Collected Fiction, Hannu Rajaniemi - Review
Collected Fiction, Hannu Rajaniemi, Tachyon Publication, 2015, pages 386, ISBN: 978-1-61696-192-3 Trade Paperback
In 2010, Hannu Rajaniemi seemed to explode into the SFF firmament like one of the extraordinary flying objects that inhabit the strange worlds he creates. The Quantum Thief was the first book in a trilogy that established him as a major new star in hard SF writing. Now he has just published, Collected Fiction, a masterly batch of stories that explore an immense range of styles and characters, including humans, semi-human replicants, bio-engineered talking cats and dogs, goddesses, ancient and modern, angels, ghosts and lots of Finns, who may or may not be a different species of human altogether.
This is delightful collection. Perhaps you think this is an unusual choice of adjective for modernist, hard Sci-fi stories, but, in almost all of the stories, there is an underlying sweetness, a touch, a gentle stroke of romanticism. None are saccharine or overly sentimental but neither are they cynical. In a world where so much futurist sci-fi is resolutely and usually depressingly dystopian, the positive world view that Rajaniemi presents is almost shocking. He doesn’t present an easy future, but it is one in which creatures of good will and good heart can overcome most obstacles. And, shock, horror! Rajaniemi believes in love. Although I do hope he’ll forgive me for giving away his dirty little secret.
The stories are great fun to read. Hannu uses words with pyromaniacal glee, piling up technical terms and concepts into glittering towers of demented, lego-like constructions. Fortunately, it isn’t absolutely necessary to completely understand every term or concept, (After all, how many of us have doctorates in Quantum Physics?) as long as you give yourself up to the ride, the meaning is ultimately revealed through the ride.
For example: “the warm infrared dreams of Dyson spheres…” or “the dark matter neutrolinos annihilate each other in its hungry Chown drive heart…
Or this from The Jugaad Cathedral,” a brilliant take down of an app-controlled future in which success at dating or fame is rigidly predicted by Cloud-based algo-rhythms:
“He had engineered a protocell batch that could live in grids printed on fabrics, arranged them in cellular automata patterns…. and made patterns of themselves, Turing-complete clothing , living designs that kept changing as long as you sprayed the fabrics with nutrients regularly.”
Who wouldn’t like to live in clothes that could change with our moods?
Despite the verbal hijinks, there is a unifying theme in the collection; how life in the future, inhabited by created life-forms with all-to-human emotions might be lived on the interface between human and not-so human beings. Unlike many other writers, Hannu’s vision is strangely positive.
It is also deeply imbedded in his Finnish background and roots. This is the best example I’ve yet seen of, ‘You can take the boy out of the woods, but you can’t take the Finn out of the man.’ The award winning story, Elegy for a Young Elk, in which rescuing his son from a bubble-enclosed city positively impacts on a Finnish Hunter/Poet and his friend Otso, the Bear, illustrates this perfectly. In 2010 it won the ARESFFT award for translation, a translation Hannu made himself.
My favourite from the collection was “Invisible Planets (with apologies to Italo Calvino)”, not the longest story but the one that provoked the strongest reaction in me personally. Here, an ambassadorial dark ship suffering a crisis of confidence begins to examine her memories of the planets she has visited; planets that feed on the dead, greed and selfies, dimensions and horizons, ruins, reading, writing and books.
“What if the gift it carries, the information written onto tons upon tons of endlessly coiled DNA strands that hold petabytes in a single gram, is nothing more than a scrawled message in a bottle to be picked by a fisherman on an unknown shore and then discarded, alien and meaningless.”
The answer arrived at is one that will resonate powerfully with every restless spirit out there.
The final sections showcase two brilliant experiments “Snow White is Dead”, developed with a grant from New Media Scotland, is an attempt to explore the possibility of getting text to change in response to brain activity. Using Emotiv EPOC Headsets, the experiment involved the reader (perceiver?) in directing the text according to perceptual cues. According to the author, as the project has taken on a life of its own, the texts presented here are only a part of where the story may be going.
In this, and the following “Unused Tomorrows and other Stories”, 140 character Twitter stories including the very radical, half-human, half mummy, hard-boiled detective, “Imhotep Austin” Hannu continues his explorations into the next great divide in literature.
More radical than simply choosing between paper or electronic versions of a text, the future according to Rajaniemi will offer a broader range of possibilities for experiencing and inter-acting with the material created and read.
For anyone not already knowing him, Hannu Rajaniemi was born and raised in Finland before moving to Edinburgh where he completed uncountable degrees in subjects impossible for this mere human to comprehend. I was privileged to meet him at Eurocon 2011 and have been a hard fan ever since. If you haven’t read The Quantum Thief trilogy and want to try a sample of Hannu’s work, or if you have, and need something to fill the void until his next full-size book comes out, these beautifully crafted stories are an excellent choice. Five well deserved *****