Book Received: Hannu Rajaniemi: Collected Fiction

Cover art by Lius Lasahido

The colophon on the last page of this book reads:

This limited edition of 2,000 copies has been bound for Tachyon Publications by Maple Press. The cover illustration is a re-creation of Lius Lasahido's "Raturion," which was commissioned from Lasahido specifically for this edition by the publisher.

The point here being that if you wish to add a hardcover edition of Hannu Rajaniemi: Collected Fiction to your library, you had best make haste with that order because 2,000 copies won't be available for very long. To put 2,000 copies in perspective: Sasquan, the 73rd World Science Fiction Convention (WorldCon) to be held in Spokane, Washington, on August 19-23, 2015, currently has over 8,000 members.

So, if you don't score a hardbound copy, don't say I didn't warn you....

You can read my February 18 blog post in which I write about my work on Rajaniemi's Collected Fiction. The collection contains nineteen stories and approximately 80,000 words. Three of the stories are original to the collection: "Ghost Dogs," "The Haunting of Apollo A7LB," and "Skywalker of Earth."

"Nano-jacked super-beings, carnivorous emergent technologies, the doors of perception yanked wide and almost off their hinges….Hannu Rajaniemi has a deserved reputation as the very hardest of Hard SF writers, but his range is far wider and far warmer. From stories of tech-driven future nightmare to eerie Finnish mythscapes rewired, quirky surreal mood pieces and experimental fiction genuinely worthy of the name, Rajaniemi writes fiction coded for the bleeding edge of modernity and yet rooted in age-old human imperatives; at the beating heart of these tales is a single concept—the ache of the human heart and the courage it takes to live with it, in this era or any other. So if you thought Hard SF was sterile stuff, lacking in human affect, think again—put the barrel of Rajaniemi’s fiction in your mouth and blow your mind."

—Richard Morgan, author of Altered Carbon and The Dark Defiles