Science Fiction: The Quantum Magician By Derek Künsgen

 (Drivebycuriosity) - The future will be full of surprises & wonders - a rich field for science fiction authors who want to riot their imagination. Derek Künsgen is one of them. His novel "The Quantum Magician" is full of bizarre ideas, which make the book a funny read (amazon). I didn`t find much sense in the plot but I was impressed by Künsgen`s post-baroque fabulation artistry. He weaved together tons of quantum physics, evolution, cosmology, psychology, genetics, biology, chemistry & other sciences with a lot of highly speculative fiction.

The book is hard science fiction but also a kind of futuristic poetry. One chapter begins with "Millions of magnetosomes fed the intellect billions of qubits and qutrits of magnetic and electric information. The intellect constructed a map of the signals, in all their mutual exclusive, superimposed richness. Quantum perceptions bloomed in an array of overlapping probabilities (SIC)."

Künsgen´s elaborated descriptions are fun to read even though they do not necessarily make sense. We follow the adventures of excessively bio-engineered humans & sophisticated artificial intelligences (AIs), including one who believes to be a medieval saint, who are dealing with powerful spaceships, absurd religions and elaborated wormholes in a cosmic conflict. Künsgen doesn`t belong to my favorite scifi authors - for instance Greg Benford, Ted Chiang, Nancy Kress & Liu Cixi - but he is better than the average of the genre and I might read more by him.