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| cover artist: Justin Adams |
Solaris,
The Quantum Dawn’s publisher, do a neat line in high concept SF. It’s the kind of SF that makes your brain work and can be colourful, slightly anarchic and definitely feel like the concepts are as important as the characters and the plot. That works brilliantly for me because I love SF that grapples with actual ideas about how the world might be – not just looking at how people might organise themselves but deeper than that.
The Quantum Dawn is Derek Künsken’s fourth entry into this series but don’t let you put that off. It starts with
The Quantum Magician and continue from there, slated to wrap up with the fifth in the series coming next year (2027) called
The Quantum Temple.
I really loved the first three and let this review act as a recommendation to get out there and try them if you haven’t. If you liked
The Three Body Problem or better still (and another Solaris alumnus) Yoon Ha Lee’s
Nine Fox Gambit, then this is going to be for you too.
Without spoilering the story, book three actually closed nearly all the plot threads down nicely and left us with an outcome that felt satisfying and, crucially, not really in need of more in the series.
So when I heard that Künsken was creating not just one but two more I was pretty excited but also wondered where this story was going to go.
Having read
Quantum Dawn I think it’s safe to say that you could stop at the end of the opening trilogy of books and not feel the need to continue on – the story that Künsken’s telling in
Quantum Dawn is, effectively, sequel/follow on but it’s also quite different both in feel and in content.
Because at its heart
The Quantum Dawn is a time travel novel in the fashion of the 2004 movie
Primer which remains the only time travel movie to get the science right (for a given category of right). It’s also why I hate time travel stories because nearly every single one I’ve ever encountered is ponk – not understanding its own nature and the questions the concept demands or using as a shorthand for resolution or roadblocked plot or, worse still, failing to lean into the weirdness that using time as an extendable axis alongside depth, breadth and length really implies.
There’s a lot of techno-babble in this story and that is definitely where it can fall down because alongside that babble is a lot of repetition – where terms and situations are repeatedly explained for the reader. I can understand the need to make some of the weirdness clearer for the amateur (my doctorate is in theoretical physics so I am trying to be careful when reading it, assuming others won’t bring that same background expertise to the bit). However, these repetitions absolutely break the pacing of a story that is, at its heart, a very long shaggy dog story about returning to our beginnings.
There are some great ideas here (and this is one of Künsken’s strengths), not least the Fermi Paradox, how time travel might be possible, how the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics sees time, the nature of consciousness and how that might or might not be essential to sentience (and vice versa) but I felt like I was wallowing too much in explaining how these worked rather than showing it. Especially as we’re four books in.
Having said that, this is the first time that the world Künsken’s built seriously leans into the time travel he built into earlier entries and if there’s elements in here of loops and recursion, of avoiding yourself in the past and so on this is, effectively, quite new in terms of scale and the stakes in play. It’s also interesting how he plays with identity and the nature of self in this – not so much as meeting yourself going back and coming forwards but in how different version of the same self might see the world entirely differently – an open exploration of nature vs nurture without labouring over whether an individual is one or the other.
As this is the first of what is essentially a sequel duology, Künsken spends a lot of time moving his pieces into place which, largely, works but at the same time it’s clear this novel got out of hand and it needs, from my perspective as a reader, a really heavy edit to remove the repetition and techno-babble. I think it probably also needs a second go that has an eye on the ‘there’s a lot going on but nothing’s actually happening,’ that I felt towards the end of the story.
In particular because this is a time travel road trip that road trip needs to feel like we’re moving along but a couple of times too many I felt that I’d encountered exactly this part of the conflict before and while time loops are fun, linear encounters that don’t really deliver much beyond repetition can drag.
It’s a personal thing but I like to feel that even in the middle of the series that when I’ve picked up a story I get a beginning and end regardless of everything else going on. Part of that’s just wanting the last book now, I guess.
Overall then, I enjoyed this and although I wasn’t as enraptured as I was expecting I’m happily waiting for the final entry in the series to see what happens to Bel, Cas, Stills, St. Matthew and the others.
--
The Math
Highlights:- Exciting time travel and hard science shenanigans
- Super weird aliens
Nerd coefficient: 5/10
Reference: Derek Künsken,
The Quantum Dawn [Solaris, 2026]
STEWART HOTSTON is an author of all kinds of science fiction and fantasy. He's also a keen Larper (he owns the UK Fest system, Curious Pastimes). He's a sometime physicist and currently a banker in the City of London. A Subjective Chaos, BSFA and BFA finalist he's also Chair of the British Science Fiction Association and Treasurer for the British Fantasy Society. He is on bluesky at: @stewarthotston.com.
