I struggled with Rajaniemi's Jean le Flambeur series (starting with The Quantum Thief) - in fact, I couldn't finish even the first novel. I was nevertheless intrigued by the premise of Summerland, and I'm very glad I gave it a try. It's a really imaginative spin on the espionage genre - after all, it includes events in the afterlife, which the British have extended their control/empire into. That's just weird. But also rather cool.

Rajaniemi's writing is excellent, and the story and world-building is great. If you're looking for something (really quite) different, then I would certainly recommend giving this a try.

A Cold War Thriller with the Rajaniemi Touch

This is a standard LeCarre cold war spycraft thriller, but with a special Hannu Rajaniemi spin.

Rajaniemi's first two books, "The Quantum Thief" and "The Fractal Prince", were brilliant reimaginings of speculative fiction tropes with deep and compelling physics twists. From being trapped in The Dilemma Prison to pulling off a break-in to a Schrödinger box, the hero of those two books took us to never before encountered sci-fi adventures on the edges of the quantum universe.

In this book, though, we have a tired spy who is weary of the game. Instead of an Iron Curtain between the East and the West we have an Aetheric Curtain between the living and the dead. While in earlier books the goal was to expand our world building and reading experience outside the usual bounds, in this book the goal is to force all of that creativity and novelty into the formal and unyielding limits of a standard, traditional espionage thriller.

Where the great Rajaniemi books are based on thinking that is totally outside the box, this book is an exercise in putting everything firmly inside the box. The effect is that while the details are new, in a larger sense everything that happens is an echo of everything that has already happened in dozens of spy thrillers. The spycraft is the same, the macguffin is the same, the double and triple crosses are the same, even the stakes are the same.

To be fair, this is an excellent and well written spy thriller. It does everything right. All of the little, (and big), tweaks arising from the living/dead angle are clever and well thought out. At bottom, though, if you really like LeCarre style books this will might very well be a fascinating and entertaining new approach. If you are mostly looking for that Rajaniemi sci-fi magic and don't really care who was in the cold and who came out of the cold, this will probably disappoint to some extent.

(Please note that I received a free ecopy of this book without a review requirement, or any influence regarding review content should I choose to post a review. Apart from that I have no connection at all to either the author or the publisher of this book.)

I liked parts of this book, but other parts I didn't. I think it was a good story but it wasn't for me.

One of the hardest things for me as a reader is to finish a book that was written well but that just didn't grab me as much as I expected it to--or as much as I think it should have. Summerland is just such a novel.

Summerland is set in an alternate 1938 Great Britain. Summerland itself is a sort of city of the dead, but only those with tickets can get in. The others just fade away. As you can imagine, it's got power struggles and corruption and all the other sorts of things you'd expect a system of this type to undergo. British intelligence has to navigate both worlds, in the backdrop of the Spanish Civil War. An SIS agent named Rachel discovers a mole who's feeding secrets to the Russians. She has the added tension of fighting against chauvinism and Old Boys Club feelings of the time.

Rajaniemi drops you into the action and you're given information about the world through actions and exposition and revelations. It's all well done. The characters themselves are a mixed bag. Rachel is likable and sympathetic, while the other main character, Peter, is much less so.

Here's the biggest problem--and it's through no fault of Rajaniemi's, though it affects my feeling nonetheless. Any sort of Cold War spy novel with high levels of supernatural content is going to be compared to Tim Powers' excellent Declare, and this just can't hold a candle to Powers' work. Summerland even has Kim Philby dropping in, which I understand from a historical perspective but which makes that comparison even more glaring.

Again, the writing was good. The world was interesting. I just don't need 3-star Summerland when there's already 5-star Declare.

2.5 Stars

Although I thought the writing was excellent, I did struggle at times with Summerland. The premise of this story -alternate history! science-fiction! mystery! - seemed right up my alley. However, at times I was overwhelmed by all the different aspects of the novel and found it hard to connect to the characters.

This was my first novel by Rajaniemi and I'd be opened to some of his other books as I have heard good things about them. I'd recommend this to seasoned Rajaniemi readers, but probably not to those just diving in to his books for the first time.

"Summerland" is a deeply weird novel, even though it's still on the fence about whether it's a Weird novel as well. But who's keeping that gate, anyway? It's something, and it's winsome as it goes about it. For fans of Charles Stross' alternate-history "Empire Games" AND Ruthanne Emrys' "Deep Roots" (and you must like both! or else we can't be friends), this novel melds an oddball magic system, a dimensionally complicated afterlife, and WWII-era sleuthing. This book tackles, among other things, sexism in the workforce, sexism in the *afterlife* and the *afterlife's* workforce, and the difficulties of empire-building when its rulers are actually dead and they're the only ones who can give out tickets to an afterlife worth diddly squat.

Oh, and the afterlife is in danger.

