Johanna Sinisalo holds up her Prometheus Award (Photo by Ryan Lackey)
Tor.com, one of my favorite sites devoted to science fiction, ran a recent piece by Jonathan Thornton, “A Readers’ Guide to the Finnish Weird in Translation.”
If you check it out, you’ll notice that writer Johanna Sinisalo is a central figure in the genre and even named it: “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 then goes on to offer some recommendations, including an anthology edited by Sinisalo, and two of Sinisalo’s novels, Not Before Sundown and The Blood of Angels.
Yet another Sinisalo novel, The Core of the Sun, won the Prometheus Award in 2017. As it happens, she won the same year the Worldcon was held in Helsinki, so we were able to present the award before Sinisalo’s local fans.
You can read an appreciation of The Core of the Sun by our own Chris Hibbert at this blog, and also read a piece about the book at Tor’s website, written by Natalie Zutter.
It’s great to be reminded about Core of the Sun. Not the type of science fiction I’m normally drawn to, but I really enjoyed and appreciated it. I reread Chris’s appreciation of it just now. I may be rereading this one soon…