A Wild Encounter

Troll: A Love Story, Johanna Sinisalo

Troll: A Love Story (aka Not Before Sundown) a fascinating fantasy novel by Finnish SF writer Johanna Sinisalo, won the 2004 Tiptree Award – which is how I found out about it, because an excerpt was published in one of the Tiptree anthologies.

The protagonist of the novel, a young Finnish photographer named Angel, lives in a world not all that unlike our own, with the exception that at least some of the species we consider to be creatures of fantasy are real. Trolls – beings central to Scandanavian fantasy and folk takes in this world – have been determined to exist, although little is known about them, as they are rarely seen by humans. And, as this is, as the title says, a love story concerning a troll, it’s hardly giving anything away to say that Angel encounters a troll and that encounter becomes the central driving element of the book.

This novel touches on a great many issues having to do with humans and their “place” in the world. Most obvious, perhaps, is humankind’s relationship with (and exploitation/commercialisation of, and fascination by) that which is seen as “wild,” primitive, uncivilised, “untouched,” and all of those wonderful, charged words that we apply to things which are not us – to animals, if we are human, to nature if we are socially constructed, to non-European societies if we are European, to people of colour if we are while, to women if we are men… and so it goes. It also explores humanity’s need to control and dominate that which it can, and deny or ignore that which it cannot, in the list of things we think of as being nature, wild, animalistic – including our sexuality. And of course, as in many novels that look at how humans share their worlds with non-human species, it is about lack of harmony and balance, ecology and awareness, human waste and destruction and fear of the other and the unknown, which is yet another side of the Wild we construct when we separate ourselves from the rest of the life on this planet.

Book Selection Criteria

Like most people who like to read books, I have a "book list" of books that I want to read. And a pile of "books waiting to be read" somewhere in my house.

Normally, the way that I add books to my book list is rather haphazard. Someone I trust recommends a book, or I'm wandering around the Internetz and I run across an interesting book review, or I read one in one of the very few magazines I actually subscribe to, or I read an anthology and find a new writer whose work intrigues me, or I discover through any one of many ways that an author I'm already familiar with has put out a new book. I even check footnotes and bibliographies of books I read to find info about other books in the same or a related field that might be of interest.

This would be how I've managed to create a book list that is currently 26 pages long, in Courier 9 point, with half-inch top and bottom margins. We don't really want to contemplate how many book are on that list, but it's probably over 1,000.

Which is why it's probably a very foolish thing for me to consider embarking on a new reading project... but I'm going to, anyway. I've been making up lists of the winners and short-listed nominees of the Tiptree, Gaylactic Spectrum, Carl Brandon Society and Lambda Science Fiction and Fantasy awards, with an eye to reading the ones that I have not already read that seem interesting to me. I'm not going to be obsessive about this and try to read every single winner or short-listed entry for each award, but I do think I should read more of the books that have been identified as significant works according to the selection criteria of the four organisations involved.

Obviously, I've already read at least some of the books that have been honoured, but I want to read more.