Darkome by Hannu Rajaniemi: Review by Niall Harrison

Darkome, Hannu Rajaniemi (Gollancz 978-1-47320-332-7, 245pp, £18.99, tp). September 2024.

Mind you, better an ending that fades than no ending at all. I’ve had a good run recently, but it turns out that I was overdue an encounter with that frustrating species, the unmarked Book One that cannot be read as a standalone. Hannu Rajaniemi’s Darkome is the offender: After 250-odd brisk pages of biohackers vs. capitalists it ends in media res, with the actual words TO BE CONTINUED, and without any resolution of the arguments it has raised. For how many volumes it will be continued, the publisher doesn’t seem to be telling: Given the timeframe of the novel’s prologue, which is not too much further into the future than its main plot, my best guess is a duol­ogy, but we’ll have to wait and see.

Here’s what we know about the eventual ending from that prologue: The novel’s narrator, Inara Reyes, has encoded her dying testimonial into a DNA fragment that she has dispersed through the world, along with instructions ‘‘for growing almost anything – for turning you into almost anything.’’ She implores her readers to be like the tumour that is killing her, to adapt in resistance, to become something new and expansive. ‘‘It’s the old, broken world around you that is the disease,’’ she states, ‘‘and you are the cure.’’ And the world the novel unfolds is certainly not in a good way, wracked for over a decade by a succes­sion of pandemics – natural and bioengineered – with hundreds of millions now dependent on a wearable mRNA vaccine factory produced by a company called Aspis, which makes immunisa­tions ‘‘as easy as rolling out a new software patch,’’ but which also detects and blocks anything the company hasn’t approved.

Inara, all of 19, has grown up within a Bay Area enclave of the titular biohacking community, which rejects Aspis’s ‘‘DRM for the body.’’ How­ever, after her mother dies of cancer secondary to Li-Fraumeni syndrome, a heritable genetic disorder affecting a key protein that normally pre­vents mutations, Inara’s father blackmails her into joining an Aspis clinical trial for a new version of the patch, which detects precancerous mutations and proactively develops vaccines against them. For Inara, this doesn’t work as advertised: Despite the new patch she develops a tumour and, under selection pressure accelerated by her disease, it releases DNA sequences that trick the Aspis into ignoring it. Shortly after Inara realises that she has a darkome dream on her hands – the potential to jailbreak and subvert Aspis technology – so does everyone else, and the chase is on.

The setting might initially seem quite a way from the postsingularity baroque of The Quan­tum Thief (2010) and most of the other stories that initially made Rajaniemi’s name, and it’s true that the technology in Darkome is much more de­tailed and grounded in the plausible. Rajaniemi’s portrayal of clinical research – and of the specific scenario of a tech approach to biomedical re­search, addressing questions for which academia is ‘‘too timid’’ and about which drug companies ‘‘don’t care’’ – is convincingly extrapolated from our present. In the week that I read Darkome, I also read news stories about early mRNA cancer vaccine data, a step along the road to Aspis-like technology; and although the acknowledgements were missing from my advance copy, I’m reason­ably sure that a couple of the research studies men­tioned in the novel from ‘‘the 2020s’’ are real. So the overall feel is distinct from his earlier novels. But there are throughlines, most notably narrative vigour, and an extremely competent if not always savvy narrator who makes for enjoyable company. Rajaniemi has always been good at encouraging the reader to turn the page, and if I’d been turning the pages less avidly, the unanticipated cliffhanger would have been less annoying.

Another continuity is the degree to which Ra­janiemi’s fiction, like that of, say, Cory Doctorow, seems like an extension of his day job as much as an exploration of his personal experiences. In a social media thread about the genesis of the novel, Rajaniemi described watching his own mother lose her fight with breast cancer, and how this informed his interest in molecular biology, which in turn fed into Darkome in the same way that his earlier academic study of mathematical physics fed into The Quantum Thief. Many novel­ists might have a comparable backstory for their work. But Rajaniemi is also now the co-founder and CEO of Helix Nano, a biotech start-up based in California that is pursuing exactly the type of ‘‘immune-computer interface’’ that is developed by Aspis, and in various ways, you can see how the worldbuilding of Darkome accepts Silicon Val­ley expectations of the near future. Smartphones have merged with wearables; driverless cars have become ubiquitous; universal basic income has been passed; and most strikingly, generative AI is everywhere.

In entertainment, the impact has been hor­rendous: Human actors, musicians, and other performers struggle to compete with immersive generative wonderlands, turning to biohacking to replicate the hypernormal physiological char­acteristics of AI dreams. But there are also many more positive applications. Indeed, while this 2040 is a dark place, almost all the rays of light come from tech. OpenAI, we are told, released their model weights in 2028, which is part of what made communities like darkome possible (a de­velopment that seems increasingly unlikely given the company’s recent financial restructuring into a for-profit business); Inara frequently uses genAI as a research assistant to help her understand the possibilities of her condition, or to summarise comments from a busy livestream, or to turn brief notes into a narrative explanation for others. I’m not entirely sure how seriously we are meant to take the character who suggests that the fear of AI apocalypse in the 2020s was more widespread and more justified than the fear of nuclear war in the 1970s, and that in fact the risk remains real and live: Maybe their concerns will eventuate in Book Two, maybe they won’t. But I do think Darkome is convinced that even without that possibility, generative AI is a transformative technology that will embed itself in our lives in a variety of ways, a view that is surely indicative of the intellectual hinterland shaping the novel.

Perhaps even more striking is the scene in which Inara comes face-to-face with the CEO of Aspis, Amanda Shah: One should be very cau­tious when psychoanalyzing a novel, but knowing the extraliterary context, it’s awfully tempting to read the confrontation as a dialogue between two aspects of Rajaniemi’s psyche. Structurally, in the world presented, Shah’s walled-garden vision of a biological Homeland Security is not axiomatically wrong, and indeed is given a generous hearing; moreover, Inara is philosophically aligned with Shah on the importance of a long-termist vision of humanity’s future, and of making decisions with the uncounted generations in mind, they just disagree about what those decisions should be. It makes for an unusual vibe compared to a lot of other recent science fiction. Put it this way: Shah’s net worth is never specified, but she’s almost certainly the most sympathetically portrayed tech billionaire you’ll read in SF this year, and while Inara’s vision of ‘‘an endless dance of becoming’’ seems destined to win out, it also seems likely that Shah’s approach will receive a level of vindication –

TO BE CONTINUED.

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In Niall Harrison‘s spare time, he writes reviews and essays about sf. He is a former editor of Vector (2006-2010) and Strange Horizons (2010-2017), as well as a former Arthur C. Clarke Award judge and various other things.

This review and more like it in the November 2024 issue of Locus.

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