Summerland

April 30, 2018
In this adroit if tangled fantasy of the years between the world wars, set in an alternate world where Marconi learned to tune his radio to supernatural frequencies, great national powers can assign agents to the afterlife, but espionage still relies on the most human types of intelligence. Englishwoman Rachel White works for the Winter Court of living spies. While guarding a Soviet defector, she is set on the trail of a mole in the Summer Court, whose spies have transitioned to the afterlife, aka Summerland. Chasing the clues leads her to the highest political offices. The civil war in Spain has England’s prime minister, H.B. West (a thinly veiled H.G. Wells), debating whether to continue supporting Franco or counter the Russians by backing their rebel, Stalin (who’s frustrated in his ambitions by a perpetually presiding Lenin). Rajaniemi cleanly describes a world in which death loses some of its sting given that there are literal tickets to heaven, though he never really gets into the consequences of Europe colonizing the afterlife and leaders still ruling after they die. Rachel and her husband, Joe, face their failings in this life, providing the book with its emotional resolution, whatever may happen in sequels or worlds to come. Fans of Rajaniemi’s Jean le Flambeur hypertech SF series need not be concerned; he smoothly transitions to this magical dieselpunk tale (airships battle “ectoflyers” in soul-powered flight suits) with all his technical skill in evidence.

May 15, 2018

In 1938 Britain, the Queen is dead but still ruling the living from afar in Summerland, the city of the afterlife. Stakes of "life or death" no longer have meaning, and the most important commodity on both planes of existence is power. What matters in life if it does not stop at death? Rachel White is a secret intelligence officer with a penchant for interrogating Soviet spies and avoiding her suffocating marriage. She uncovers a mole in Summerland, but her fears are dismissed by her superiors. Humiliated and demoted, Rachel embarks on a rogue mission to bring down the mole and clean house in both the living and dead British Empire. Finnish-born Rajaniemi ("Jean le Flambeur" series) takes a familiar premise (Soviet vs. British spies in the 1930s) and turns it into something new, a complex philosophical espionage story interwoven with mathematical theory and ghosts, taking great care to make Summerland an intricate and vivid world of technological and spiritual wonder. VERDICT Recommended for the author's fans and readers who enjoy Ben Aaronovitch and Adam Roberts. [See Prepub Alert, 12/11/17.]--Jennifer Funk, McKendree Univ. Lib., Lebanon, IL

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 1, 2018
Following a dazzling science-fiction trilogy, Rajaniemi (Invisible Planets, 2017, etc.) offers a sort of neo-steampunk spy story wherein the afterlife is real.Discovered by Victorian scientist-spiritualists--who else?--Summerland, a city of the dead, was built by a now-vanished alien race. To get there when you die you need only visualize a kind of four-dimensional hieroglyph called a Ticket. Occupied exclusively by the British (but why?), Summerland has a fully functioning infrastructure and economy (but why would dead people need this?), and its inhabitants can talk to the still-living via ectophone or visit the mundane by renting the body of a medium. On Earth, it's 1938, and the Spanish Civil War threatens to explode, with Britain supporting the Fascists, while the Soviet Union (run with uncanny precision by a vast collective intellect whose kernel is the departed V.I. Lenin augmented by millions of dead souls) assists the Communists in a conflict fought with aetherguns and ectotanks. (Take a deep breath. Exhale.) British Secret Intelligence Service operative Rachel White learns the identity of a Soviet mole. Unfortunately, Peter Bloom is not only dead, but he works for the SIS's Summerland branch. Worse, when Rachel reports the discovery, she's ridiculed and reassigned to menial work--Bloom, you see, has close family connections to Prime Minister Herbert Blanco West (closely modeled on H.G. Wells, with what seems to be an admixture of David Lloyd George), so nobody's willing to risk career and afterlife to investigate. Rajaniemi's name-dropping yarn bulges with both real-world and imaginary spies and SIS agents, politicians, and scientists, but the impressive and apposite details--there are ecto-equivalents of most computer functions--often seem designed to obscure intractable flaws in the framework. Neither are the characters easy to take a shine to when the dead ones have more substance and simpatico than the living.A jaw-dropping, knowing, hyperintelligent yarn that, like the author's previous outings, would have benefitted from fewer smarts and more warmth.

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