The Quantum Magician by Derek Künsken

Derek Künsken’s The Quantum Magician (2018) is kind of like one of those summer movies where if where you don’t think too much about what is happening, and aren’t looking for deep, moving character studies, you’re more than perfectly happy to glide along the surface and enjoy the ride as things go boom. And though, like a number of those same movies, The Quantum Magician goes on a bit too long, for the most part I happily skated through. And yes, things did go boom.

We’re set centuries in the future when humanity has colonized the stars thanks to a set of stable wormholes left behind by a long-dead civilization. These gates are fiercely, jealously controlled by a small number of powerful, dominating groups such as the Congregate and the Anglo-Spanish banks. What kickstarts the action is when one “client” culture, the Sub-Sahar... Read More

The Quantum Garden by Derek Künsken

The Quantum Garden (2019) is the second installment of Derek Künsken’s QUANTUM EVOLUTION series, following the adventures of conman Belisarius Arjona, one of a few thousands of “Homo quantus” — a bio-engineered species able to deal with floods of data, strange math, and quantum effects. The first book in the series, The Quantum Magician, saw Belisarius gather a crew of misfits in order to help an oppressed “client culture” smuggle a fleet of uniquely advanced spaceships through a wormhole so as to gain their independence from the powerful Congregate. Belisarius, however, was running a con-within-a-con, and while he succeeded in helping the Sub-Saharan Union get their ... Read More