presented with more elaborate scenarios of defection and cooperation, besides the above-mentioned default scenario.
Moving Cities
In the story universe, MarsMars
Mars is the fourth planet from the Sun in the Solar System. The planet is named after the Roman god of war, Mars. It is often described as the "Red Planet", as the iron oxide prevalent on its surface gives it a reddish appearance...
has been settled, but all settlements are on mobile platforms in order to escape the ravage of the phoboi plague.
Oubliette
The Oubliette is a Moving City of Mars and the location where most of the action in the novel takes place. The Oubliette society is characterized by the use of exomemory, gevulot, and Time as a currency. Visitors to the Oubliette are given a temporary gevulot shell to access exomemory and gevulot, and a temporary Watch to keep Time.Zoku colony
The zoku colony is in the Dust District, which is on the outskirts of the Oubliette. It resembles a dome. The Sino-Japanese word zokuZoku
is a Sino-Japanese term meaning tribe, clan, or family. As a suffix it has been used extensively within Japan to define subcultural phenomena, though many zoku do not acquire the suffix ....
means tribe, clan, or family.
Biot feed
A biot feed is a telepathicTelepathy
Telepathy , is the induction of mental states from one mind to another. The term was coined in 1882 by the classical scholar Fredric W. H. Myers, a founder of the Society for Psychical Research, and has remained more popular than the more-correct expression thought-transference...
system that feeds the biological sensory information that one person generates to another. This information is usually experienced in the form of a muffled background sensation by the latter.
Exomemory
The exomemory in the Oubliette is the public memory of the Oubliette. Anyone in the Oubliette can look up the exomemory to obtain information by 'blinking: note the apostropheApostrophe
The apostrophe is a punctuation mark, and sometimes a diacritic mark, in languages that use the Latin alphabet or certain other alphabets...
in front of "b", which denotes the Oubliette-specific action of blinking to access information from the exomemory. Possibly derived from "web link"
Hyperlink
In computing, a hyperlink is a reference to data that the reader can directly follow, or that is followed automatically. A hyperlink points to a whole document or to a specific element within a document. Hypertext is text with hyperlinks...
, along the same lines whereby "web log" became blog
Blog
A blog is a type of website or part of a website supposed to be updated with new content from time to time. Blogs are usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in...
.
Gevulot
Gevulot (Hebrew for "borders") is a privacy protocol used in the Oubliette. It is a system that allows people in the Oubliette, both citizens and visitors alike, to set the desired level of privacy in every social encounter, to share memories and to access the exomemory. People can obscure themselves from being seen by others if they are hidden behind a gevulot "fog". However, this effect is only apparent, as analog recording devices, like cameras, can still capture images of people behind gevulot. Gevulot is physically implemented using a wearable shell, which visitors to the Oubliette are given upon entry.q-objects
In the story universe, q-objects are objects made out of q-dots, an ubiquitous and versatile material. The q-dots can function as weapons, sensors, building materials, fabrics, etc.quptlink
In the story universe, gogols can qupt each other using the quptlink. The quptlink functions like a telepathic messaging network and appears to be mediated by neutrinos. Almost everyone can qupt, but in the Oubliette, gevulot is preferred.Spimescape
A spimescape, in the story universe, is a virtual realityVirtual reality
Virtual reality , also known as virtuality, is a term that applies to computer-simulated environments that can simulate physical presence in places in the real world, as well as in imaginary worlds...
environment. A spimescape is populated by objects called spimes. The name may be a reference to the notion, proposed by Bruce Sterling
Bruce Sterling
Michael Bruce Sterling is an American science fiction author, best known for his novels and his work on the Mirrorshades anthology, which helped define the cyberpunk genre.-Writings:...
, of a spime
Spime
Spime is a neologism for a currently theoretical object that can be tracked through space and time throughout the lifetime of the object. The name “spime” for this concept was coined by author Bruce Sterling...
, an object that can be tracked in space and time throughout the lifetime of the object.
Time
The currency of the Oubliette is Time, which is used to pay for goods and services, as well as the privilege to have children. The currency is stored in a Watch and appears to be made of a material that can encode quantum states. The amount of Time citizens have in their Watches determines how long they have before they enter the Quiet.Visitors have to purchase a temporary citizenship and Watch upon arrival, but when their Time is used up, they do not enter the Quiet. Instead, they are put into a state of suspended animation
Suspended animation
Suspended animation is the slowing of life processes by external means without termination. Breathing, heartbeat, and other involuntary functions may still occur, but they can only be detected by artificial means. Extreme cold can be used to precipitate the slowing of an individual's functions; use...
and reanimated only after their deportation
Deportation
Deportation means the expulsion of a person or group of people from a place or country. Today it often refers to the expulsion of foreign nationals whereas the expulsion of nationals is called banishment, exile, or penal transportation...
from the Oubliette.