This wasn't the easiest book I've ever sunk my teeth into, but in the end I was completely won over. Rajaniemi knows how to write noir detective fiction, adds a new spin to it that doesn't really smack of the typical paranormal, and packs a punch in what I found to be a truly satisfying final act.

In 1938, the British Empire conquered Heaven and twenty years later, death is not final anymore. British citizens deemed worthy are offered a Ticket, a pass to an afterlife in Summerland, a metropolis made of souls.

However, afterlife has a cost and death is now an asset in the pre-war years. In this alternate history, World War II never happened and the Soviets are building their own Summerland. Their aim is to create God by making a machine compiling the souls of all the loyal and obedient Soviet citizens. Their God will be all knowing and will allow them to conquer Earth and all its heavens.

Rachel White is a SIS agent working for the Crown: she is slowly earning her Ticket that will allow her to join the rest of her family in Summerland. During one of her missions, she gets a lead on a mole residing in the Summer Court. However, being a woman in the SIS isn’t easy and Rachel doesn’t have the support of her higher-ups. It doesn’t help that the alleged traitor has a lot of high placed friends such as the Prime Minister but most of all, that he’s dead. How do incriminate a soul? Her only way to do so is to go rogue and find allies who are able to infiltrate the world of the dead.

Summerland is a very unique kind of spy fiction novel. In this world, since death is not final, the dead have a very big part to play in the political situation and people’s feelings toward death is very different from what we know. Indeed, for most of them, life is only the beginning. Murder and death are overrated since you can just continue doing everything you used to do “before” in Summerland. What’s really the point of living in this situation except to earn your Ticket?

However, since the system is based on merit, inequalities of daily life transcend death. Only the ones deemed worthy or rich enough can buy their way into the afterlife and, even with all the money or merit, the souls of the dead start disappearing after a while anyway. If you are poor, death is the end, if you’re rich, you can only put it off for so long.

This novel has a fascinating worldbuilding and its execution is done perfectly. At first, I was quite lost because Rajaniemi throws you into this world without a lot of explanations and you have to figure everything out on your own. Learning the vocabulary and finding out what is alternative history to what really happened to place the story in the right context is the most difficult part. However, even is it is a bit much at first, when you get how this world work is the moment you can truly appreciate Rajaniemi’s genius. The novel is really short for the sheer amount of imagination and worldbuilding it contains. At the end of the book, I felt like I almost knew this alternate world as well as my own!

It also helps that the plot is very engaging and that I really enjoyed reading from both perspective: the mole and the one trying to find him. I was rooting for both protagonists and they felt like real people. I related a lot to Rachel’s struggles as she is trying to do her work as well as she can while being refrained by her male entourage who just want her to quit because, after all, women shouldn’t ever be spies right? I could also sympathize with Bloom and why he was working against his own country.



I don’t read a lot of spy novels but I enjoy them quite a lot, especially when they have speculative elements (like Dave Hutchinson’s Fractured Europe Sequence for example) and this one was the perfect example of that. The story was intriguing, the world fascinating and even if this novel is standalone, I want more stories set in this world!



Highly recommended.

4.5 stars.

The term "cross-genre" doesn't really do this book justice. It's an alternate history romantic spy novel that approaches a steampunk premise with the meticulousness of a hard sci-fi author. Plus, there's an urban fantasy style supernatural English bureaucracy! But once you wrap your head around the metaphysics, this is a rather straightforward love story about post-WWI England and Russia fighting to colonize the afterlife.

Which... okay, now that I've written this down, it's really impressive how breezy a read this is after the opening chapters. An easy book to recommend to a broad array of genre fans looking for something slightly different, I think I'm probably in the minority wishing that there was just a little bit more happening. But for a setting that starts out sprawling in disorienting directions, it ultimately feels a little reined in.

We discuss Summerland in non-spoilery terms on Midnight Skull Sessions 102, with more to come in future episodes when my co-host catches up!

