Complex but more accessible than his previous work, Rajaniemi’s latest is a feast of spycraft, afterlives, Gods, moral quandaries and politics set in a magnificently original alternate history world.

Set in an alternate 1938, the Spanish Civil War is heating up and Britain has discovered a way to communicate with and preserve consciousness in the afterlife, called Summerland. The empire has colonised an abandoned alien city within Summerland, creating a haven for their recently deceased citizens who are able to access it through a vaguely meritocratic ‘ticket’ system. Britain maintains spy agencies in both the worlds of the living and the dead – the Winter and Summer Courts – enabling them to gather intelligence and influence events on the Spanish front from both sides.

Rachel White is a Winter Court (living) agent who has been constantly overlooked due to her gender but gets a lead on a Soviet mole in Summerland, only to be demoted when she reveals it. However, Rachel is not done with chasing down the mole, even if she has to revert to less than above board measures to achieve it.

Peter Bloom is the illegitimate son of the prime minister and a Russian double agent planted in Britain’s Summer Court (Summerland/afterlife) working for the Presence, a Russian-created God built from a hivemind of souls, but is aware that someone from the Winter Court is onto him.

This is not a James Bond spy novel, there’s a smidge of high society drinking and gun fights, but it’s much more about intelligence gathering, two major powers twisting for advantage, and high-stakes spycraft. It’s a slow, intellectual burn and I’m grateful for it. The action scenes are well done, but the key scenes are much more likely to be a group of characters in a room lying to each other which is just as great.

The highlight here, really, is Summerland itself. Rajaniemi has put a lot of love into thinking about and developing this world and it shows. From the ticket system, to the fourth compass directionality, to the weird alien structures that lose shape when not maintained, to the Fading phenomenon, and the elaborate ecto- and spiritualist mechanisms used to allow communication between Summerland and the land of the living. And this is without even going near the military elements! It all provides opportunities to consider what happens to power structures if people continue to live on and work from beyond the grave, and what value life has over death when, if you’ve got a Ticket, the existential threat is minimal.

This book requires you to pay attention: the world is detailed, the politics are tricky enough to almost be real, and the double-agent spy-on-spy narrative is layered on top of the lot of it. There’s a lot to keep track of, but I found if I dropped the thread it didn’t take me long to pick it up again. Rajaniemi isn’t going to hold your hand here, but the characters and world are presented consistently enough to give you something to hold onto while you reorient yourself to what the hell is going on.

The main characters are both flawed, but relatable – their present contest with one another is supported by extensive reflective passages showing their lives up to this point and giving the reader a better sense of who they are and why their cause matters to them. I didn’t know who I wanted to win. I still don’t, really. The argument is pretty compelling both ways.

Summerland is on the literary end of the sci-fi bell curve, but well worth the time. I think this novel is going to deepen on the re-read and there’s scope in it for subsequent books, too, which I would be quite interested in. This world’s certainly big enough for more stories!

An advance copy of this book was kindly provided by Macmillan-Tor/Forge, Gollancz and NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Rajaniemi's Jean le Flambeur trilogy was a marvel; tricksy, baroque post-singularity space opera, and as such exactly the sort of thing I was always likely to love. His first novel outside that...isn't. It's set in an alternate 1938 where, four decades earlier, scientists made irrefutable contact with the afterlife. So the Great War was won with ectotanks and flyers, people channelling the energy of the dead - and now, the battle between the Republicans and Franco looks set to draw the great powers into conflict once more. Except that here, with Germany more thoroughly crushed, it's Britain backing Franco - something which makes a horrible kind of sense when you consider that the erosion of the boundary between living and dead mean the older generation need never relinquish control, so Victoria and her contemporaries are still pulling the strings from behind an increasingly tattered veil. Which, yes, on one level is a good way to prod at the increasing feeling of our own younger generations that their predecessors aren't getting out of the way, that we're all suffering through an unending baby boomer purgatory. And set against that, the attraction/repulsion of the Presence, the Soviet overmind, a vast collective intelligence which seems equally plausible given the dreams of the early Communists, the true history of the Immortalisation Commission. And yet. As tends to be the case with st**mp*nk, there's that faintly annoying sense of boxes being ticked. So when we get to Spain and there are mentions of Comrade Eric, Pope Teilhard, a Georgian dissident Communist...it feels a little obvious, somehow. A little 'Oh, those guys. Yeah.' Which in turn makes it all the more odd once we meet the British Prime Minister, and despite blatantly being HG Wells, he's had the serial numbers filed off and is named 'HB West'. Surely it would make more sense either to do that for everyone, or none of them?

