List of characters in the Jean le Flambeur series

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 (flambeur, ) 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.

As Paul Sernine (a pseudonym and almost 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.

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.

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