Summerland, de Hannu Rajaniemi
I do hold some respect before Reading a Hannu Rajaniemi book. The Quantum Thief was a tough book, full of hard to understand ideas. But it was thrilling and full of that Sense of Wonder. I did not discover that in his Collected Fiction that I read some years ago, which for me was a little bit weird. Some short stories were really good, and some others not that much. Added to this, I’ve decided since some months ago not to review books that I dislike. But with Summerland I’ll do and exception because I think it holds some great ideas that you may find interesting.
Summerland takes place during the Spanish Civil War and it is told as a chronicle or a story about some secret wars played by the most powerful European countries at the time. So yes, it is a novel about spies. But then fantasy comes in, they have discovered that life and death have no meaning whatsoever. They can communicate with the Dead using some mediums through a possession. A fight to possess and control the Summerland begins.
Hannu Rajaniemi mixes real history events and people with characters, and this gives a perspective to the story and a point for the reader to hold to reality and to certain events. The bad part (and there is always a bad part of every story) is that the characters felt really misused or unused. Some of them feel like tools, some other like “hey, look at this guy, he appears here”. I can’t restrain myself in doing a (maybe unfair) comparison between Summerland and The Last Days of Paris by China Mieville, which blow my mind when I read it. Mieville book does everything right where Summerland just fails.
Summerland was a long waited project by Rajaniemi, and science takes a huge role in the book. It is Marcone and no one else who discovers this world beyond Dead or Alive. And yes, it is fantasy at its purest, but the huge elements of science work really well in the story. Rajaniemi also takes part in the ongoing gender discussion, but for me it just felt like “agenda”. It’s not elegant at all and it feels like some characters just screaming to the reader “hey, we think women are not week, you see us? We really think that!”. I wished for a cleverer way to put it. Rajaniemi works best at criticizing politics and some ways the System works.
Some other interesting ideas in Summerland are the safe way to travel to this world beyond with a ticket so the soul can fix itself to the world in order to not disappear. And the interesting idea of a god, or the absolute force. Sadly, I do not recommend this book whatsoever. I felt it was pretty boring for the most part of it, and I had the impression that it was just spinning around. There are a lot of ideas and story parts that I did not enjoy at all, but let’s just leave them aside. I will be waiting for the next Rajaniemi book, overall I think he is a really interesting author to follow.

England, 1938. The war is over, but not the way our reality had it. In this version of events, death is no longer a closed door. Instead, we can see through the windows to ‘Summerland’, send messages, maybe work out ways to have visitors once in a while…

The real-world branch of the British intelligence services is now known as the Winter Court. Even in these hallowed halls it’s not the best time to be a woman, as Mrs Rachel White knows well. When one of her missions goes awry, her gender is used against her and she finds herself in the typing pool. But a highly trained, accomplished spy treated so poorly is surely ripe pickings for the other side to turn…

I’ve been meaning to read some of Hannu Rajaniemi’s work for ages now – I’ve got his Quantum Thief trilogy on my shelves (well, in boxes right now, as I’m moving!), and in fact I know some of his colleagues at Edinburgh Uni. So when this stand-alone title popped up on Netgalley, I jumped at the chance!

And if I’m being honest, I was just a tad disappointed. The world-building is excellent with lots of cool ideas about how the ‘afterlife’ might be and how it could interact with our reality. There are also some intriguing hints of how this kind of revelation would affect people’s minds, and of course how history diverts along with the discoveries, using real historical figures alongside the fiction. The fairly standard, Le Carre-esque Cold War spy thriller is lifted with those hints of the fantastical.

However, I never really clicked with any of the characters somehow, and I think that left me a little less engaged with the book that I would have liked. Rachel was meant to be the key character, she was likable enough and wasn’t putting up with being treated like a 1930s housewife, but… hmm. It possibly didn’t help that half the time we followed someone on the other side of the spy game, and he came across as something of an over-privileged school boy toff of the kind I cannot stand.

I’m still very much looking forward to backtracking to Quantum Thief – the writing here was good – and despite my so-so feelings on this one I’d certainly want a look if more of this world appears on the page.

'The windmill you are tilting at is very high and ancient and English: Privilege...'

Well. (or should I say, Wells...?)

This is a strange one. It's a mashup of classic espionage (1930s, British Empire vs Soviet Union, a molehunt and traitors among the gilded products of elite English education) with horror (through some higher dimensional maths, the afterlife has been discovered so Spooks can literally be... spooks), overtones of steampunk (Queen Victoria rules from beyond the grave in her Summer Court) there are spirit crowns and the "coppery weave of spirit armour" and a dash of paradoxical mathematics (how can one rely on a system that must, logically, contain contradictions?)

It must, I think, take a good dose of self-belief to make such a thing work, as this does, combined with the ability to spin a great story. This account of Rachel White's thankless service for a thankless Service - she's an outsider, as a mere woman, also suspect as a married woman, shouldn't she have given up her job? - is certainly a great story. (I think all the best spy books need an outsider, someone who's prepared to judge, make a stir, in the secret world).

And Rajaniemi is assured in the way he makes the fantasy stuff - the ghosts, Summerland itself, the crowns and mediums and so on - a key part of the story, not just something tacked on. This is an alternate world. There is "Oxford Court" Tube line. Ectotanks win wars. Lenin has become "The Presence" - a steely hive mind. There may still be a Civil War in Spain, but its stakes are different, higher than in our universe. The science is different too, with a forgotten dead-end of 19th century science raised to the status of truth*. One of the fun things about the book is how much reality Rajaniemi allows to bleed in, whether it's the Prime Minister, modelled on HG Wells (see if you can spot the references to his books), the (real and alleged) spies and traitors who surround Rachel or indeed the mathematics and logic.