The other problem, and this is probably going to affect fewer readers, is that the whole set-up reminds me a bit too much of <i>Wraith: The Oblivion</i> - the none-more-goth nineties roleplaying game for people who didn't find <i>Vampire</i> quite morbid enough. The way that there exist cities in the afterlife, but ones replicating and in some ways amplifying the inequities of the living world. The abyss beyond and beneath that world, the living realm above it. The gradual fading of spirits without anchors, the way that old souls become the stuff of the realm so that prosperity is literally built from the souls of the dispossessed...this is all very familiar. Worse, once you've hit on that, the big reveals become very easy to predict. But as against the way that <i>Wraith</i> made everything sound suitably portentous, here it all feels a bit tickety-boo, the mid-century British jauntiness robbing the whole idea of much mystery. Yes, the term 'Spooks' for posthumous spies was probably inevitable, but the fact that the favoured are assured of their post-mortem integrity by possession of a 'Ticket'...well, it's that bit too Willy Wonka for me. I'm sure this is at least in part deliberate - an intentional move to show how capitalism can rob the world, and here even the next world, of its magic and mystery. And yet, to return to the RPG comparison, it makes me think less of the Spectacle's sins, and more of the sort of system where the players game the magic system for effect, without ever feeling the faintest touch of mystery.

Fundamentally, though, I think my problem is that I was just too in love with how free-floating and wide-ranging the Flambeur books were. An Earthbound story about mid-twentieth-century people was always going to be more constricted, both by research and by the manners of the time. There's more research to hold everything back (though not without very occasional glitches - I find the idea of a 1930s Brit saying "My husband - he has some issues" implausibly anachronistic, though of course this might be one of those times when we think a phrase arrived later than it did). And yes, on one level, I respect Rajaniemi for not just plugging away at that same thing we know he can do, forever. But on the other...well, remember how outside the Culture, Banks still found time to create three other excellent SF worlds for single novels? I think I expected something more like that. Whereas this feels a little too much like the substitute of his non-M books.

Still, if you're more into mid-twentieth-century spy thrillers than I am, I imagine this would be considerably more satisfactory. The idea of souls being visible to the dead as shapes of light, betraying emotion &c, is absolutely perfect (it's pretty much how I've always pictured them), and puts an interesting spin on the necessary games of deceit and misdirection - without making the whole business quite so absurd as it was in the espionage plotline of Pullman's <i>Belle Sauvage</i>*. The way in which the body image of the deceased can falter at times of stress, so suddenly they show the injury that killed them, or themselves as a child...well, I think we can all identify. And the logic games at the story's thematic heart, the notion that "if you started with a contradiction, you could prove anything"...it nags at me, in good ways. This is by no means a disaster. But for my own tastes, and compared to that magisterial debut trilogy, it is a disappointment.

*As it happens I was talking to a friend about this at the weekend, and we concluded - why doesn't the obviously dodgy guy with the obviously dodgy hyena daemon at least try to disguise it? Quick coat of paint, some fake ears, and "No, this is definitely a Labrador, that famously trusting breed. STOP LAUGHING, FIDO."

(Netgalley ARC)

This was my first experience with Hannu Rajaniemi's work. I had heard good things about his Jean Le Flambeur series and decided to give this a try. While I wasn't disappointed, I also wasn't extremely impressed. Good world-building and fairly good character work, but nothing particularly new or exciting.

