History Literature / TheQuantumThief

* MissingMom: Isidore's mother withdrew her permissions from her family to remember anything about her, effectively disappearing completely in an instant.
** [[spoiler: He later learns she's the Tzaddik he's been working with for years.]]

* {{Transhuman}}: Practically every character in the story, to greater or lesser extent.
** Uploaded Brains and Quantum People and Ursamorphs, oh my!

* VigilanteMan: The Tzaddikim. Undeniably good, protecting the Oubliette from mind thieves and trying to root out the Chryptarchs. [[spoiler: Subverted, as they are the brainwashed, UnwittingPawn of the Chryptarchs.]]

* [[spoiler: TheBadGuyWins: In the end the Supra City Zokus are whisked to safety, Chen and the All-Defector are defeated... and Sobornost's primary opposition is gone, leaving the remaining Founders to do as they will with everyone who's left.]]

The second part of the trilogy, ''The Fractal Prince'', came out in late 2012. A physicist receives a mysterious paper. The ideas in it are far, far ahead of current thinking and quite, quite terrifying. In a city of fast ones, shadow players, and jinni, two sisters contemplate a revolution. And on the edges of reality, a thief, helped by a sardonic ship, is trying to break into a Schrödinger box for his patron. In the box is his freedom. Or not. Jean de Flambeur is back, and he’s running out of time.

* AIIsACrapshoot: The Sobornost gave up on trying to create intelligence without sapience or make minds not based on the human cognitive architecture after they ended up creating the mindless, destructive insanity that was [[EldritchAbomination the Dragons]], which are now used only as terror weapons. Disturbingly, this means that every single system that the Sobornost uses is powered by a spliced, copy-pasted and mutilated version of an uploaded human mind.

* MagicFromTechnology: In ''The Fractal Prince'', the inhabitants of Sirr couch their understanding of Wild Code in terms of Middle-Eastern stories, mythology, and mysticism.

* BilingualBonus[=/=]MeaningfulName: The Oortians speak the author's native tongue, Finnish. Mieli means "mind" and Sydän means "heart". Perhonen stands for "butterfly", or strictly speaking "Lepidopteran", encompassing both moths and butterflies.
** Not strictly a Bilingual Bonus, but [[spoiler:knowing that 'oubliette' is a word for a type of dungeon does make a reveal at the end less surprising.]]

*** We later learn that Jean is a longtime fan of the Lupin stories, which implies that the choice of name was intentional in-universe, on Jean's part.

** ''Causal Angel'' briefly features Notch-zoku that is devoted to building monuments and whose symbol is a [[VideoGame/{{Minecraft}} crudely carved man with a pickaxe]].

** [[spoiler: And ''The Causal Angel'' ends the same way.]]

The second part of the trilogy, ''The Fractal Prince'', came out in late 2012. A physicist receives a mysterious paper. The ideas in it are far, far ahead of current thinking and quite, quite terrifying. In a city of fast ones, shadow players, and jinni, two sisters contemplate a revolution. And on the edges of reality a thief, helped by a sardonic ship, is trying to break into a Schrödinger box for his patron. In the box is his freedom. Or not. Jean de Flambeur is back. And he’s running out of time.

The third and final installment, ''The Causal Angel'', came out in July 2014. After the events of The Fractal Prince, Jean le Flambeur and Mieli are separated. The two protagonists, each in their own way, struggle to decide where their loyalties lie and how to proceed in the catastrophically altered situation. Meanwhile, the Solar System is plummeting into an all-out war. The most powerful factions, the Sobornost and the Zoku, are gathering their forces and making their plays, while simultaneously being torn apart by internal strifes.

* BrokenBird: Mieli. She devoutly serves the Sobornost Founder Pellegrini to [[spoiler:to get the uploaded mind of her beloved Sydän back to her. ]]

* ClarksThirdLaw: Given that it's a post-singularity setting it's inevitable that borderline impossible things pop up, most blatantly the Kaminari Jewel and the Zoku Realm Gates. The Zoku in general seem to like to play up this aspect of their technology to cater to their personal aesthetics.

** [[spoiler: Mars in ''The Causal Angel''. Serves as the Zoku Elders's NotSoHarmlessVillain moment.]]

* ApocalypseHow: A Class 4 and Class X happen before the story starts, with the Collapse wiping out or otherwise altering the entire Earth biosphere, and the Spike destroying Jupiter.
** [[spoiler: A Class 6 and two more Class X happen throughout the series - when everything on Earth gets eaten by the Dragons; when Mars is destroyed by the Great Game Zoku; and when Saturn is consumed by another Spike event in the climax of the series. And a second Class 6 happens when the Chen guberniya is wiped, depending on how exactly you count gogols and the guberniyas.]]
** [[spoiler: The hsien-kus were planning a different Class 6 on Earth to upload the entire planet into their guberniya, although it was going to be much more orderly and thought out than a typical example of the trope.]]
** [[spoiler: The All-Defector was planning a Class X-5 using the Kaminari Jewel.]]

* FantasyCounterpartCulture: The Oortians are descendents of Finns, while the Zoku date their history to [[spoiler:the Internet subcultures of the 21st century.]]

* InfoDrop: The author seems particularly averse to exposition, so the only hope a reader has to figure anything out about the setting is to piece all the disparate tidbits together. [[LoveItOrHateIt Depending on your disposition]], this is either part of the series' charm, or horribly frustrating.

** [[spoiler: He later learns she's the Zadik he's been working with for years.]]

* PracticalCurrency: The currency on Mars is ''time''. When one's time as a Noble runs out, their mind gets put into a Quiet work body for a few years to earn more. Think [[XMeetsY community service meets forced labor]].