Leena Krohn (1947– ) is a critically acclaimed Finnish author, perhaps the most well-known Finnish writer of her generation. Her large and varied body of work—showcased in English in the enormous Collected Fiction (2015)—includes novels, short stories, children’s books, and essays. She often deals with such topics as the relationship between imagination and morality, the evolution of synthetic forms of life, and the future of humankind in the context of the natural world. Krohn has received such prestigious honors as the Pro Finlandia Medal of the Order of the Lion of Finland (1997; returned in protest for ethical reasons) and the Aleksis Kivi Fund award for lifetime achievement (2013). Her short novel Tainaron: Mail from Another City was a World Fantasy Award finalist in 2005 and her books have been translated into more than twenty languages. Her fiction has been included in such English-language anthologies as The Weird, Sisters of the Revolution, and The Dedalus Book of Finnish Fantasy.
Krohn’s usual form is a kind of “mosaic” novel, in which short chapters advance the overall story arc but also form complete tales in and of themselves. The rate of ideas and images conveyed in a typical chapter, even when playful, has a density that might overwhelm in longer increments but seems layered and useful at the short length. There is also a puzzle aspect respectful of reader intelligence and imagination, as the reader pieces together the final form of the novel chapter by chapter.
Her justly celebrated novel Tainaron exemplifies the worth of this approach: not only is there an interesting symbolism in chapters that include a hillside immolation of beetles and another with sand lions, but the insect characters themselves have an intrinsic meaning beyond that mere symbolism.
Krohn is also one of our foremost thinkers about not just the present but the future. The novel Pereat Mundus (1998 in Finnish; published in English in Collected Fiction) details the lives of a series of cloned biotech versions of the same person—exploring what it means to be human. In this work and others, Krohn’s exploration of biotech and artificial intelligence occurred well before it became trendy in English-language fiction, and if Pereat Mundus had entered the English-language canon in the 1990s it would have been received as groundbreaking work. (Krohn also used digital tools in her literary work well before they became popular in mainstream literary circles—perhaps best exemplified in her experimental novel Sphinx or Robot.)
As Peter Berbegal noted in his profile of Krohn for the New Yorker website, “Krohn offers up the narrated inner lives of characters trying to make sense of their environments, and of the other people whom they encounter. Many of the works are set in cities, but the worlds that Krohn’s characters inhabit never feel concrete: everything is mediated through particular characters’ perceptions. The reader is left with the sense of having intruded on someone’s dream, in which symbols are revelations of intimate details.”
“Gorgonoids” is a self-contained excerpt from another important Krohn novel, Mathematical Creatures or Shared Dreams, which won Finland’s most prestigious literary award, the Finlandia Prize, in 1993. Mathematical Creatures was Krohn’s seventh novel for adults and consists of twelve prose pieces that straddle the line between fiction and essay, in a way similar to some of Alfred Jarry’s and Jorge Luis Borges’s work. They are linked thematically by a discussion of the relationship between self and reality. “Gorgonoids” is among the most playful selections in this anthology, demonstrating to great effect how Krohn’s imagination and attention to detail help make her exploration of abstract ideas so interesting.