Hannu Rajaniemi

The Finnish novelist tells us about his spooky new novel

think of a scientist and, if you’re not picturing a wild-eyed and eccentric figure such as Doc from Back To The Future, there’s a good chance you’re picturing a white-coated, rational, diligent man or woman doing Important Work. This, after all, is the image the scientific community likes to project. But, as Hannu Rajaniemi points out, there have been plenty of famous scientists who have had rather more esoteric ideas, especially in the 19th century.

“You have serious people like Lord Kelvin and [James Clerk] Maxwell and Peter Tait, the Scottish mathematician, speculating about how could the afterlife work,” he says. “Could we actually use some of these new discoveries, x-rays or radio or things like that, to understand how it works?” Further out in leftfield, American Spiritualist preacher John Murray Spear (1804-87) “wanted to build spirit-powered sewing machines” to free women from the drudgery and sheer toil of operating hand-cranked machines, to use the afterlife “to create social reform”.

In Rajaniemi’s alternate 1930s-set novel Summerland, such thinking has paid dividends, at least for the British empire, which has expanded its reach into the afterlife, only to find the Soviets have secretly infiltrated this realm too. It’s a set-up that gives the novel a retro, steampunk vibe, yet it never comes across as an exercise in nostalgia, in part because we’re still exploring ideas around the afterlife today as we ponder the possibility of uploading our personalities. Indeed, the parallels here are explored in a book that was a key influence on Summerland, British philosopher John Gray’s The Immortalization Commission (2011).

ON OUR RADAR

If Rajaniemi’s ongoing obsession with arcane corners of 19th-century scientific thinking gave the book its themes, the plot arrived when he figured out that Summerland needed to be an espionage novel. “At some point I realised it had to be a spy story because it was so much about discovering hidden things in different layers of reality that matched very closely to what spies do,” he says. It also helped that, historically, there are strong connections between the British spy tradition and the occult. Aleister Crowley, it’s said, was among the upper-class individuals who ended up working for the Secret Intelligence Service.

The class element here was a huge weakness in the British security system because it was too often assumed that “if you know this person’s people” then they must be trustworthy. As the Cambridge spy ring showed, this simply wasn’t true. The idea of the patriarchy also plays in Summerland, of well-connected chaps meeting in places from which women are excluded.

Nevertheless, infamous double agent Kim Philby (1912-88) feared discovery by a real-life female spy, Jane Archer (1898-1982), and worked to sideline her. “She was an incredibly accomplished individual who joined the SIS when she was 18, and then progressed through the ranks to become a counter-intelligence specialist,” says Rajaniemi. “When she was working for MI6, Kim Philby was her boss and she pieced together some hints from an intelligence asset that there was a very high-ranking British mole.”

SCIENCE BOFFIN

As with the way Rajaniemi riffs off the history of science (ideas around higher dimensions put forward by Charles Howard Hinton (1853-1907) are also important in the novel) similarities between Archer and the insider/outsider protagonist of Summerland, spy Rachel White, give the book resonance. Considering his Jean le Flambeur series took inspiration from Arsène Lupin, the gentleman thief created by French writer Maurice Leblanc (1864-1941), it’s a trick he’s used before, yet in other respects Summerland is a complete departure from The Quantum Thief and its sequels.

According to Rajaniemi, he needed “to write in a different mode” to far-future SF and it’s perhaps revealing that his next book will again be different, and deal with biohackers. “There are people in real life who are already making DIY cancer therapies and starting to apply these tools not just in big biotech companies or academic labs but in the garage,” he says. The projects such researchers work on range from trying to develop “an open source way of manufacturing insulin” to making “true vegan cheese”.

This hi-tech world is familiar to Rajaniemi because he’s never relied just on writing to put food on the table. He’s also co-founder and CEO of Helix Nanotechnologies, a company conducting biotech research with the aim of treating genetic diseases. Having previously lived in Edinburgh, he now lives in the Bay area on the West Coast of the US, a good spot from which to survey the near future.

“Everything is accelerated here,” he says, adding, “The inequality here is absolutely unbelievable, the fact that you have homeless people on the street next to the headquarters of the most highly valued unicorn companies in the world. Or the fact that housing here is getting so unaffordable, it’s worse than central London. So you see the good and bad, but it’s definitely interesting.”

Summerland is published on 28 June by Gollancz.

“I NEEDED TO WRITE IN A DIFFERENT MODE TO FAR-FUTURE SF”