Hannu Rajaniemi is a remarkable writer. Even at his most difficult—for sometimes, indeed, he’s a tricky writer to process—he’s certainly one of the field’s most inventive and interesting voices. Collected Fiction (2015) is a vibrant mix of his various genre stories, uneven in quality, but breathtaking in range and scope. The pieces don’t always connect but when they do, it’s stunning, and even when they don’t, it’s difficult to deny the author’s relentless creativity.
Rajaniemi is known primarily for complex futuristic SF full of brain-twisting ideas and quirky neologisms, so for me one of the surprises of Collected Fiction is that it shows his signature style to be just one of many. Indeed, he writes effectively in more conventional modes: traditional SF, contemporary fantasy, even the tinge of dark horror. Most successful of these, I think, are “Fisher of Men,” an evocative contemporary fantasy about a man who encounters sirens and sea gods along the coast of Finland, and “Paris, In Love,” a charming, fantastical short-short about requited love between a man and a city. “Satan’s Typist” is a snarly, clever horror short, and there are other intriguing experiments on display, like the Twitter microfictions of “Unused Tomorrows and Other Stories” and a text iteration of “Snow White Is Dead,” one of several possible results of a “choose-your-own-adventure” fiction piece designed to react to human brainwaves while read with a brain-machine interface.
But Rajaniemi is at his most impressive when inventing truly visionary science fictional futures, which at times he does with such effortless, future-shocky disorientation that it almost feels like the work of an SF writer from the future, working from an advanced science fictional playbook. One of his earliest stories, “Shibuya No Love”—which I had the good fortune of sifting out of the Futurismic slushpile when I was an editor—shows glimpses of the future world-building brilliance that would turn up in stories like “Deus Ex Hominie,” “His Master’s Voice,” “Elegy for a Young Elk,” and “The Jugaad Cathedral.” These stories defy easy synopsis, but dazzle with colorful language, eye-popping visuals, and more ideas per page than most writers pack into an entire novel. In its comprehensiveness, Collected Fiction has its share of weaker, merely good entries, and to be fair it loses some steam late in the volume. But it’s still an impressive record of one of the field’s most distinctive, ambitious, and restlessly creative voices.
