Permafrost (& Neuromancer revisited)

I came upon Permafrost, an Alastair Reynolds novella at one of the local libraries, and ended up reading it right then and there -- being a novella it's not a long read. Its theme didn't turn out to be the greatest -- has there ever been a good time travel story? Permafrost also uses first person perspective, which is atypical for Reynolds.

I feel I've encountered the premise of Permafrost more than once before. Earth's biosphere has collapsed: it started with some disease killing insects, which then spread to other fauna and flora. Humanity is on the brink of extinction due to lack of food: their only desperate hope is traveling back in time to fetch a seed sample of some resilient, edible plant.

Time traveling in the book happens by the traveler taking over the body of someone in the past. The story begins in medias res, the technology already working, but then keeps jumping back and forth between the time the novella's protagonist Valentina Lidova is just recruited as one of the potential travelers. She is a 71-year-old teacher who by happenstance is also the daughter of the scientist who worked out time travel theory in the first place.

The whole idea is so nonsensical that it was hard to find the story compelling: taking over a past person and how paradoxes are only soft boundaries. However, there are some mysteries in the narrative that did make me want to see it to the end. For instance: how the protagonist is being weird about having to kill someone at the start.

Another traveler is Antti, appearing already in the second sentence -- cool, a random Finnish character for a change, I thought. About halfway through the novella, Valentina struggles with the confusion caused to her by the body Antti is occupying being a grizzly man while the actual Antti is a woman. Hold up a minute: Antti is a woman? I had to flip back to check when Valentina first meets Antti, and she indeed was mentioned being a woman. I had not acknowledged that, probably because Antti in Finnish (from Greek Andros) is exclusively a male name practically without exceptions. I wonder what led Reynolds to give a woman a male name -- I hope it wasn't ignorance.

Amusingly, I have had trouble remembering a character is a woman more than once in other Reynolds's stories when her name is not obviously gendered (to me, anyway), like Skade in Redemption Ark and Purslane in House of Suns. The sole Finnish third person pronoun is gender neutral ('hän') so there's no he/she reinforcement in the translated books.

Neuromancer in Finnish

On the same library visit I read Permafrost, I borrowed the Finnish translation (by Arto Häilä) of Neuromancer by William Gibson which I've been meaning to reread. The novel did indeed turn out to be a lot more lucid for me in Finnish. I got a much clearer understanding of moment-by-moment happenings. The translation did also have a couple of curiosities.

The first one appeared right away in the iconic opening line -- "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel." -- whose translation caught me off guard: "Taivas himersi sataman yllä kuin sammuneelle kanavalle käännetty televisio." 'Himertää' (to glimmer, to appear dim) is not a verb I've had in my vocabulary. Oddly enough, I think I encountered it just recently in one of the Reynolds books. Then I shrugged it off but now I had to check what it actually means. I wasn't even connecting it to the word 'himmeä' (dim, dull, not-shiny).

Another oddity was the Finn, and I think his 'name' with the definite article was a problem for the translator. He ended up translating it and capitalizing it too, which is not a thing for nationalities in Finnish. Capitalized, 'Suomalainen' is not 'a Finnish person' but a fairly common last name. It looked quite weird in the novel.

I should check out the rest of the Sprawl trilogy at some point.