There's a story that's an extended, magnificent homage to the HMV logo. There's a story where the city of Paris falls in love with a Finn and tries to woo him. There's a knot of stories exploring the developing consequences of the "god plague," what happens when the Rapture of the Nerds is seen as a virulent strain of disease that grants superhuman, world-changing powers indiscriminately to anyone who contracts it. There's a story that apologizes to Italo Calvino and a story containing god-speech that reads like a loving parody of Longfellow. There's a story about a haunted space suit and a story about men the sea's daughter marries. They're all astounding.
Most of the stories are science fiction, of a type that I was intimidated by at first but then felt myself being enriched by, one Dyson Sphere and red-shift at a time. The science has the cadence and elegance of poetry, the logic of fairy tale, and as such had me almost revelling in how Rajaniemi made it both intelligible and original. I was reminded of Catherynne Valente's science fiction and Benjamin Rosenbaum's, writing so suffused with love and enthusiasm for storytelling that it's practically its own mode of composition. Several stories are genre-defiant, poly-genre-ous, slippery and fantastic; there are a couple of darker horror-slanted pieces that took me by surprise, but mostly this is a collection of dexterous, loving, beautifully optimistic work that left me breathless and delighted.
Towards the end, the reading experience radically shifts gears; Rajaniemi steps in to introduce stories that developed as real-world experiments. So we get the introduction to "Snow White is Dead," which begins "You should really be reading this story on a computer screen wearing an electroencephalography headset," describing the story as an "ambitious literary/technology experiment," where the goal was to "write a story that reads you." It's utterly fascinating — as is Rajaniemi's introduction to the concluding pieces, a series of 140-character micro-fictions written while "Twitterer-in-Residence" for New Media Scotland in 2008.
My necklace communicates hunger, happiness, and a desire to dance. A story has composed itself through the medium of my reading it. Hannu Rajaniemi's magnificent science fiction — as is paradoxically appropriate — is pure magic.
Amal El-Mohtar is the author of The Honey Month and the editor of Goblin Fruit, an online poetry magazine.