That makes the story seem more of a game than it is, this is a genuinely compelling narrative, focussing as it does on the frustrated life of Rachel White, the obscure, flailing motivations of Peter Bloom and on the wider, corrosive effect of the Empire's control of the spirit world. Bluntly, there is no more death, those assured of a "Ticket" can find their way to Summerland, where a little society has been build up (from bricks made of dead souls...) there to live out their deaths for eternity, even able to contact the living by "etheric telephone". It's to Rajaniemi's credit that he makes this whole edifice seem not only plausible but inevitable - as are the downsides. With no more life and death, what matters anymore? Only the most desperate loss is real now, such as a pregnancy that ended early or a soul literally consumed by one of those aetheric tanks. And with death, at large.defeated, what grief, what guilt, might be loaded on those affected by those rare true deaths?

So - whether as a story of tradecraft, spooks (of both kinds), mysterious files and of treachery, as one of horror and meddling with things We Were Not Meant To Know or as a sad and moving human tale dwelling on the aftereffects of loss, this would be a great book. As a blend of all three, it's unputdownable. The writing is sharp ("The raindrops tasted like fear") with the whole concept allowing for the emotional core of the story to be made literal ("the soul-fragments he carried from the War spilled out and made cold spots in the bedroom...", "the best of what the British Empire had to offer, spun from aether and made solid by collective belief." ) and Rajaniemi isn't above sly references to the classics of spy fiction (so, to a character shivering in the yard: 'Why don't you come in from the cold and tell us all about it?' Altogether a triumph, and I'd strongly recommend it.

*Aether atoms. The idea is that space is filled with an invisible fluid, the aether, which is the stuff that supports light waves (as the air supports sounds waves). The idea of aether fell out of favour, not so much disproved as shown by Einstein to be unnecessary. In this world things took a different turn, and an idea that was seriously considered before Einstein - that atoms can then be imagined as more or less complicated, endlessly spinning aether vortices - essentially knots - plays an important part in its physics.

Hannu arrived to the science fiction genre with quite a bang in 2010. His novel, The Quantum Thief, was clever, bombastic and energetic, and was widely acclaimed as an inventive debut from an exciting new author.

Now, eight years and three other novels on, Hannu’s latest novel is a very different read.

My prejudices should be known from the start – I love stories set around World War Two, both in the interwar years leading up to it and the Cold War afterwards. Genre books are a rich source of interest to me, both as alternate history and as a historical style novel with an SF/Fantasy twist.

Hannu’s latest novel is a story, set in such a world, with the manner of the 1930’s but with a Lovecraftian twist. In this world of dark suits, greatcoats and Homburg hats, there is a world that overlaps involving ectoplasm, the occult and the afterlife.

From the publisher: In 1938, death is no longer feared but exploited.

Since the discovery of the afterlife, the British Empire has extended its reach into Summerland, a metropolis for the recently deceased.

But Britain isn’t the only contender for power in this life and the next. The Soviets have spies in Summerland, and the technology to build their own god.

When SIS agent Rachel White gets a lead on one of the Soviet moles, blowing the whistle puts her hard-earned career at risk. The spy has friends in high places, and she will have to go rogue to bring him in.



This alternate world has taken a left turn in time in the early Twentieth Century, with the discovery that the afterlife is real and embodied by a city known as Summerland. Created by ‘aethertechs’ and seen by its deceased inhabitants rather like a photo negative, it is where you can go to when you die – if you have a ticket – before moving on to join ‘the mysterious ‘Presence’. However, it is not a place for everyone. Some choose not to go, whilst those who are ticketless fade away to nothingness.

Understandably, this has had major effects on both worlds. Maintaining an intelligence network is made more complex by the fact that communication between the two worlds is not always easy. Whilst there are commuters between the two, communication can vary and fade in and out. To allow such interaction, ghosts can hire bodies in the physical world for rent, or use ‘ectophones’ to speak to the dead. Endearingly, there’s a lot of Bakelite and wires, Faraday cages and spirit crowns, partly developed by ‘ectotechnology’, with guns, aeroplanes and even soldiers made up of ectoplasm, which seem to have given England the decisive winning factor in The Great War.

Now in 1930’s peacetime, we have a subtler way of combat, a world of politics and espionage – a James Bond-ian environment of clandestine meetings, bureaucratic paperwork, cocktail parties, dinner jackets and polite chit-chat. In terms of governance, as well as the physical world governments there’s a Summer Court and a Winter Court, that work with humankind (or rather, their government representatives) to maintain some sort of fragile peace.

This is important as the physical world is on the cusp of war again. There is conflict in the Spanish Civil War, where Joseph Dzhugashvili (Stalin) is gaining followers, whilst Britain and the Soviets are trying to use the situation for mutual benefit – or, alternatively, for secrets and information, traded for individual advantage.