Summerland is an impressive novel blending spy-fi and science fiction.  If you only pick one science fiction novel to read this summer, this is it.  Summerland is set in an alternate Britain circa 1938. The Cold War is in full swing, but there are two fronts - the world of the living and the world of the dead.  The world of the novel was changed forever when the Summerland was discovered. Once thought to be gone forever, the souls of the dead persevere and retain their intelligence.  Technology allows communication between the living and the dead, and spy services make use of agents both living and dead.


Rachel White is a British agent in charge of a Russian defector.  Before he dies he offers her a piece of information - there is a mole in the British operation.  But how do you catch a mole who is already dead?


The richly imagined world of Summerland is difficult to leave. Summerland has a lot to offer readers - from the unique technology and the utterly realistic characters to the immersive plot.  I highly recommend this wonderful novel to anyone who enjoys Cold War spy fiction or science fiction.


5 / 5


I received a copy of Summerland from the publisher and Netgalley.com in exchange for an honest review.


— Crittermom

Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC of this title.

Loved the concept of there being an inter-connected afterlife and having them sort of modeled after the Fae Winter/Summer courts.

Though I know it's not for everyone, I enjoy the "altered historical fiction" aspect of this, with supporting characters like Stalin, Lenin, etc.

The writer gave us quite an immersive world and my only complaint is that he spent more time fleshing it out and explaining it. I'm not a big fan of books that drop you into a world where everything is different and they expect you to just catch up. Even just 5-10 pages extra at the beginning would have made quite the difference.

Overall, a solid read and looking forward to anything that the author puts out in this world in the future.

Summerland is a peculiar novel with the unique premise of mashing together the disparate concepts of the afterlife with Cold War spy tradecraft .

Almost the entire book takes place in an alternate 1938, where the dead are able to relocate to a fourth dimensional afterlife via a meritocratic system of Tickets that are offered to the deserving. The dead can further interact with and manifest themselves in a very real way in the world of the living via ectophones and mediums. Imagine being able to phone a loved one who has passed away whenever you like and you begin to understand the draw of the Ticket.

The first protagonists is the perennially underappreciated Rachel White investigating the existence of a mole, while battling the bureaucracy of English privilege and male chauvinism. The second is Peter Bloom, our mole, who inhabits the afterlife.

From virtually the beginning of the book, Peter Bloom is identified as the mole, which for me, much deflates the tension. Summerland is rather about our protagonists underlying motivations, the growing realisation that all is not well and questioning the nature of a true patriot.

And therein lies the rub. A character driven novel is dependent upon the depth of its characters and I struggled to identify with the these characters and I was not drawn into this world in a meaningful way.

Summerland contains some ambitious concepts, but lacks the characters to realise the massive potential of this novel.

Summerland by Hannu Rajaniemi

Pros: fleshed-out characters, interesting world, fast paced

Cons: pay close attention or you’ll get lost quickly, some aspects not explained well

This book is pretty complicated so I’m using the synopsis from the book instead of trying to come up with my own:

Loss is a thing of the past. Murder is obsolete. Death is just the beginning.

In 1938, death is no longer feared but exploited. Since the discovery of the afterlife, the British Empire has extended its reach into Summerland, a metropolis for the recently deceased.

Yet Britain isn't the only contender for power in this life and the next. The Soviets have spies in Summerland, and the technology to build their own god.

When SIS agent Rachel White gets a lead on one of the Soviet moles, blowing the whistle puts her hard-earned career at risk. The spy has friends in high places, and she will have to go rogue to bring him in.

But how do you catch a man who's already dead?

Pay very close attention to the first few chapters of the book as you’re dumped into the action with no background information beyond what you can gleam from conversations. Once you’ve got a feel for the players, the world, and the stakes, sit back and enjoy the fast paced ride.

The story is told through mostly alternating chapters from the points of view of Rachel White and Peter Bloom. Note that their timelines don’t match up right away (his story starts a few days after hers). I was impressed at the amount of background detail you eventually learn about the pair, and how that makes you care about them, even while they’re making choices that are hard to sympathize with. I especially liked the difficult relationship Rachel has with her husband. It was great seeing a married woman as a protagonist that took into account the prejudices she faced as well as the sacrifices she made to reach her position.

