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Summary
Summary
"It reads like John Le Carré if Le Carré ate a ton of acid before writing Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy ..." -- NPR on Summerland
From Hannu Rajaniemi, one of the most exciting science fiction writers in the last decade, comes an awe-inspiring account of the afterlife and what happens when it spills over into the world of the living
Loss is a thing of the past. Murder is obsolete. Death is just the beginning.
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.
Yet 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.
But how do you catch a man who's already dead?
Other Tor books by Hannu Rajaniemi:
Jean le Flambeur series
1. The Quantum Thief
2. The Fractal Prince
3. The Casual Angel
Author Notes
HANNU RAJANIEMI is an author, mathematical physicist, and science innovator from Finland. He has a PhD in String Theory. For more than a decade he lived in Edinburgh and currently resides in California. He holds several advanced degrees in mathematics and physics. Multilingual from an early age, he writes his science fiction in English. Rajaniemi released the Jean le Flambeur SF trilogy through Tor.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
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. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Guardian Review
Francesco Dimitris The Book of Hidden Things (Titan, £8.99) rapidly draws the reader into the story of four childhood friends, now in their 30s. Every year for almost two decades they have met up in their hometown, the small Italian village of Casalfranco. When Arturo, at whose insistence this pact was formed, fails to show up, the three concerned friends investigate and discover that hes been leading a secret life: not only has he been growing marijuana on a large scale, but he has supposedly cured a young girl of leukaemia. They also learn that hes written a manuscript entitled The Book of Hidden Things, which suggests that he has access to a world hidden from our own. But is his disappearance connected to this manuscript and an event in his childhood, when he vanished for a week and returned very much changed, or is there a more mundane explanation? Dimitris first novel in English, written with breezy fluency, is an affecting fable of friendship, magic and nostalgia. To commemorate the centenary of Arthur C Clarkes birth, editors Ian Whates and Tom Hunter invited former Clarke award winners and nominees to contribute stories and articles to 2001: An Odyssey In Words (NewCon, £12.99). The remit was that each story must be told in precisely 2,001 words, a brevity which compelled the authors to concentrate on ideas rather than characterisation, in true Clarkian tradition. The result is a strong anthology of 27 stories and three non-fiction pieces that not only references Clarkes own best-known novels 2001, Childhoods End and Rendezvous with Rama, among others but spans the gamut of SF tropes: first and last contact, time and interstellar travel, warfare and alien intervention Standouts include Adrian Tchaikovskys The Collectors, a wonderful piece of sense-of-wonder SF about humankinds first extrasolar exploration and what is found in an alien star system; The Fugue by Stephanie Holman, a poignant take on the aliens are among us theme; and Chris Becketts moving Memories of a Table, in which visitors to the Museum of Chronotronic Archaeology view brief fragments of past events. Hannu Rajaniemi is known for dense, intellectually rigorous post-singularity space operas that explore cutting-edge quantum physics, but with Summerland (Gollancz, £14.99) hes switched sub-genres while retaining his trademark conceptual high jinks and impressive world-building. Rajaniemi never spoonfeeds the reader: fans must work to piece together information slipped into the narrative. Here were in an alternate 1938, and Great Britain and the Soviet Union are locked in a cold war. What is different about this world is that both sides have access to the afterlife a realm known as Summerland where the privileged dead of our world live on and can exert influence on earth-bound events. When British secret agent Rachel White discovers that the Soviets have a mole, the now-dead Peter Bloom, her paymasters dont believe her. What follows are her labyrinthine attempts to unmask the mole in an impressive plot reminiscent of John le Carré. The third book in Ada Palmers sprawling Terra Ignota quartet, The Will to Battle (Head of Zeus, £8.99), continues the chronicle of the far-future worldwide utopia made up of seven social entities known as Hives. A three centuries-long period of peace and stability is coming to an end and society is crumbling, ravaged by corruption and political intrigue. It was always a peace bought at a cost, however: political activists and those deemed to be troublemakers were singled out for assassination. With the breakdown of society, the hives are caught up in bitter conflict, narrated by the wily criminal-cum-historian and former slave Mycoft Canner. The Will to Battle is not an easy read; couched in lush, often dense prose, its a complex intellectual disquisition on Renaissance and early Enlightenment thought, fate and free will, and a utopian societys descent into barbarism, slowed by philosophical digressions. Its necessary to have read the first two books to appreciate the byzantine complexity of the narrative; the quartet concludes next year. Craig DiLouies first speculative fiction novel, One of Us (Orbit, £8.99), is set in a version of 1984 ravaged by a sexually transmitted disease which resulted in the Plague generation mutant children born with terrible deformities who are incarcerated in inhumane institutions and often forced into slavery. But when these children begin to develop startling mental powers, several of their number, led by an autistic boy known as Brain, plan a rebellion. The tension is heightened when the US government becomes involved, and decides that the Plague generation can be used to its own ends. This is a tense thriller with a social conscience that doesnt shy away from the violently graphic consequences of its premise: DiLouie gets the reader on the side of the children with some sympathetic characterisation in an effective, and often moving, portrayal of injustice and prejudice. Eric Browns latest novel is Buying Time (Solaris). - Eric Brown.
Kirkus Review
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-spiritualistswho 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 workBloom, 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 detailsthere are ecto-equivalents of most computer functionsoften 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. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
The year is 1938 not the 1938 we know from history but a 1938 in which the afterlife is no mere metaphysical concept but a reality. Britain and the Soviet empire are locked in battle over who will control the world of the deceased. British intelligence has offices in Summerland, the city where many of the deceased carry on their new existences, but the Soviets have their agents, too, operating covertly. Rachel White, an agent of the SIS, scores a real coup when she learns the identity of one especially clever Russian mole, who happens to be a British intelligence operative working for the enemy. But there's a problem: the double agent is deceased. How can Rachel, a living human being, hope to track down and bring to justice a dead man? This is a wildly imaginative novel the world building here is exquisite, right down to the ectophones that the living use to communicate with the world of the dead and it should appeal equally to readers of fantasy and to those who enjoy alternate-history fiction set during the WWII years.--Pitt, David Copyright 2010 Booklist
Library Journal Review
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 Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