To this situation we have Rachel White, a Secret Intelligence Service agent who is demoted when an asset pick-up goes wrong. However her demotion is partly for another reason – to allow Rachel to work undercover, having being told that there is a Soviet mole in the British spy network.

As readers, we know early on who this mole is, for we are also told the story from his point of view. He is Peter Bloom, one of the dead living beyond death. As the story develops, we are told of who he is and how he got there, though this is not a story with clear delimitations of right and wrong. It becomes clear that Peter is being kept in his role supported by someone else, for reasons that become clear over the course of the novel.

There is also Rachel’s husband, Joe, a man still in shock after his role in the War and whose secretive nature has caused rifts between himself and Rachel as a result. This creates an emotional aspect to a story that could have seemed cold and unemotional otherwise.

So far all of this sounds like the background to a good spy novel, if a little implausible, but what works here is the way that Hannu adds this element of the fantastic to raise the novel beyond a mere crime thriller or alternative history. Whereas in a traditional spy story much of the dilemma is resolved by killing the opposition, here it is much more complicated, and much more interesting – if the spy is already dead, what is the solution?

The world of Summerland is both eerie and strange, yet here is given a logical explanation. It may sound a little far-fetched, but it feels like it works, as everything unusual is as a logical consequence of this unique set up, and this creates a sense of reality that is usually absent from such novels.

Towards the end, things turn rather Lovecraft-ian, as our characters examine ‘life’ beyond Summerland and discover that there’s lot more at stake than they first thought. Pleasingly, (and perhaps unusually!) there is resolution at the end. I felt that the tale was done, though the created environment is so good that I am sure that other stories could be told if the author wished.

Summerland is a triumph – a very different novel from those in the Quantum Thief series, but as complex and as engaging as its predecessors. For those who want an intellectual thought-experiment combined with a Cold War sensibility, an espionage story with a fantastic rationale merged into it, then you will love it. I did – I think this one will be in the award nominations next year.

Summerland had such an interesting premise and it was pulled off fairly well. In Summerland, the afterlife has been discovered and colonized by the British, much to the chagrin of the Russians. Set in late 1930s England, this sci-fi novel is also a spy noir thriller, and I really enjoyed the mash-up. The spies followed are Rachel & Peter. Rachel has discovered that Peter is a mole, but she’s discouraged from pursuing the case, so she goes rogue. There were definite Agent Carter vibes here for me & for a guy, Rajaniemi does a decent job addressing difficulties a female spy would have faced at the time.

From the beginning, the world is pretty crazy, and you are definitely thrown in without a lifeboat. I was able to puzzle most of it out eventually, but was pretty confused at first, and still find some aspects of the book confusing. That being said, I really liked the vibe of the book. The sci-fi spy noir atmosphere was interesting, and it got the point where it was very page turner-y and hard to put down. The story is told in alternating viewpoints between Peter and Rachel, and that contributes to the novel a lot because it makes it difficult to assign your allegiances to any one side or party.

The concept of the colonization of the afterlife and the harnessing of the power of souls was fascinating and also very unsettling. Humans are definitely capable of atrocities and this book explores what additional ones would be possible if we were able to harness such power. There is also some odd worship of souls happening, and that was the part I found most confusing, honestly. That being said, I enjoyed the author’s exploration of these issues and was intrigued to read more about it.

If you like spy noir thrillers and/or science fiction and/or both, then this novel is right up your alley. If you liked Agent Carter, I also think you will enjoy this novel. It’s a quick ride, with fascinating ideas & alternate history. I liked it a lot, even if I found it confusing or overly odd at times. It was also really nice to read a standalone for once, and I enjoyed that the story was pretty wrapped up at the end. If you read it, I hope you enjoy it as well!

Note: I received this book from Netgalley & the publisher in exchange for a fair and honest review.

Hannu Rajaniemi’s “Summerland” ($25.99, Tor) proved an unusual read for me in more ways than one.

In 1930s Europe, no one fears death anymore. At least not if they have a Ticket to Summerland. Not only do the living know about the afterlife in Rajaniemi’s alternate history, but they can communicate with people there, and the dead can visit the world of the living whenever they want through mediums and other means.

It’s no surprise, then, that the European powers of the time would wrangle over control of the world of the dead, just as they do the world of the living.

Rachel White is a good, but dissatisfied SIS agent with the British Empire. As a woman in the 1930s, she doesn’t get the respect of her fellow agents or superiors, no matter how good her work. Then she learns of a Soviet mole in Summerland. Instead of being put on the case, she’s removed from her position and placed in an accounting position.

But with the possible fate of the afterlife on the line, Rachel isn’t going to give up the chase.


This was my introduction to Rajaniemi, so I didn’t know quite what to expect going in, but the premise of the book was unusual enough to pique my interest. I was not disappointed.

