Johanna Sinisalo and the New Weird

Abstract

This chapter analyzes the Finnish author Johanna Sinisalo’s 2013 novel Auringon ydin [The core of the sun] in the contexts of speculative fiction, dystopia, and fairy tale to provide an illustrative example of Sinisalo’s oeuvre. The novel combines various elements, genres, and text-types in a self-reflexive and parodic way, which both gives the novel a peculiar twist and offers an interesting viewpoint on the Finnish weird. The novel’s fabulous thought experiment combines the depiction of human domestication with real documents addressing eugenics and sterilization and the domestication of silver foxes. The chapter also discusses dystopian and fairy-tale elements in the novel and suggests that while Sinisalo draws from multiple sources in her writing, she can be considered a science-fiction writer due to her focus on the thought experiment.