The Quiet
The Quiet is the state in which all citizens of the Oubliette must eventually enter at some point. When citizens enter the Quiet, their gogols are assigned by the city computer to the Quiets, machines that help run the Oubliette, while their bodies are collected by the Resurrection Men and kept in storage for their return from the Quiet. Early entry into the Quiet can be voluntarily chosen or imposed as a sanction by the courts.Watches
In the Oubliette, every person, citizen or visitor, has a Watch, which keeps the Time that the person still has. The Watch also contains a private encryption key that is required to 'blink exomemory and use gevulot.Utility fog
A utility fog in the story universe is similar to the idea of a utility fogUtility fog
Utility fog is a hypothetical collection of tiny robots that can replicate a physical structure. As such, it is a form of self-reconfiguring modular robotics.-Conception:...
proposed by J. Storrs Hall
J. Storrs Hall
John Storrs Hall is involved in the field of molecular nanotechnology. He founded the sci.nanotech Usenet newsgroup and moderated it for ten years, and served as the founding chief scientist of Nanorex Inc. for two years...
.
Gogols
In the story universe, most humans have undergone mind uploads and can easily have their mindsMINDS
Initiated as an EU-funded project in 2004, MINDS International was founded as an Association in fall 2007 by 11 news agencies from Europe and the USA...
transferred between bodies, while artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence is the intelligence of machines and the branch of computer science that aims to create it. AI textbooks define the field as "the study and design of intelligent agents" where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its...
has advanced to a point where artificial minds are almost indistinguishable from uploaded ones. Gogols (likely in reference to the Nikolai Gogol
Nikolai Gogol
Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol was a Ukrainian-born Russian dramatist and novelist.Considered by his contemporaries one of the preeminent figures of the natural school of Russian literary realism, later critics have found in Gogol's work a fundamentally romantic sensibility, with strains of Surrealism...
novel, Dead Souls
Dead Souls
Dead Souls is a novel by Nikolai Gogol, first published in 1842, and widely regarded as an exemplar of 19th-century Russian literature. Gogol himself saw it as an "epic poem in prose", and within the book as a "novel in verse". Despite supposedly completing the trilogy's second part, Gogol...
) are used to refer to these sentient entities, which may be likened to souls or minds. They are also similar to software, as gogols can be cloned and transferred between bodies. A character offers the Oubliette-centric view that the concept of a gogol as "a dead soul, the uploaded mind of a human being, enslaved to carry out tasks, [is] anathema to anyone from the Oubliette."
The Oubliette
The Oubliette is the only baseline human nation left in the solar system. The citizens of the Oubliette were originally slaves whose minds were used as the control processes in machines for terraforming Mars. They rebelled against their enslavers and founded a new state based on the freedom and privacy of individual minds. The Oubliette is governed by the Voice, a composite of the unconscious beliefs of all Oubliette citizens.The Sobornost
The Sobornost (etymologySobornost
Sobornost is a term coined by the early Slavophiles, Ivan Kireevsky and Aleksey Khomyakov, to underline the need for cooperation between people at the expense of individualism on the basis that the opposing groups focus on what is common between them. Khomyakov believed the West was progressively...
) are a posthuman
Posthuman
Posthuman may refer to:*Posthuman, a hypothetical future being whose basic capacities so radically exceed those of present humans as to be no longer human by our current standards...
upload collective
Collective
A collective is a group of entities that share or are motivated by at least one common issue or interest, or work together on a specific project to achieve a common objective...
. Their main guberniya
Guberniya
A guberniya was a major administrative subdivision of the Russian Empire usually translated as government, governorate, or province. Such administrative division was preserved for sometime upon the collapse of the empire in 1917. A guberniya was ruled by a governor , a word borrowed from Latin ,...
appears to be in Venus
Venus
Venus is the second planet from the Sun, orbiting it every 224.7 Earth days. The planet is named after Venus, the Roman goddess of love and beauty. After the Moon, it is the brightest natural object in the night sky, reaching an apparent magnitude of −4.6, bright enough to cast shadows...
, but they appear to have control over many parts of the solar system. Gogols of the Sobornost place great importance on a common mission, the Great Common Task, which appears to be the uploading of all sentient minds in the solar system. It is implied that the Sobornost is controlled by the Founders, the original creators of the collective who have made millions of copies of themselves, giving them access to the combined computational abilities of their many copies. The combined copies of the founders are called copyclans. Individuals other than the founders uploaded into the Sobornost become slaves to the copyclans, and are used to maintain the computational processes of the Sobornost.
Gogol pirates
Gogol pirates extract gogols from people without prior consent. Gogol pirates have many ways to steal a gogol, the simplest being an optogenetic method, but the gevulot in the Oubliette presents a barrier to such crude methods. Gogol pirates are servants of the Sobornost, and upload their stolen gogols into the collective.The zoku
The zoku are a faction of posthuman warriors. As with the Sobornost, each member of the zoku is a composite of many minds. However, it is implied that the minds that make up the different members of the zoku have more equality compared to the Sobornost. The zoku are descended from members of MMORPGMMORPG
Massively multiplayer online role-playing game is a genre of role-playing video games in which a very large number of players interact with one another within a virtual game world....
guilds, and their culture reflects these origins. They are warriors and mercenaries, and are primarily motivated by the desire to find new challenges and improve themselves through conflict. They dismiss people who believe in actual causes and movements as "meme
Meme
A meme is "an idea, behaviour or style that spreads from person to person within a culture."A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols or practices, which can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals or other imitable phenomena...
zombies." The zoku fought a war against the Sobornost called the protocol war, which they lost. They originally lived on Saturn, but after losing the war they sought asylum on the Oubliette on Mars in order to recover.