The Core of the Sun

I grabbed this because my book club had been on a run of translated speculative fiction and I wanted to keep it going, and I’ll admit the cover, a woman cradling a chili pepper like it’s precious cargo, is what actually sold me at the library shelf. It turns out that image is doing honest work. Vanna’s whole plot is built around a growing, increasingly dangerous addiction to capsaicin, in a Finland where decades of selective breeding have split women into two engineered categories, submissive “eloi” and intelligent “morlocks” who are supposed to not exist anymore.

Sinisalo roots the premise in something real, Dmitri Belyaev’s actual Soviet-era experiments breeding foxes for tameness, which produced physical changes alongside behavioral ones within a handful of generations. Applying that logic to human gender engineering is a genuinely disturbing extrapolation, and the book builds it out through fake government pamphlets and old letters between Vanna and her sister rather than a narrator explaining the world to you directly, which I liked a lot more than a straight infodump would have worked.

Where I’m more mixed is the back half, where a couple of the darker turns started to feel more sketched than earned, an idea explored just enough to disturb rather than fully followed through. A few other readers called the dystopia’s premise a little shallow for how seriously the book wants you to take it, and by the last third I understood that complaint even though I don’t fully share it.

Four stars. Weird, sharp, occasionally underbaked, and I haven’t stopped thinking about the fox research since I closed the book.