Invasive Humans and Posthumanist Horror in Johanna Sinisalo’s Birdbrain

Abstract

Finnish author Johanna Sinisalo’s work is often aligned with “weird fiction,” a genre that combines speculative fantasy with horror and includes the work of Jeff Vandermeer and China Mieville, among others. Her fiction tends to explore nonhuman lives and environmentalist issues, and Birdbrain (2008) is no exception. Indeed, this novel can also be usefully categorized as “cli-fi” since climate change catalyzes and intensifies the particularly posthuman questions raised in the text. Birdbrain tells the story of Heidi and Jyrki, a young Finnish couple on a long backpacking trip through Australia and New Zealand. Their relationship is relatively new and uncertain, even at the beginning of the hike, and the events of the novel test their bond. The novel is fragmented in style, composed of narrative sections that alternate between Heidi, Jyrki, passages from other texts, and unlabeled sections of narration. The novel’s plot and characters trouble the binaries of wilderness and civilization, human and nonhuman, and, in doing so, posit the relationship between humans and invasive species as not merely one of metaphor but one of ecological fact.