The Arabian Nights is very rich body of source material and it’s also a very interesting, early construct in itself.

It seemed like a very natural link when you’re dealing with themes of stories within stories. The premise of The Fractal Prince takes its lead from The Arabian Nights … If you follow that kind of thinking through to its logical conclusion, this is an effect that, given a suitable framework around it, could be used to invade somebody else’s mind and take it over. So we end up with this infinite recursion of versions of each other inside each other’s heads as we become intertwined with the people we interact with. What happens is that we construct a representation of who we think another person is and they do the same to us. He has this idea that our consciousness is on some kind of strange loop that isn’t necessarily restricted to the space within our brains as it spreads out when we interact with other people. That notion comes from some far-out philosophy-of-the-mind ideas by Douglas Hofstadter, who is best known for his early book, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. You also have body thieves in The Fractal Prince … Also what would we do with stories in a post-human future: could they survive as a kind of currency or some sort of tool that invades peoples’ heads? The Quantum Thief was concerned with memory and how our memories shape who we are while The Fractal Prince is very much about stories in terms of how, with our consciousness, we shape the kinds of stories we tell about ourselves and how we spin tales within tales in our heads to keep us alive. There’s an underlying theme of identity that runs through both books.

The Fractal Prince by Hannu Rajaniemi