Summerland
by Hannu Rajaniemi
Tor
2018
Summerland is a spy novel in the tradition of John le Carre, set in London during the Cold War, its intrigue driven by the accusation that there's a traitor, a Soviet mole, in the heart of the British secret services. But this is an alt history. The year is 1938. Germany lost the Great War so comprehensively that it stands no chance of rearming to invade its neighbors. Instead, a tense stalemate between the UK and USSR plays out as the belligerents pick sides in another country's civil war, prolonging endlessly. But this war isn't in Vietnam or Korea - its the Spanish Civil War, with a British-backed Franco unable to defeat the Soviet-supported Republic. And, oh yeah, half the spies on both sides are ghosts.
In Summerland, the afterlife is a physical place, a layer of four-dimensional space just below the layer of the living world. Theosophical exploration discovered the ruins of Summer City in the 1890s, the remains of an earlier civilization built by the now vanished Old Dead. If a person can imagine a specific 4D shape as they die (with the help of a Ticket, a printed card that seems to function like a psychic QR code, a visual representation of the unique coordinates of a specific location), then their soul will reawaken at that location in Summerland. If you die without a Ticket, your remains near where you died, and rapidly Fades until you lose all of your memories and sense of self.
These discoveries have given rise to a world where the death has lost its sting. Indeed, the living envy the dead. Each nation exists half on Earth and half in the afterlife. The ghost of Queen Victoria still rules the British Empire, aided by her living Prime Minister, HG Wells. Spy duties are split between the dead in the Summer Court and the living in the Winter Court. Lenin still rules the Soviet Union as well - in death, Soviet citizens merge with their leader, transforming him into a truly collective superintelligence, the Presence. Because the dead are not gone, the torch is never passed. Living children remain beholden to their dead ancestors; Stalin is the dissident leader of a splinter faction, trying to use the Spanish Civil War to create a Communist but non-Leninist enclave.
When they visit the living world, ghosts can only see electromagnetism and souls. They can read emotions but not thoughts, and they can be blocked by Faraday cages. For a price, a ghost can temporarily possess the body of a medium wearing an electric crown. Ghosts make very good spies. In this world, radio and electric technology have advanced rapidly, all cars use electric motors for example, and medicine has languished. The only treatment for severe illness or injury is an overdose of morphine administered while you stare at your Ticket.
Summerland starts when a Soviet defector reveals to living British spy Rachel White that there is a mole loyal to Lenin among the ghost spies of the Summer Court. The mole is Peter Bloom, wunderkind and illegitimate son of the Prime Minister, who is simply too beloved for anyone to suspect. Because her defector tells her this just before committing suicide without a Ticket, Rachel gets demoted for fucking up her case. Not knowing who she can trust, if anyone, Rachel goes off-books to catch and expose Peter on her own.
Peter meanwhile is desperate to avoid getting caught, and to be exfiltrated to the Soviet afterlife to become one with the Presence. He's trying to stop Britain from switching their alliance from Franco to Stalin, and looking for a British secret to steal that's big enough to buy him a way out of his double life. He thinks he finds it, in the form of an old study HG Wells commissioned investigating the afterlife equivalent to the Fermi paradox - if the souls of any intelligent dead can travel to Summerland and set up civilization there, why was it empty when humans first arrived in the 1890s? where are all the alien minds? Not realizing that Rachel knows his identity, Peter picks her, obvious disaffected after a recent hushed-up embarrassing incident, and tries to use her to steal the physical file he needs.
Rajaniemi has really succeeded here on two fronts. First, this is a fun and imaginative scifi novel. What if Victorian era ideas about the affinity between electricity and spirits were true? What if the Theosophists' beliefs about immortal souls and four dimensional space were correct? And what if the tradition of all dead generations very literally weighed like a nightmare on the brains of the living? I like how Rajaniemi imagines and describes the afterlife, and especially his depiction of movement through 4D space, and the ana and kata directions that function as analogues for up and down. I like the way he extrapolates. The ghostly storage of information resembles cloud storage of digital files, and the way everything in the afterlife can be located and indexed using hypercube diagrams reminds of librarians' ambitions for a semantic web, where all real-world objects, including people, have URLs that allow them to be linked consistently online. Rajaniemi provides enough detail so you can imagine this strange, half living, half ghostly society, and so that the powers and limitations of the ghosts appear consistent, but not so much that everything is belabored or weighed down in minutia.
Second, Summerland succeeds as a spy novel. The alt history sets up an alternative Cold War with comprehensible stakes and sides. There's plenty of suspicion and paranoia, plenty of intrigue, and well-described scenes of tradecraft like spotting a tail or developing an asset. Multiple characters hidden agendas, and Peter Bloom is not the only double agent. But at the same time, the characters are consistent enough that their actions remain plausible, even when they catch you by surprise in the moment. They have comprehensible motivations, whether loyalty, ideology, or self interest, and they behave true to those motives even when they're trying to act in secret. Getting close to both Rachel and Peter as viewpoint characters not only lets us see the living and dead worlds, it provides us with direct and accurate information about the two main covert ops being run. And both have personal histories that give them a complex relationship with the current state of the world, and relatable reasons for wanting to change it.
I would compare Summerland favorably to Rasputin's Bastards, which also features psychic spies, and very favorably to The Eyre Affair, which also has a fairly divergent alternate history.
My complaints are very few. First, Rajaniemi's dialogue almost never includes contractions. The effect isn't so much to make the speakers sound posh or proper as it is to make what they're saying sound a bit stilted and artificial.
Another thing I found odd is that although the British PM is very specifically HG Wells, man of imagination, author of Little Wars and The Invisible Man, both of which play roles in the plot, for some reason Rajaniemi calls him 'Herbert Blanco West,' and then has to repeatedly make really obvious allusions to make sure you realize that 'HB West' is really supposed to be HG Wells. Rajaniemi references Lenin and Stalin by name, as well as radio inventor Marconi and 4D theorist Charles Hinton by name, so it's difficult for me to understand why he doesn't do the same for Wells. I even sort of wonder if it's somehow a legal or practical decision rather than and artistic one.
