Review: The Quantum Magician

The Quantum Magician by Derek Künsken
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Quantum Magician is Canadian author Derek Künsken's sci-fi debut novel. Originally serialized in three parts in early 2018 in the magazine Analog Science Fiction, it's a rollicking blend of space travel, transhuman evolution, space-time travel, and an impressive heist. Employing that time-honored trope of a crew of vagabonds drawn together in space to do a job, Künsken has put together a fun tale with plenty of humor. The speculative tech fiction and very theoretical physics were also engaging and the author platformed his imagination off of real science, which is always something I enjoy in sci-fi. If you ever wanted to see a sort of Ocean's Eleven set in space, this would be your novel. But Belisarius Arjona, a Homo quantus, is a con man like none you've ever met before, as he is an engineered man capable of exploiting quantum probabilities.

I'm not sure if it was the oddly paginated structure of my review copy but my one criticism of the novel is that I felt it could have been more tightly edited. Having not had the pleasure of reading the Analog serial installments, I am not sure how much re-editing went into the full length novel, which looks to be about 500 pages. There is, however, plenty of space left for further installments! ;)

I received a Digital Review Copy of this book from Solaris, via NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.

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