How would the world react if we found
definitive proof of the afterlife? Would we all
carry on as normal, or would the powerful
immediately try to exploit it? The second
option, of course, is the foundation of Hannu
Rajaniemi’s latest novel. Summerland is set
in 1938, as the British Empire and Soviets vie
for control of the titular land for the recently
deceased and follows a SIS agent who needs
to bring in a Russian mole from the afterlife.
Summerland is such a fascinating
vision of the afterlife. What was your
inspiration for that world?
It’s heavily inspired by spiritualism and
the scientific and pseudo-scientific ideas
several heavyweight intellectuals were
developing in the late 19th Century –
especially luminiferous aether, and the
fourth dimension. The rabbit hole was John
Gray’s wonderful book The Immortalization
Commission, which examines the late 19th
and early 20th Century obsession with the
afterlife through the life of HG Wells and also
covers the attempts by Soviet ‘God-Builders’
to reconstruct religion after the Revolution.
As I pulled on these threads, all kinds of
weird stuff started coming up, from German
astrophysicist Johann Zöllner’s idea that the
reason spirits can travel through walls and
see things we can’t is because they exist in
the fourth dimension, to Charles Hinton’s
amazing writings about visualising the
fourth dimension and so on and so on.
What was striking about all this was that
around the turn of the 19th Century, there
was this sense that science could actually
figure out things like afterlife, given the
extremely rapid progress in other areas
- electricity, X-rays, and so on. You can
find this reflected in stories like Kipling’s
‘Wireless’, where the radio is used to contact
the afterlife. And I feel we are in a similar
moment now, with AI, the singularity,
notions like mind uploading: that afterlife
could become the domain of technology, not
religion. But we have been there before – and
that was the key inspiration for Summerland.
How did you go about reimagining
the 1938 geopolitical landscape in a
world where death is no longer the
threat it once was?
I think more or less the usual process
of working out the consequences of the
divergence point, which in this case is
Marconi and Lodge establishing radio
contact with the afterlife in the 1890s.
The technology is developed in Britain, so
Great Britain has a massive advantage in
WWI, resulting in a British Empire that
remains a dominant world power longer
than in our world. Things also play out very
differently in the Soviet Union. In real life,
there were attempts to cryopreserve Lenin
and speculation about ways to bring him
back from beyond... While the spy elements
certainly required thought on geopolitics, I
was actually more interested in the impact
on everyday life: how do attitudes to death
change, how do people work, what happens
to medicine, to crime...There are a lot of underlying themes
in the novel; privilege, sexism and
colonialism, in particular. Were094 | w w w. s c i fi n ow.co.u k
BOOK CLUB
InterviewRACE FOR
THE AFTERLIFE
We talk to author Hannu Rajaniemi about
his incredible new SF
they aspects that you intentionally
wanted to explore or did they arise
out of the setting?
I did know from the start that I wanted
to have a character who had experienced
genuine loss in a world where most people
hadn’t, and that meant that the main
character had to be female (more details
would be a spoiler!). The rest of the themes
sprung organically from that.Summerland is a concept that feels
very rich in potential. Will be further
adventures in the afterlife?
I have an idea for a sequel which is set in
the Sixties of this world that could be a nice
novella – but it might be a while before I get
to that...Summerland is available now
from Gollancz.WORDS becky leaHannu Rajaniemi’s latest
takes him away from the
award-winning Jean le
Flambeur series.