Nordic Visions: The Best of Nordic Speculative Fiction (Solaris/Rebellion Publishing)
Edited by Margrét Helgadóttir
Bear in mind that very few stories and even fewer anthologies get translated from these languages. Nordic tongues have limited words, so any translation into English–that bastion of verbiage borrowed many languages–is difficult. Here each of the writers worked with their own translators, who are all credited along with the authors.
It’s organized by country. We start with Sweden.
“She” by John Ajvide Lindqvist is a ghost story, a very disturbing haunting that stems from a rare series of coincidences.
“Lost and Found” by Maria Haskins is a science fiction story about someone who was part of a “can we terraform this?” advance team gone horribly long.
“Sing” by Karin Tidbeck is about a scientist going to a backwater planet with an ecosystem based on parasitism. The parasites allow the human colonists to sing beautifully and in an alien manner, if they survive the change or are not crippled by it. It’s told by a woman tailor who was deformed by the change and he falls in love with both her and the planet until…
Denmark
I really don’t see how “The False Fisherman” by Kaspar Colling Nielsen was speculative, but it was still a good story, a sort of character study.
I enjoyed “Heather Country” by Jakob Drud. It could have as easily been named “Pig Sh*t Country” or “Bio-Fuel Country” but, in a nutshell, it’s told by an investigator who’s pretty much indebted to the bioengineered company store–like everyone else–and was stuck with a partner not of her choosing. It’s a bit of a mystery that sent them there, and the story quickly went off the rails into surprising territory.
“The Traveller Girl” by Lene Kaaberbøl was almost about landowners and prejudice against the Nordic version of Romani (gypsies)–and magic. But here the magic was in the land.
The Faroe Islands
“The Abyss” by Rakel Helmsdal is perhaps recounting a dream, or a nightmare.
Iceland
“The Dreamgiver” by Johann Thorsson? Oh my goodness, that is an amazing story and it puts a woven dream catcher to serious use.
You feel as if you are inside of a dream in “Hamraborg Babylon” by Alexander Dan Vilhjálmsson. With a traveler you visit layers of the city of Hamraborg, which is old, jealous, and deadly.
Norway
Crystalline beings on a mining planet are given to the miners as “Companions.” Are they sentient? Can this man adjust to them is the question in “As You Wish” by Tor Åge Bringsværd.
If “The Cormorant” by Tone Almhjell had shown up in Abyss & Apex’s slush pile, I would have bought it. I’ll suggest it to Bonnie Brunish as a reprint, which we occasionally publish. *Happy sigh* What a wonderful, wonderful piece of writing.
On “The Day Jonas Shadowed His Dad” author Thore Hansen shares an incredible story of a world beneath ours. Sadly, it had a plot hole where you have no idea how they ate (or if they were even hungry?) over the space of over a week until they found a place they wanted to stay.
“A Lion Roars in Longyearbyen” by Margrét Helgadóttir is marvelous. It’s a story of climate change forcing people north, and in this case the animals displaced (or genetically resurrected) into a zoo.
Finland
Very little of the author Johanna Sinisalo’s natural world remains; this man jacks into a non-invasive wilderness monitoring device that has no electromagnetic signature and moves so slowly the wildlife does not consider it a threat. Until “A Bird Does Not Sing Because It Has an Answer”…
“Elegy for a Young Elk,” by Hannu Rajaniemi, is a far-future tale of nanobits and tech plagues, and of a stubborn old Finnish poet and hunter and his faithful bear companion. The man has refused to be uploaded and only he can do this one thing for his ex, who is now part of the Cloud and appears as a being made out of rain. It’s a quest for the poet to get his mojo back, and nicely done.
“The Wings that Slice the Sky” by Emmi Itäranta is based on Finnish legends and it’s an epic piece of fantasy that almost feels as if it was chanted beside an ancient fireside.
To sum it up, this anthology is a smorgasbord of various touchstones of Nordic thought, legends, hopes, dreams, and nightmares. It’s occasionally potent, but uneven at times. Still, I enjoyed it.