Search Worlds Without End

Nebula and Sturgeon Award nominated novelette. The Finnish original appeared in 2002. The first English translation was published in the anthology The SFWA European Hall of Fame: Sixteen Contemporary Masterpieces of Science Fiction from the Continent (2007), edited by James and Kathryn Morrow. It can also be found in the anthologies Year's Best SF 13 (2008), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer and The Big Book of Science Fiction (2016), edited by Jeff and Ann VanderMeer.

From the author of Not Before Sundown, this novel is a skilful portrait of the unquenchable desire of Westerners for the pure and the primitive. A young Finnish couple go on the hiking trip of a lifetime in Australasia with Heart of Darkness as reading material. The trip gradually turns into a tortuous thriller with belongings disappearing and, even more mysteriously, reappearing. The travellers come to be at the mercy of untamed nature. Birdbrain reveals the dark side of the explorer's desire: the insatiable need to control, to invade and leave one's mark on the landscape. But what happens when nature starts to fight back?

Mikael, a young gay photographer, finds in the courtyard of his apartment block a small, man-like creature. It is a young troll, known from mythology as a wild beast, now considered extinct. Mikael takes the troll, whom he has named Pessi, back to his apartment. But Mikael does not discover that trolls exude pheromones that smell like a Calvin Klein aftershave and that this has a profound aphrodisiac effect on all those around him. Shooting an assignment for the ultra-hip Stalker jeans, Mikael finds himself fast-tracked into a dangerous liaison with Martes, the art director of the advertising agency, while a couple of his friends in turn fall in love with him because he carries the troll's scent. What Mikael fails above all to learn, with tragic consequences, is that Pessi the troll is the interpreter of man's darkest, most forbidden feelings.

The phenomenon of colony-collapse disorder, the sudden mass disappearance of bees, has become so widespread that much of the world – although not, as yet, Finland – is facing agricultural and ecological disaster.

Amateur beekeeper Orvo, devastated by the recent death of his eco-warrior son, finds two of his hives deserted and begins to fear that the 'epidemic' has reached Scandinavia. Then, in the attic of the old barn, he makes a mystical and frightening discovery: a pathway to a parallel world. Is it a hallucination stimulated by sorrow and loss – or is it something very real and connected with the bees' disappearance? His research teaches him that in practically every culture bees are viewed as half-supernatural messengers that can travel between worlds and are associated with resurrection and the afterlife. He begins to wonder if this portal could reunite him with his dead son and whether he can himself escape the ecological meltdown of this world.

The Blood of Angels reworks the Orpheus myth while analysing modern man's need to deny his mortality and raise himself above the rest of nature, to compare himself to the angels – but at what price?

From the author of the Finlandia Award-winning novel Troll: A Love Story, The Core of the Sun further cements Johanna Sinisalo's reputation as a master of literary speculative fiction and of her country's unique take on it, dubbed "Finnish weird." Set in an alternative historical present, in a "eusistocracy"--an extreme welfare state--that holds public health and social stability above all else, it follows a young woman whose growing addiction to illegal chili peppers leads her on an adventure into a world where love, sex, and free will are all controlled by the state.

The Eusistocratic Republic of Finland has bred a new human sub-species of receptive, submissive women, called eloi, for sex and procreation, while intelligent, independent women are relegated to menial labor and sterilized so that they do not carry on their "defective" line. Vanna, raised as an eloi but secretly intelligent, needs money to help her doll-like sister, who has disappeared. Vanna forms a friendship with a man named Jare, and they become involved in buying and selling a stimulant known to the Health Authority to be extremely dangerous: chili peppers. Then Jare comes across a strange religious cult in possession of the Core of the Sun, a chili so hot that it is rumored to cause hallucinations. Does this chili have effects that justify its prohibition? How did Finland turn into the North Korea of Europe? And will Vanna succeed in her quest to find her sister, or will her growing need to satisfy her chili addiction destroy her?

Johanna Sinisalo's tautly told story of fight and flight is also a feisty, between-the-lines social polemic--a witty, inventive, and fiendishly engaging read.

First published in Tähtivaeltaja magazine March, 1994

Can be read for free at Finnish Weird 3: Enter the Weird

Translated by J. Robert Tupasela