The truly strange thing about this book for me, though, is that I tend to be a character reader. The story has to be good, but if I don’t connect with at least one of the characters, I’m not fully engaged. A good character will even occasionally pull me through a not-so-good story. The truth is, I never really found my common ground with Rachel. She is, purposefully, I believe, a distant personality. I was never really invested in her on a personal level, yet the pages kept turning. Though I’m sure there have been one or two here and there, I can’t name another book where that’s happened off the top of my head.

So what was it that still made me enjoy “Summerland?” A number of things. First, there’s Rajaniemi’s writing style. Again, I always put character and story far above literary flair, but there’s just something gorgeous about his prose. It’s sophisticated and lyrical without being pretentious. I never get the feeling that Rajaniemi is talking down to me as a reader the way I do with some authors who have literary aspirations. Instead his words pulled me along and kept me engaged.

Then, there’s the world itself. How could you not be drawn to a place where death is, well, dead? You can pick up the ectophone and speak to a deceased parent if you need advice. You can say the words that you never got to say to someone who has passed away. There’s always time.

Of course, there are also downsides. One not-so-cool aspect is that there’s no paradise waiting on the other side for the folks in Summerland. Most of them still have 9-to-5 jobs. And if you believe you have eternity, are you living your life to the fullest and making the most of each day? They’ve also weaponized the afterlife with ectotanks that turn into Lovecraftian horrors that can mow through enemies. Now that I think about it, that last one is pretty awesome from a reader perspective, just not for the people in the book.

Part fantasy, part weird science fiction, part historical spy novel, there’s a lot to like in “Summerland” for a lot of different audiences. If secret agent adventure in the afterlife sounds intriguing to you, give it a try.

"You were not paranoid if any room could contain an invisible ghost, looking at your thoughts or listening to your words via a hidden ectaphone'

And that quote effectively summarizes why the premise of this book is so interesting. This story is pre WW2 spy thriller with the backdrop of the Spanish Civil War. Spy thrillers are not really my thing, but the lovely tension of a human woman agent trying to catch a turned ghost operative along with Hannu Rajaniemi's excellent ability to sketch out fully formed characters, even the minor ones, makes this a pretty great read. The pacing is good too, and I enjoyed the structural choice the author took of dropping us into memories and recollections of the POV characters without much of a transition, just like people naturally wander into remembrances while thinking. Recommended.

The afterlife hardly seems like a suitable subject for science fiction, but authors as far back as Edgar Allan Poe – whose pseudoscientific proto-mockumentary “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” hoodwinked newspaper readers in 1845 – have sought to portray the pre-scientific notion of consciousness after death in post-scientific terms. Some of the more famous examples since then come from Philip José Farmer (Riverworld series) and Philip K. Dick (Ubik), and of course the 1990 star-studded b-movie “Flatliners”. More recently, the idea of a digital afterlife – spurred by technological advances in brain mapping, digital storage, and the ever-increasing verisimilitude of virtual reality and computer simulations – has taken hold in popular science fiction. Considering this development, it is a little curious that Cambridge/Edinburgh-educated mathematician Hannu Rajaniemi, author of the diamond hard sci-fi Jean le Flambeur trilogy, would dip his toes into so abstract a pond as the good old-fashioned, pre-digital afterlife in his new novel Summerland. But then again, abstraction is the essence of mathematics, and the Jean le Flambeur books largely dealt with the same philosophical investigations into mind-body dualism that fuel even the most occultish conceptions of life after death.
Set in an alternate, Nazi-free 1938 in Great Britain, Rachel White is an agent for the Winter Court, the British intelligence (SIS) organization for all things afterlife-related. The dead (at least those lucky enough to obtain a Ticket) reside in the aetheric metropolis of Summerland, and the SIS branch there is known as the Summer Court. Rachel learns that one of their agents in the Summer Court – a ghost named Peter Bloom whom she briefly served with before he died – is a Soviet mole, but she’s left hanging by her superiors and must go rogue to expose him. The Spanish Civil War rages in the background, and most of the novel’s intrigue revolves around Britain’s stake in the outcome. Britain has grudgingly thrown its support behind Franco’s fascists, if only to counter the Soviet Union’s support of Spain’s communist factions. Bloom himself is basically untouchable – he is shielded from suspicion by everyone up to and including the prime minister – and can do a lot of damage as a Soviet spy; not only in affecting the outcome of the Spanish war, but also in steering the fate of the world at large. The Soviets have created a god-like machine called the Presence to guide their empire, one that the chosen few can be joined with after death – an allure that Bloom, and presumably many others, cannot resist.
Summerland is the kind of story that begins in media res and unpacks its layers gradually. Rajaniemi is sly about explicating his extraordinarily complex world: there are certainly little pockets of exposition and info-dumping here and there, but most of the architecture is revealed through the little edges that poke out as the details of plot and character emerge. Summerland is not a long novel and the fact that Rajaniemi manages to keep his cat-and-mouse plot moving at a crackling pace while inventing an entirely new physics to explain how the world works is nothing short of sensational.
Neither does the plot’s momentum slight the characters’ inner lives in the least: Rachel’s circumstances – being the only woman operative in the SIS – make it so she can expose herself to recruitment by Bloom without even having to create a fiction to explain her motives. Overworked and undervalued, her results are questioned and often disregarded despite her sterling track record. Early in the novel we even witness her superior passively suggest that violence would be an appropriate punishment for her perceived insolence. When she literally must turn traitor to make her unsanctioned pursuit of Bloom, the effect is all the more colorable by such contingencies. Bloom is also a fascinating character, caught somewhere in between the radicalism of his youth and a new kind of wariness that comes when one is safe in the knowledge that death is not the end. At one point he acutely reveals the basic injustice of his own plight: now that the soul has been commoditized he has nothing to look forward to but an eternity in civil service. At least the Soviets are offering communion with God.
The tricky balancing act that Rajaniemi mostly pulls off with Summerland leaves little to complain about: even on the few occasions where its convolutions start to dogpile, taking a step back to untangle the threads is part of the pleasure of reading it. If I were to express any disappointment in my experience, it would only be that the novel sprouts so many miraculous possibilities and teases so many underutilized potentialities that no amount of satisfactory narrative closure could ever seem like enough. I would gladly welcome, even long for, a return trip to Summerland.

