When I first saw Summerland pop up on NetGalley, I got my feisty finger out and click-clickity-clicked as fast as I could. When you read as many books as I do, it's easy to start feeling the dreaded book slump start to take over and for your reading list to grow stale, but look at how unique and exciting this premise is! While I'm glad I picked this up, as it was a unique and very different read for me, I think I had a different image in my head of what this would be vs. what it actually was. No...

If you're into stuff like this, you can read the full review.Ana and Kata: “Summerland” by Hannu Rajaniemi“Yet the longer you lived in Summerland, the stranger things became. Your hypersight grew more acute, and little by little, you developed an awareness of two additional directions that were invisible to the living. One was the ana direction, four-up. Towards ana lay the world of the living, in its own thin slice of the aether. It was the direction of the Unseen, the mysterious source of hype...

As a bonafide fanboy of Rajaniemi, first for his trilogy and then for his short story collection, I was really chomping at the bit for ANYTHING he might write next. His imagination is by far some of the most hard-hitting spectacular steam-rolling post-singularity tour-de-force circuses I've ever come across.So what was my initial reaction when I heard he was writing about 1938 pre-war spy fiction where the afterlife is not only accessible but is actively involved in politics in that alternate wo...

Sci-Fi meets Alternate History meets bloody shrimping original concept meets super extra cool afterlife meets espionage and counter-espionage and counter-counter-espionage meets subversion and counter-subversion and counter-counter-subversion meets traitorous traitors meets scrumpalicious contraptions meets Franco and Stalin and Lenin, oh my meets ectoplasmic everything = ➽ Full review to come and stuff. Hopefully some time before 2078.P.S. A person who likes orange marmalade cannot be all bad.

An alt-30s spy thriller only life after death exists. Old spies do die, and then they get a job on the other side. It's a pretty weird concept, made weirder by the very strongly alt setting which has diverged considerably from our reality but uses a lot of people even so. Expect Kim Philby, Roger Hollis, Stalin, Mansfield Cumming etc, all not doing what you might think. That basically works, even if it's confusing, but what does not is to add a New Woman called Ann Veronica and the discoverer of...

DNF at 60%I really enjoyed the beginning, and think the ideas and concepts are great. The writing is actually very confident and seasoned too. However, about halfway through I hit a wall that I could not get past. While I like Rachel, one of the main characters, the other main character, Peter, is hard to sympathize with and is just plain boring. The plot eventually becomes so burdensome it's virtually impenetrable. After painfully slogging through the last couple chapters, I have no desire to c...

This was my first novel by this author, who came highly recommended.The premise of there being an afterlife, making death no big deal, as well as all the political repercussions (Queen Victoria is still ruling Britain, although from Summerland which basically is "the other side") sounded intriguing. The people here not only have a way of talking to the dead on a special phone, the dead can also rent a medium's body to walk among the living. We also have a spy story full of agents, moles, double-...

Originally posted at https://1000yearplan.com/2018/06/25/s...The afterlife hardly seems like a suitable subject for science fiction, but authors as far back as Edgar Allan Poe – whose pseudoscientific proto-mockumentary “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” hoodwinked newspaper readers in 1845 – have sought to portray the pre-scientific notion of consciousness after death in post-scientific terms. Some of the more famous examples since then come from Philip José Farmer (Riverworld series) and P...

Ahoy there me mateys! This be the third book in me Ports for Plunder – 19 Books in 2019 list. I knew I wanted to read this alternative history sci-fi novel after reading about it in matey Lashaan @ bookidote’s awesome review. As he nicely puts it, “It might not be the most accessible story that you could pick up, but it is without a doubt enthralling and authentic.”And aye, that be exactly what this was. The story takes place in an alternate 1938 where the dead are still very much a part of the

„You are a cruel woman, Mrs. Moore,“ he said between sips.Reminiscent of Marvel‘s Agent Carter, Mrs. Moore is a secret agent... but that is just the beginning. Set in 1938, we get espionage and counter espionage, glimpses of the Spanish Civil War, the Old Boy‘s Clubs ruling Great Britain, one disenchanted female agent, communism, an alternate reality or rather, a netherworld of ghosts and mediums. Because in this world you go places, when you die. If you have something important to do and own a

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 p...

Full disclosure: I received an advance copy of Summerland because I got to read the first pages at Worldcon, got hooked and then bugged the publisher until they gave me a copy. No spoilers.I've always felt that there are concept books, and then there are plot-based books. The concept books take an idea and explore it thoroughly, and you umm and ahhh at the marvellous imagination of the writer. Plot books send you somewhere that's familiar enough that the strange world the author has created does...

I finally started to get the premise of this novel, spies in the afterlife during World War II. Ectoplasm included. And the government is somehow in control? I decided not to finish for the following reasons:-I loved the quantum novels by the author, partly because they felt so heavily based in potential science, even if I couldn't quite grasp it all of the time. This novel does not benefit from the same realism and it was hard to accept it enough to enjoy it, for me.-A badly written/handled mis...

5 Stars Summerland by Hannu Rajaniemi lived up to my high expectations. Let me simply state that Rajaniemi has vaulted himself to the top as one of my very favorite science fiction authors writing today. This is a cool mystery set in a world where we can go to an afterlife place called Summerland. A really cool concept with great characters and great writing.A must read.

You can find my review on my blog by clicking here.There’s always something intimately satisfying in picking up a book that jolts your mind with refreshing ideas that only seemed inconceivable at first. Author of the critically-acclaimed Jean le Flambeur trilogy Hannu Rajaniemi returns for a stand-alone espionage story infused with a whole dose of science fiction in Summerland. Pulsating with passion and creativity, this story is the very archetype of what novelty is all about. Far from being a

It was hard to believe this was written by the same author who wrote The Quantum Thief, one of my favorite books. In many ways the plot was similar to The Ghost Walkers by Wells. Perhaps it was the plot or world in both books but I didn’t love either. Perhaps other readers will enjoy this more than I did.

I received this as part of my Brilliant Books subscription, and I must confess to a moment of dread and doubt when I opened the box. I tried to read The Quantum Thief and absolutely hated it, so much so that I didn't finish it. However, BB has done a great job of picking books for me and I do like to give author's more than one chance, so I decided to give it a go. I'm glad I did. It wasn't particularly suspenseful, mysterious, or surprising. It was, in fact, quite predictable. Yet it was also f...

Hannu Rajaniemi has done it again. Summerland is a superbly crafted, immersive and thought-provoking novel. Instead of a deep space caper, Summerland is a pre-Cold War Era espionage mystery set in 1938 England where the East-West theatre is on the brink of the Spanish Civil War. Bureaucratic rivalry between the living and the dead in the British Intelligence intersect with private indiscretions of the elite, since in this alternative world, death is not the end but entre to a better place. In Su...

I normally don't write reviews here for items that I am supposed to review for LJ, but I do want to add that the synopsis that GoodReads has listed is incorrect. This is not about "the bastard daughter of Harry Houdini" or a "map of the Other Side". That does sound very intriguing, but those items are not anywhere in this particular book. Review to follow in the Library Journal.

Although it purports to be a very different sort of book, I found ‘Summerland’ strangely akin to Hannu Rajaniemi’s The Jean le Flambeur Trilogy: The Quantum Thief, The Fractal Prince, The Causal Angel. While the latter are hard sci-fi space adventures, the former is an alternate history supernatural spy story. Yet all are intoxicated by intricate world-building, which crowds out the characters and story. The central concept in ‘Summerland’ is admittedly brilliant: after Marconi managed to contac...