I love a heist! There's nothing like a moment when a complicated plan falls to pieces, and then bam! actually the plan falling to pieces was step 23 of Plan D, and now the crew is stealing even more than they thought. The Quantum Magician is so quickly paced it's like sleight of hand, with big flashy space opera ideas. The verve of the writing papers over some pretty bad structural cracks, but I had a great time.

Belisarius Arjona is slumming it as an art dealer on a world ruled by the Puppets, a post-human subclade. Bel is himself a post-human, a fallen member of Homo quantus, an experiment to produce a natural physicist capable of directly and intuitive understanding 11-dimensional wormhole physics. An officer of the Sub-Saharan Union offers him a job too rich to pass up, and too dangerous to take. He needs to smuggle 12 warships equipped with incredibly powerful drives and weapons through the Puppet wormhole and back into main space. The payment is a runabout with the same drive, a ship the other governments will pay anything to get their hands on. To do the job, Bel needs to assemble a team, an old flame, a former partner on his deathbed, an AI with delusions of sainthood, a renegade geneticist, a Puppet traitor, a foul-mouth space pilot who can only survive under 700 atmospheres of pressure, and an eccentric explosive expert.

That's a sizable crew, and there are a lot of moving parts. A truly great story about a con has a few simple rules. First, the job is never about the payoff, the real trick is stealing something worth more than money. Second, a great heist involves a perfect read and deception of both the social and physical terrain of the heist; think the end of Ocean's 11. For the first, Bel is stealing access to quantum reality and perhaps a return to H. quantus society, but I never quite bought that as a motivation. For the second, Künsken gestures at a setting divided between great powers and client states based on control of the Wormhole Axis, alien artifacts that allow long distance space travel, but I was perennial confused about how transit through the axis was regulated and on which side our characters were. The social terrain plays out over the group psychology of the Puppets, who were genetically engineered slaves designed to serve a set of masters who they now imprison, but the whole BDSM theology of the Puppets was gross, sticky, and nowhere near as interesting as the author believes.

But hey, sometimes you need popcorn, and the basic swiftness and likeability of the writing kept me with the story.