Aunque conozco la faceta de Hannu Rajaniemi como escritor de fantasía y algo de terror por su colección Hannu Rajaniemi: Collected Fiction realmente lo que más me gusta de su obra es su vertiente de ciencia ficción. Hace ya un tiempo lo entrevisté y ya hablaba de Summerland, así que el proyecto lleva mucho tiempo preparándose.

Summerland se desarrolla temporalmente durante la Guerra Civil Española y es una crónica de la guerra secreta que enfrentaba a las grandes potencias europeas y a sus servicios de espionaje. Pero es muy distinta de la realidad que conocemos porque se ha descubierto el Más Allá y nos podemos comunicar con ellos. La muerte ya no significa el fin, la comunicación con los espíritus está al orden del día y estas almas también pueden tomar posesión de mediums autorizados para campar a sus anchas por la Tierra. Esta "Tierra del verano" puede parecer el paraíso, pero es escenario de luchas de poder exactamente igual que nuestra querido hogar.

Que los descubridores de la tecnología que permite comunicarse con los espíritus fueran Marconi y sus coétaneos pretende dar una pátina de credibilidad a la historia, pero las explicaciones resultan demasiado etéreas para mi gusto. Nos hallamos ante una novela de fantasía con un pequeña pátina de ciencia y como tal debemos aceptarla.

Un punto a favor en mi lectura de la novela fue la presencia de figuras reconocibles dentro del espionaje británico de la época. Vemos a Guy Burgess, a Kim Philby y a alguno más, así que Rajaniemi ha hecho los deberes (no vemos a Anthony Blunt, pero tampoco nos vamos a poner exquisitos) pero desperdicia a estos personajes en apenas una escena cuando podrían haber dado muchísimo más juego.

Summerland es una crítica acerada a la sociedad de privilegio, al hecho de que por pertenecer a un club desde tu nacimiento ya tengas más oportunidades que los demás, a una oligarquía desfasada y decadente, que acabó devorada por sí misma. También se critica sin pudor las diferencias sociales entre hombres y mujeres, achacando a la "debilidad femenina" las inexistentes oportunidades de ascenso de personas más valiosas que otras. Sobre todo, me gusta la crítica al férreo control que aún después de muertos siguen ejerciendo los poderosos, evitando la regeneración y el cambio.

Algunas de las ideas que plantea el autor finlandés tienen su contraposición en el mundo real. La forma "segura" de viajar al Más Allá es mediante la obtención de un ticket, que permite al alma "fijarse" en el nuevo mundo y no desaparecer. Por supuesto, este ticket solo lo consiguen las clases adineradas o los soldados del ejército, en una metáfora poco sutil pero muy efectiva de las desigualdades sociales presentes en cualquier civilización. También hay otra idea que es muy similar a lo que propone Leena Likitalo en The Five Daughters of the Moon (no sé si el origen finlandés de ambos tendrá algo que ver) una entidad superior, un Dios creado por el hombre que atrae y repele por igual a según qué personajes. La conversación sobre si esta mente es el mal o el bien absoluto es de lo más interesante del libro.

