This is a list of characters in the Jean le Flambeur series. The science fiction series by Hannu Rajaniemi currently consists of the novels The Quantum Thief, The Fractal Prince, and The Causal Angel.
Jean le Flambeur
Jean le Flambeur (flambeur, French, "big-time gambler") is the protagonist of The Quantum Thief and The Fractal Prince. Events narrated from his point of view as Jean le Flambeur are in the first person, while all other points of view in the novels are narrated in the third person, including those in which Jean assumes another name, identity or disguise. In his identity as Jean le Flambeur, he prefers to wear a white shirt and velvet jacket, and sometimes sports blue shades.
At the start of The Quantum Thief, he is imprisoned in the Dilemma Prison, a Sobornost prison located in the Neptunian Trojan belt, but is rescued by Mieli at the behest of Josephine Pellegrini, and tasked to undertake another heist. Clues from his memories lead them to Oubliette, a Moving City of Mars.
Paul Sernine
As Paul Sernine (a pseudonym and an anagram of Arsene Lupin, assumed in the Maurice Leblanc novel 813), Jean assumed the identity of an architect in order to hide his loot in the Oubliette. Jean had hoped that he could cast off his prior life as a thief and settle down in the Oubliette with Raymonde, his Oubliette lover. The Interlude chapters in The Quantum Thief with names taken from the nine Dignities are flashbacks to the events of the Paul Sernine era, and each of the main Oubliette characters in those Interlude chapters has a customized Watch carved with the corresponding Dignity. These chapters describe Jean's hope to cast off his past as Paul Sernine, his plan to do so and his subsequent departure from Mars, but in Xuexue's chapter, some backstory for how the solar system became post-human is introduced.
Jean le Roi
The events in The Quantum Thief are partly due to Jean's quest to retrieve his memories, and partly due to the manipulations, via gevulot, of Jean le Roi, who is stated by Jean to bear a very close resemblance to himself. In fact, it is stated outright in The Fractal Prince that Jean le Roi is actually another version of Jean le Flambeur.
It appears that Jean le Roi was another version of Jean that was shipped out to the Oubliette as one of the initial prisoners, and that he had later risen after the prisoners' rebellion to become King of the Oubliette and, after the Revolution, the Cryptarch of the Oubliette. Jean le Roi claimed that he and Jean le Flambeur were cellmates at Sante Prison on Earth, but this is doubted by the latter, and le Roi then claimed that they were cellmates "after a fashion."
After Paul Sernine decided to leave Mars, Jean le Roi hooked up with Raymonde and fathered Isidore Beautrelet, while somehow convincing everyone that the child was Sernine's. At the end of The Quantum Thief, Jean le Roi is imprisoned in a Dilemma Prison brought about by the release of an Archon by Jean le Flambeur, but not before passing on the keys of the Cryptarch to Isidore, who used it to calm the splintered Oubliette population via the Voice.
The Flower Thief
Jean is sometimes described as the flower thief. This may be an allusion to his charisma, but he is also known to sometimes wear a flower on the lapel of his jacket.
Mieli
Mieli (Finnish, "mind") is an Oortian warrior—"so battle-ready she has a fusion reactor embedded in her thigh"—and the daughter of Karhu ("bear; ursa") of the Hiljainen Koto ("quiet home"). She is bonded to serve the Sobornost Founder, Josephine Pellegrini, after losing her lover in Venus during the creation of a singularity and believing that Pellegrini will restore her lover back to her.
In The Quantum Thief, Mieli is tasked to rescue Jean le Flambeur from the Dilemma Prison. She is ambivalent about her task, as she despises thieves but is ordered to help one. Her honor leads to occasional conflicts with Jean, but helped her to secure the tzadikkim's assistance when Jean's persuasion failed to work on the latter. She proves to be a skilled warrior and is crucial in extricating Jean from several dangerous situations. A bond between her and Jean soon develops, to the extent that she gives Pellegrini the right to make gogols of her (i.e. clone her, thus sacrificing her uniqueness) in exchange for permission to rescue Jean le Flambeur and the Oubliette from certain doom.
In The Fractal Prince, Mieli has become more ambivalent about her task. Her loyalty to Pellegrini is tested when Jean's actions repeatedly endanger both her and her ship. More of her backstory is revealed through flashbacks, including the story of how she came to lose her lover, Sydän ("heart").
Oortians
The Oortians are a humanoid race from the Oort cloud. Their culture, as revealed by Mieli, is based on Finnish culture, as the Oortian colonies were presumably seeded by Finnish refugees from Earth. Mieli's name is Finnish, as is that of her lost lover, Sydän. Also, Jean makes references to the Oortian deities Kuutar and Ilmatar: both appear in the Kalevala, the former being the Moon spirit, the latter the air spirit. Oortians appear to have functional wings, as Mieli and Sydän are portrayed to have them.
Perhonen
Perhonen (Finnish, "butterfly") is a sentient Oortian spidership. She has a flirtatious personality and often fills the inside of the ship with butterfly avatars. She was sung from the alinen by Mieli.
Sydän
Sydän (Finnish, "heart") is an Oortian woman and the lost lover of Mieli. Mieli treasures a jewel of Sydän's that she managed to hold on to before Sydän was lost, and is very protective of it.
In The Quantum Thief, it is implied that she is under the influence of the Sobornost, and that Mieli is bound to serve Pellegrini in the hope of being reunited with her. She appears to Mieli in the Dilemma Prison as a dream memory, which was supplied by Pellegrini to alleviate Mieli's ordeal.
