I recently finished Hannu Rajaniemi's Darkome — loved it, definitely recommend. All the more inspiring that Rajaniemi writes these things in his spare time while building a biotech company. The book isn't wildly long - it’s a much quicker pace than the other fiction I’ve been reading recently (namely Adrian Tchaikovsky and Iain M. Banks, which both also have really interesting, but much farther future speculations on biology and AI) but it's somehow still a really compelling and deep story - and the pace feels appropriate for the nearish-future narrative.

What struck me most is the believability. Arguably this is unsurprising given I’ve been reading far-future fiction and given I spent time in the Bay Area, where the story takes place. I.e. some of the cultural tropes create familiarity where there’s radical technical novelty, though I don’t think this is the main driver of believability. The premise is daring but relatable (since covid): a decade of plagues sort-of slows down everything - including AI progress - but accelerates biological research into vaccines and immunology resulting in a wearable-device based global immune system and a network of biohackers creating their own vaccines. It's different from many contemporary technological projections, but feels like it follows the same rules and could fit right in for someone who was especially concerned about biorisk—it still feels consistent and plausible. A bit like a bio-risk version of the AI 2027 report expanded into a novel with a complex protagonist. It also solves the challenge of new technology making fiction plots impossible to follow in a really natural way - i.e. there’s few enough innovations to seem familiar, but enough to afford a sense of wonder and excitement and apprehension.

The world-building centers around these two, initially separate (or seemingly so), ‘worlds’ or cultures or socio-technical systems. One represented by wearable ‘big biotech’ Aspis devices, which detect and deploy immunizations against plagues - the other is the biohacker world of Darkome, represented by the protagonist and her home (at the outset) ‘The Harbour.’ The novel begins in The Harbour and slowly blurs the two separate worlds as the protagonist, Inara, traverses and effects them.

This tension between centralized oversight and biohacker creativity is what makes the novel philosophically interesting and perhaps a useful communication.  It’d be an excellent novel to pair with non-fiction, especially as part of a bioethics or biosecurity course / discussion series. You have these competing cultures: big tech/biotech, the biohacker world (represented by communities like The Harbor), and lurking criminal elements. Initially it looks like institutional competition, but it gets more sophisticated—you see well-intentioned people sprinkled throughout different cultures, and malicious actors everywhere too. The novel shows both the advantages and vulnerabilities of centralization, especially for something like global immunity and certainly highlights the risks (weaponization) and benefits of widely available biotechnology.

Inara is a lovable protagonist who makes mistakes. None of the heroes and villains are what they seem initially, and your perspective evolves with that of Inara. And even the end-game villain is an interesting character, though somewhat briefly introduced / quite opaque in this first book. He has a plausible motivating story (a competing plan to save humanity, in tension with that of Aspis, Darkome, and other actors & institutions in the world) that would make him sympathetic, if not for his brutality, cruelty, and obvious pretense about his true goals.

There are a couple small plot elements that feel forced—a friend's plague story that becomes conveniently relevant later, a girlfriend setup at the end that feels like obvious sequel bait. These might be intentional threading for subsequent novels, but I found they slightly jarred my otherwise smooth immersion in the story.

For emphasis: the fact that Rajaniemi writes this casually while running a company is wild — and inspiring. I'd love to see more builders churning out fiction—it gives you a sense of how people shaping the future are thinking, and it feels more grounded in plausibility. Instead of debating investment themes or policy objectives abstractly, you can paint a picture of a possible world that's both wondrous and disastrous, making hopes and concerns concrete. Going back and forth via fiction seems like a useful way of expositing values and debating futures.

I'm hoping this becomes a normal thing. There's probably a world where AI makes fiction writing more accessible as a hobby, where industry leaders can explore the hero and villain journeys playing out in their minds. I'd certainly want to read more of it.

I think I might read this again at some point. I'd definitely read the sequel.

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