Por desgracia, la historia en sí no me ha convencido. Se utilizan recursos de espionaje como buzones de entrega, códigos secretos y aparecen agentes dobles, pero relmente la trama en este sentido es bastante floja. Lo que parece ser la amenaza más compleja a la que se pueden enfrentar solo queda esbozada y la posibilidad que tienen los espíritus de "leer la mente" (aunque en realidad solo sean los sentimientos más fuertes en ese momento) está francamente infravalorada. Me hubiera gustado que el autor hubiera conseguido que esta parte central del libro fuera más interesante, pero no ha sido así.

Dudo si recomendar o no la lectura de Summerland a según qué público. Las sesiones espiritistas tecnificadas no son lo mío, pero es posible que a otro lector si le atraigan.

This was my first novel by this author, who came highly recommended.

The premise of there being an afterlife, making death no big deal, as well as all the political repercussions (Queen Victoria is still ruling Britain, although from Summerland which basically is "the other side") sounded intriguing. The people here not only have a way of talking to the dead on a special phone, the dead can also rent a medium's body to walk among the living. Then we also had a spy story full of agents, moles, doube-agents and whatnot. And then there is something wrong with this other world, the souls and ghosts/spirits.

Unfortunately, I did not connect with this AT ALL. Maybe it's because I'm not made for spy stories or maybe it's because I was hoping for a bit more otherworldliness.

Whatever it was, I did not connect with any of the characters.
While I hated how Rachel was treated simply for being a woman (this takes place in the late 1930s so sexism, especially in the Service, was even worse than it is nowadays), I also didn't care (except for one of her decisions and that made me hate her).
Peter, Roger, Max, Joe, Nora, Otto, the Prime Minister ... it really didn't matter at all. There was a back-and-forth like a tug-of-war as in any spy story and the writing really was solid but it didn't tickle any of my senses.

Sadly, the same goes for the last effort to make the supernatural more intriguing. I like the idea of what's "wrong" with the other side much like the idea of the Presence. However, like I said, I was not invested despite that.

Still, thanks go to Netgalley and the publisher for the chance to reading this ARC.

Hannu Rajaniemi's first novels, the Jean le Flambeur series, involved an elaborate heist in a posthuman universe where people could make near-infinite copies of themselves. <i>Summerland</i> retains the preoccupation with immortality, but the setting is different and the weirdness builds more slowly. The story's architecture is built around a spy novel: it's 1938, there's a war in Spain, and British and Soviet spies are playing cat and mouse. The difference from our own history is that, in this book, ghosts and electricity are linked: with sufficient technological support you can go straight from life to afterlife (for the British, Summerland) without Fading like ordinary ghosts. Afterlife in Summerland is painfully bourgeois, but the narrative slowly makes it clear that death is more complicated than a simple Ticket to a ghostly city. There are some interesting alternate-history comments on the way that technological development changed, when an afterlife became an option.

Any ghost can see the emotions of the living, which complicates the efforts of spies and counter-spies. The heroine, Rachel, is a spy who has done reasonably well for herself in a mostly-male profession. One of the ways that she manipulates the ghosts is by channeling her justified anger at the sexism all around her. To me, those pieces felt a little bit too obvious: in my own experience with mostly-male professions, the big things are exhausting and tacitly understood, so when you need to shout you yell about small, anomalous things.

In many ways, <i>Summerland</i> feels similar to Ian Tregillis' <i>Bitter Seeds,</i> which is another novel about spies, occult-powered technology, and the Second World War. But in <i>Bitter Seeds</i> characterization takes second place to horror. Both books have women married to war heroes who grieve the loss of children, but in <i>Summerland</i> the strengths and failures of the relationship both seem more real, and the eventual rapprochement feels earned.

At the very end of <i>Summerland</i>, we see a glimpse of the broader universe, beyond Summerland and the equivalent Soviet enclave. I hope this is a promise of more books to come.

When I first saw Summerland pop up on NetGalley, I got my feisty finger out and click-clickity-clicked as fast as I could. When you read as many books as I do, it's easy to start feeling the dreaded book slump start to take over and for your reading list to grow stale, but look at how unique and exciting this premise is! While I'm glad I picked this up, as it was a unique and very different read for me, I think I had a different image in my head of what this would be vs. what it actually was.

No spoilers here, but I first noticed that there was a reveal of a certain piece of information early on that I felt would have built the tension and engaged me as a reader a bit more if it had been used as an element of mystery. (I do feel I might be alone in this thought though, as my mystery/thriller/suspense background takes over in these situations.) I also don't read a ton of spy fiction, so many of the elements other readers will enjoy and appreciate were lost on me. Again, these are all personal reaction and opinions and in no way suggest this isn't a quality read, because...

The writing was excellent! Seriously, this is high quality character development and world building. I'm in awe that the author was able to take such a short novel and do so much with it. Bows down Between the characters and the world building, I think readers who are more familiar with spy fiction and science fiction will be thrilled with Rajaniemi's latest novel.