Discussions of Genre Interpretations in Johanna Sinisalo’s Auringon ydin and Finnish Weird

What would our life be like in the Eusistocratian Republic of Finland, the speculative society where the citizens have been domesticated by means of selective breeding? What would it be like to be a woman who does not meet the requirements and norms of the accepted female behaviour in this society? Finnish writer Johanna Sinisalo’s (b. 1958) latest novel Auringon ydin (2013, “The Core of the Sun”) invites its reader to ponder these questions. Among the questions that the reader is presumably asking is the question of the novel’s genre. In this essay, we discuss the possible genre interpretations of the novel in relation to speculative and science fictional background.