THE QUANTUM MAGICIAN

RELEASED OUT NOW! 480 pages | Paperback/ebook

Author derek Kunsken

Publisher solaris

At its heart, The Quantum Magician is a caper about a con artist trying to pull off a deliriously ambitious scam, but Derek Kunsken layers up his impressive tale with quantum mechanics, genetic engineering and religious fanaticism. The protagonist Belisarius is a “homo quantus”, a human designed to think on a quantum scale, hired to find a way to transport a battle fleet across the galaxy undetected. To pull off the impossible, he gathers a team of specialists that includes a sentient AI, a subaquatic pilot, a geneticist, and his lost love.

The first half of the book requires some fortitude, as there’s a lot of world-building to establish and some dense prose to absorb before the con gets underway. Fortunately, when the job begins Kunsken proves he can handle action, tension and spectacle with a skill and style to match the rigour of the science. And Belisarius becomes a more compelling protagonist the more the reader comes to understand him. The religious element adds a potent streak of darkness as one of the team has to infiltrate the Puppets, a race bred to worship their human masters, but whose devotion has turned into a terrifying fetishisation of their idols. The results are genuinely unsettling. It’s a boldly ambitious debut, and Kunsken proves more than able to realise his vision.