The worldbuilding is well done and takes into consideration how the discovery of a literal afterlife affects the living. Summerland itself is a little hard to picture (understandably as it’s got a 4th dimension that isn’t time) but adheres to a particular set of rules. I would have liked more information on how the ectotanks and flyers worked, because they sounded terrifyingly awesome.

This is a unique spy thriller that’s worth picking up.

What would it be like to exist in a world where death doesn’t really matter? For the British Empire, it means colonizing the afterlife and continuing to play the Great Game forever. Summerland, by Hannu Rajaniemi, is a spy versus spy story set in an alternate 1938 where the Spanish Civil War might lead to another world war. Rachel White works for the Winter Court, the lively side of the British Secret Service. Peter Bloom is a Russian double agent undercover in the Summer Court, the afterlife version of the British Intelligence Service. Rachel knows there’s a mole and Peter knows that someone knows—neither of them knows that there might be a larger, deadlier conflict about to kick off.

As one of the lone women in the Secret Service on either side of the veil, Rachel is underestimated by everyone. She does not appreciate it. When she uncovers the identity of a Russian mole and is ignored, her disgruntlement blossoms into full blown fury. Rachel decides to go rogue enough to try and track down Peter Bloom. Bloom, meanwhile, is on a mission to join the Presence (a shadowy hive mind of Soviet ghosts—which is the most communist thing I have ever heard of). While the two spies chase each other around London and Summerland, they slowly learn that their governments are playing a much deeper game than Rachel or Peter could have realized.

The plot is entertaining, but what I enjoyed most about this book was the world-building. Rajaniemi put it in a lot of thought to ecto-based technology, the Presence, and the big question of what it would mean if people could look forward to a long afterlife. In Rachel and Peter’s world, medicine is a half-hearted pursuit and people (especially young college men) do stupid things because it doesn’t really matter if they die. Sure, some ghosts fade away to nothing, but if you have your Ticket, you’re in like Flint. I imagine that Peter is utterly weary of the fact that he has to keep fighting for the foreseeable future. Rachel, meanwhile, starts to have second and third thoughts about the way her superiors throw away lives. Without death, live doesn’t mean as much in this world.

Even though Summerland has a lot of dead characters and is set half in the afterlife, this is a lively read. There are spies, chases, betrayals, secrets within secrets, and sacrifice. There are parts of this book that meander, so I had to trust that the spy v. spy plots and the secrets would lead so something. I am happy to report that the ending of Summerland knocked my bookish socks. I really liked this book.

I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration. It will be released 26 June 2018.

I sampled this author's <i>Quantum Thief</i>, but bounced off it because it was both very high-concept and in a setting with a lot of new things in it that aren't immediately explained. This one is high-concept, but the setting is more understandable: the world of British espionage in an alternate 1930s, in which Lodge and Marconi have discovered a way to talk to the dead and to help people who die to remain conscious on the Other Side. There's a rivalry in Britain between the dead spies of the Summer Court and the live ones of the Winter Court. Lenin has formed the core of a powerful collective dead consciousness in the Soviet Union known as the Presence, and Stalin, exiled, is trying to undermine the Communists throughout Europe without exactly selling out to the West. There are lots of double agents, including the illegitimate son of the Prime Minister - the PM in question being fairly obviously based on H.G. Wells.

It's skillfully done, and threads the difficult needle of having disillusioned, unhappy characters who still strive to be better, or to do something worthwhile. That helped me to relate to them as protagonists. They inhabited a grey world, but not a completely hopeless or pointless one.

One of the main characters was the PM's illegitimate son, already mentioned; the other was a female agent who had been consistently passed over and not taken seriously because of her gender. When she discovers from a Russian defector that the PM's son has been turned, nobody believes her, and she has to decide who she can trust to help her bring him down.

Cue lots of complicated maneuvering and spycraft, along with some original worldbuilding around the concept of the conscious dead.

The plot managed to be complex and yet comprehensible, another thing that's hard to do. Overall, both impressive and enjoyable.

I received a copy from Netgalley for review.