Kudos to Johanna Sinisalo, most familiar to readers of this blog as winner of the 2017 Prometheus Award for Best Novel.
Sinisalo, widely hailed as one of Finland’s leading novelists, has been recognized as a finalist in Finland’s top science fiction award.
The Helsinki Science Fiction Society has announced 2026 finalists for its Tähtivaeltaja (“Star Rover”) Award for the best science fiction book published in Finland in the previous year.
SINISALO’S SWAN SONG
According to File 770, Sinisalo was recognized for her novel Swan Song (Joetsenlaulu in Finnish), published by Otava.
Her novel has been described as a “poignant, profound and deeply human tale about perception” and as a ”masterful” near-future ‘Finnish Weird’ narrative exploring consciousness, communication, and human-nature relations.
Jane, the central character, who manages remote bird-monitoring (A2 monitoring) from the United States. The narrative centers on Jane as she gets involved in a life-changing adventure.
Swan Song has been hailed as “ a masterpiece on relationships between species.”
The winner will be announced in April-May.
The other Star Rover Award finalists include novels by Juan Jacinto Munoz-Rengel, Marisha Rasi-Koskinen, Ali Smith and Hanna Weselius.
No word on when – or whether – Sinisalo’s latest novel will be translated into English and published or made available in the US.
Sinisalo – the first Prometheus winner from a country whose native language isn’t English and whose work had to be translated into English to become eligible for our award – isn’t the first author recognized in both Finland’s award and the Prometheus Awards.
Previous winners of the Helsinki SF award – which are recognized in the years they are translated into Finnish if initially published earlier in another language – include Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun and Margaret Atwood’s Testament.
Both were selected by LFS judges as Prometheus Best Novel finalists when they were first published, with Ishiguro’s novel recognized in 2022 and Atwood’s novel in 2020. The latter work is the sequel to Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, itself a 1987 Prometheus Best Novel finalist.
SINISALO’S PROMETHEUS CONNECTIONS
A Finlandia Prize-winning author, Sinisalo often is compared to writers like Ursula Le Guin and Kurt Vonnegut. (Both authors have had works inducted into the Prometheus Hall of Fame for Best Classic Fiction, with Le Guin’s dystopian/utopian novel The Dispossessed winning in 1993 and Vonnegut’s satirical story “Harrison Bergeron” winning in 2019.
Sinisalo won her Prometheus Award for The Core of the Sun, at once a feminist and libertarian dystopian novel offering an alternate 21st-century history of Finland.
In the fast-paced novel, both a coming-of-age tale and an awakening-to-full-selfhood fable, a patriarchal and authoritarian government enforces a social system, a War-on-Drugs Prohibition of individualistic pleasure and a eugenics program that breeds and virtually enslaves compliant women.
The novel’s title refers to a religious cult centered on use of a chili so hot that it seems to spark hallucinations.
Sinisalo draws implicit historical comparisons and polemical commentary related to Prohibition and the War on Drugs as the oppressive male-dominated government wages a war on people consuming hot chili peppers and puritanically suppresses the pleasures and wild intensities that the drug arouses evokes similar efforts in history.
For a full review of The Core of the Sun, read the Prometheus Blog Appreciation.
WHAT’S ‘FINNISH WEIRD’?
If Sinisalo’s Swan Song has been categorized as a fantastical SF work within the “Finnish Weird” genre, what does that term mean?
As it happens, Sinisalo herself coined the term used for the Finnish brand of SF/fantasy that blends elements of speculative fiction with philosophical inquiries exploring the natural world. The subgenre often focuses on how people choose – or fail – to understand other species and their own limitations.
An overview of and Reader’s Guide to the “Finnish Weird” subgenre, published by Jonathan Thornton in 2022 in Reactor magazine, gives Sinisalo a lot of credit for both the term and the vitality of the subgenre.
That Reactor overview, worth reading in full, includes glowing reviews of Sinisalo’s novel Not Before Sundown and The Daedalus Book of Finnish Fantasy, edited by Sinisalo.
“In her 2011 essay “Weird and Proud of It” (published in the journal Books From Finland), Finnish author Johanna Sinisalo coined the term “suomikumma,” or Finnish Weird, to refer to a new strain of speculative fiction being produced by herself and her Finnish peers,” Thornton wrote.
“In stark contrast to the realist strain of mainstream Finnish literature, these writers were producing work that Sinisalo describes as having a “diagonal” approach to “genres… hybrids of these genres, and genres that don’t have any other name.” She identities common features of the Finnish Weird as including “the blurring of genre boundaries, the bringing together of different genres and the unbridled flight of imagination.”
“Since then, the term has enthusiastically been adopted by editors like Jeff and Ann VanderMeer and by writers and fans of Finnish speculative fiction as a useful way to talk about the unique, inventive, and distinctively Finnish work produced by these writers.
“In the interim, the genre has only grown in stature, with Finnish writers like Sinisalo, Emmi Itäranta, and Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen winning awards and accolades in English, and the Helsinki Science Fiction Society producing a magazine in the lead-up to Finncon to introduce English-speaking SFF fans to suomikumma and its practitioners.”
“What makes the Finnish Weird so exciting is its combination of exploratory literary techniques within a tradition of the fantastic outside of the anglophone world. Because of Finnish literature’s avoidance of fantastic or speculative tropes, the writers of the Finnish Weird have had to come up with their own approach to writing the Weird, one that is influenced by their own specific folklore and culture. Speaking as a reader who can only read in English, it is exciting that more and more Finnish speculative fiction is being translated into English so that we can benefit from these fantastic writers’ imaginations.”
ABOUT THE LFS AND THE PROMETHEUS AWARDS
* Join us! To help sustain the Prometheus Awards and support a cultural and literary strategy to appreciate and honor freedom-loving fiction, join the Libertarian Futurist Society, a non-profit all-volunteer international association of freedom-loving sf/fantasy fans.
Libertarian futurists understand that culture matters. We believe that literature and the arts can be vital in envisioning a freer and better future. In some ways, culture can be even more influential and powerful than politics in the long run, by imagining better visions of the future incorporating peace, prosperity, progress, tolerance, justice, positive social change, and mutual respect for each other’s rights, human dignity, individuality and peaceful choices.
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