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Characters / The Quantum Thief

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Jean le Flambeur

Legendary master thief and conman extraordinaire, infamous throughout the Solar System, as well as the main protagonist of the trilogy.


  • Batman Gambit: an almost terrifying example More or less the entire first two books were part of a greater scope plan he set in motion. He got himself arrested to create a more altruistic le Flambeur, and gave the Pellegrini the means to break that version out, knowing she'd either send him to steal the Kaminari Jewel, or eventually allow him to remember it and do so himself.
  • Boxed Crook: After being sprung free from the Dilemma Prison at the beginning of the trilogy, he is bound in the service of Mieli and her employer, the Pellegrini, by painful safeguards in his artificial body.
  • Gentleman Thief: Jean has consciously modelled his persona after Maurice Leblanc's Arsène Lupin, and retains a code of honour and suave demeanour befitting to the trope.
  • I Hate Past Me: While he doesn't remember much of what his past self did, he frequently has misgivings about the things he finds out. Turns out there's a very good reason for this.
  • Impossible Thief: routinely conned and outwitted god-like minds over the course of his career.
  • Memory Gambit: A few of his schemes rely on him not remembering the full plan at crucial stages
  • Transhuman: His current body functions like a biological one down to the cellular level, but it's an artificial construct filled with state of art computer systems and other gadgetry. He's gone through numerous bodies in his lifetime, existed as a disembodied upload, and even existed as several copies at once.
  • Thanatos Gambit: while he didn't literally die, he did knowingly allow most of his memories to be wiped as part of his plan

Mieli

An Oortian warrior with Sobornost connections, she breaks Jean out of a Dilemma Prison in the opening of the first book and has been entangled with him ever since. Captain of the Perhonen.


  • Action Girl: Does most of the fighting out of the protagonists.
  • Cyborg: She has a pair of nanotech wings that can unfold from her back, concealed weapons in both arms and a fusion reactor embedded within her right thighbone.
  • The Lost Lenore: Although technically not dead, her lover Sydan chose to destructively upload herself into the event horizon of a singularity while she and Mieli were on Venus.
  • The Chosen One: played with. Mieli isn't the only one who can use the Kaminari Jewel, but Pelegrini apparently set her up to be a suitable candidate

Perhonen

     Oubliette 

Isidore Beautrelet

Raymonde

Pixil

The Tzaddikim

Christian Unruh

The Cryptarch

    Sobornost 

Josephine Pellegrini

Mieli's employer, a Sobornost founder who works to her own goals. She has a past connection to Jean le Flambeur that isn't fully revealed until very late in the trilogy
  • The Chessmaster: "Manipulative" doesn't really begin to describe her. Jean at one point describes her as actively making people who are useful to her plans. She played a part in making Jean into the legendary thief he became, and it's ultimately revealed, that she engineered the events that led Mieli to start working for her in the first place
  • The woman behind the man: described as a patron of the founders, and implied to be the one that pulled them together in the first place.

Matjek Chen

The most powerful and influencial of the Sobornost founders, and the main driving force behind the "Great Common Task" that supposedly unites them.
  • The Dreaded: Pretty much everybody is scared of Chen, including other founders. Jean manages to utterly terrify a group of Vasilevs into breaking protocol just by pretending to be him. Conversely even Jean is worried in the second book when Chen gets involved in person
  • Immortality Seeker: While he is already effectively immortal as a Sobornost founder, his ultimate goal is to end death entirely. The ways he goes about this are.. extreme.. to say the least
  • Greater-Scope Villain: as the most powerful of the founders he is set up as this for most of the series before the All Defector assimilates him at the end of the second book and takes over
  • The Political Officer: Every single Oblast ship of the Sobornost carries at least one Chen that takes on this role.
  • Used to Be a Sweet Kid: Matjek Chen as a child is nothing like the founder he became. In his own words "Death made him angry"

Hsien-Ku

  • Beware the Nice Ones: described as the eccentric aunt of the sobornost family, dedicated to completely replicating and recording all of history. While they are willing to negotiate with Sirr to acquire historical minds, they've tried to upload Earth by force once before, and intend to do so again once they can get around the wildcode.

Sumanguru

  • The Dreaded: Downplayed example, since it's not clear how widespread it is, but at the very least the Vasilev and the Hsien-Ku Sobornost are terrified of Sumanguru, and his reputation extends beyond the Sobornost as well.
  • Proud Warrior Race Guy: Sumanguru prime was an African warlord, and as a founder he is the most warlike and militaristic of them

Engineer-of-Souls

  • Small Role, Big Impact: he has a single appearance in the books themselves, in the epilogue of the Quantum Thief. His creation, the Hunter, is a driving antagonistic force throughout the second book. Backstory wise, he designed Dilema prison and the Archons, making him by extension responsible for the All Defector, and being critical to the events of the entire series

Vasilev

Chitragupta

  • Hufflepuff House: the Chitraguptas have the least involvement in the main plot of any of the founders, and as a result we know almost nothing about them.

The All-Defector

An anomalous entity created in Dilemma Prison, where it was infamous for always defecting successfully explanation 
  • Assimilation Plot: its grand plan is to not only turn the entire universe into itself, but to then become an expanding bubble of spacetime that assimilates all other universes into itself
  • Blue-and-Orange Morality: Sincerely believes that its end goal is the only rational course of action. It believes that the only reason the universe still exists is that other universes haven't yet assimilated them, and therefore they must strike first
  • Eldritch Abomination: Downplayed, in that it was of human origin, but the Defector is basically a statistical anomaly incarnate.
  • Exactly What It Says on the Tin: The All Defector always defects. Its assimilation plot is effectively viewing the entire multiverse as a game of prisoner's dilemma, with it inevitably playing to defect first
  • Humanoid Abomination: Only ever appears using humanoid forms it copies from others. Its true form, if it has one, is never seen.

    Sirr 

Tawaddudd Gomelez

The Axolotl

  • The Dreaded: The most infamous and feared of all body stealing Djinn. Their reputation is such that they're likened to the devil in Sirr.
  • Red Baron: The Father of Body Thieves. They're also known by a number of other titles, of which the Axolotl is one.

Abu Nuwas

Dunyazad Gomelez

    Zoku 

Barbicane

  • Beware the Silly Ones: Takes the form of a steampunk cyborg gentleman, with a personality that is quirky to say the least. Jean has to keep reminding himself that this is still an immortal posthuman mind. He's an Elder of the Great Game Zoku, effectively the secret police, and is every bit as ruthless as that would imply.
  • Meaningful Name: named after the president of the Baltimore Gun Club in From the Earth to the Moon. Almost certainly a deliberate in universe choice on his part.
  • Skewed Priorities: Ensuring the Kaminari jewel is never used takes priority over stopping the Sobornost wiping out the Zoku.
  • Well-Intentioned Extremist: Wants to preserve the Zoku and ensure another collapse doesn't happen. The lengths he will go to for this would make him an antagonist even before going into his involvement in destroying all of Mars and the Oubliette just to hide the secret of the Kaminari

Zinda

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