In The Fractal Prince, the story of how Mieli and Sydän became lovers and were then separated in Venus is revealed. Sydän was driven by a desire to visit the Inner System and later revealed that she desired immortality, instead of going into the alinen like the other Oortians.
In The Causal Angel, its revealed/implied that Sydän was actually a creation of Josephine Pelligrini's, designed to entice and seduce Mieli to help bring her closer to Josephine so she could use her to access the Kaminari Jewel.
The Sobornost
The Sobornost (etymology) are a collective of entities who command millions, if not billions, of gogols and thereby have god-like powers over them and their environments. The arc of the Jean le Flambeur series appears to revolve around an emerging conflict amongst certain high-ranking members of the Sobornost, known as the Founders.
The Founders were humans that gained power after the massive mind uploadings and thereby acquired individual command of a large number of gogols. The faces of seven Founders are carved into the Sobornost ships that carry the guberniyas and raions. Known Founders include Matjek Chen, Josephine Pellegrini, the Engineer-of-Souls ( "Sasha"), the twins Hsien-ku, Vasilev, Sumanguru and Chitragupta.
A copyclan is the collection of gogols commanded by a Sobornost entity that are its clones. Note that the entity need not be a Founder. A gogol that is in a copyclan of a Founder is referred to by the uncapitalized name of the Founder, so that a "pellegrini" is a copy of Josephine Pellegrini, and so on.
The Sobornost were, and possibly still are, at war with the Zoku. The most recent war was the Protocol War, in which Jupiter was destroyed in the event known as the Spike.
All-Defector
The All-Defector is a purported glitch in the Dilemma Prison that appears to prisoners as themselves. This gogol always defects, hence the name. In the epilogue of The Quantum Thief, it is revealed that three gogols escaped from the Dilemma Prison: Jean le Flambeur, Mieli and the All-Defector, which Sasha states to be a creation of the Archons. This fact plays an important role in the events of The Fractal Prince.
Archons
The Archons (etymology) are the builders and wardens of Dilemma Prisons. They were created by the Engineer-of-Souls to provide prisons for the Sobornost. They are nanomachines motivated to create Dilemma Prisons to override the "old ugly physics" of the real world with the physics in the Dilemma Prison. Hence, they will convert any structure that is not a Dilemma Prison into one.
But they are also entities that provide computational analysis. They are mentioned as providing a list of possible battle outcomes for the Sumanguru gogol during the Battle of the String.
They are not Dragons, so therefore are based on edited human gogols (as all other Sobornost tech).
Matjek Chen
Matjek Chen is a Sobornost Founder and considered to be the Lord of the Inner System, if not the whole solar system. He made his first appearance in the series in the epilogue, The Hunter, of The Quantum Thief. Jean mentions in The Quantum Thief that when they were humans, he used to go drinking with Chen.
In The Fractal Prince, Chen's role in the story is heightened, as the backstory of his past interactions with Josephine Pellegrini and Jean le Flambeur is explored in greater detail in the many flashbacks, presented in the novel as stories within stories. It is revealed that the Great Common Task originated from him as a goal for the Sobornost. He is also portrayed in the flashbacks as a precocious boy with great technical prowess.
Engineer-of-Souls
The Engineer-of-Souls, called Sasha by Josephine Pellegrini, is a Sobornost Founder who specializes in cultivating new types of minds inside his Guberniya in his "garden of souls", hence the title.
His creations include the Archons, which are used to take care of criminals in the Dilemma Prison, the Dragons (although this has also been attributed to Chen) and the Hunter, which was created in the events of the eponymous chapter of The Quantum Thief at the behest of Pellegrini, presumably to hunt down Jean le Flambeur.
In his prior life as a human, he studied at the University of Minsk and had romantic feelings for Pellegrini.
Chitragupta Chitragupta is a Sobornost Founder. Not much known about him, likely is mystic and mathematician.
Hsien-ku
Hsien-ku are twins who are also Sobornost Founders. They are involved in a project on Earth that has a historical objective. Thus, they run a lot of ancestor virs.
In The Fractal Prince, they sent a sumanguru to investigate the murder of Councilwoman Alile Soarez in Sirr.
Joséphine Pellegrini
Joséphine Pellegrini (namesake of the Countess of Cagliostro in the Arsene Lupin stories) is a Sobornost Founder and the employer of Mieli. She instigated the release of Jean from prison in The Quantum Thief, for reasons initially unknown, but it is revealed in the epilogue of the same novel that she is under threat from the other Founders and sees in Jean a potential weapon against her peers. It is hinted in The Quantum Thief that she and Jean shared a complicated past relationship, one that has both professional and romantic components, and this is revealed in greater detail in The Fractal Prince.
In The Quantum Thief, the "pellegrini" is initially portrayed as a mysterious entity of the Sobornost, who wields god-like powers over Jean and Mieli. She has employed Mieli to free Jean from his prison for some unknown purpose. This apparently entails recovering Jean's lost memories, some of which are hidden in the Martian Moving City of Oubliette. As the story progresses, the "pellegrini" reveals, using Mieli's body as a mouthpiece, that she had an elaborate history with Jean, having possibly been both a mentor and a lover. At the end of the novel, the character of Joséphine Pellegrini is introduced as a Sobornost Founder.