The Salt Oracle

As you may remember, I loved Lorraine Wilson’s We Are All Ghosts in the Forest. When I head that she had written a sequel I was very keen to get hold of a copy. Solaris had a launch event at World Fantasy, and The Salt Oracle was one of the books featured. Naturally I bought a copy.

I should note that this is not a sequel in the traditional sense. Katerina does not feature in the story save as an un-named Estonian witch who has developed a potential cure for ghost infection. It is, however, a story set in the same world, one in which civilization has collapsed and the world is haunted by the deadly ghosts of the internet.

Much to my delight, the story is set in Åland. The Oracle of the title is a young Russian girl who has a talent for attracting ghosts and thereby somehow being able to tap into electronic communications. With appropriate prompts, she can be made to babble streams of data from weather survey buoys scattered about the Baltic. This is enormously useful in a world in which weather forecasting has become a black art, and even compasses can no longer be relied upon. But attracting ghosts is a dangerous business. After an unfortunate event in Helsinki, in which many people died, the Oracle and her attendant academics has been exiled to a rig anchored in the Åland Islands where, it is hoped, her talents can be tapped more safely.

Wilson says in her Afterword that the book is her attempt at writing Dark Academia. That’s not a sub-genre that I am familiar with and, beyond a passing interest in the fashion movement that accompanies it, I have little interest in it. However, The Salt Oracle appears to be Dark Academia without the traditional tropes. That is, it is set in an academic institution, with academics being nasty to each other, but it is not fantasy, and nor is it properly romance.

What can be said about the book is that it is very much informed by what happens to academic research when the subject of that research is a) very valuable to commercial interests; and b) the subject of fear and suspicion among the general population. It is also, as seems rather fashionable these days, something of a meditation on Le Guin’s famous story, “Those Who Walk Away from Omelas”.

The Oracle was a child when her powers were discovered. She was taken from her parents by bandits and sold, presumably to the University of Helsinki. Her weather forecasting abilities are of considerable commercial value, and the powerful shipping magnates of Gdansk would love to have her under their control. There is a Finnish terrorist organization called the Survivors, founded by people who did survive the Helsinki incident, who are determined to kill her. And of course everyone is terrified of ghosts so the Survivors have a lot of sympathy. The Oracle needs a 24/7 paramilitary guard. Set against all this, the needs and even rights of one mentally unstable girl are far down the list of priorities.

Bellwether College, so named for its ability to attract ghosts, has three main academic departments. The most powerful is Metrology, headed by the ambitious control freak, Gabrielle. Next is Oceanography, headed by the laconic Finn, Uoti. Their job is mainly to study fish stocks, which have been greatly depleted since the Crash. Finally there is a small department who are there to study the ghosts. It is a small group: just Boudain Caron and his assistant, Auli Fraser. It is Auli, with Finnish lesbian mothers and presumably a now absent Scottish father, who is the focus of our story.

Auli, unusually at Bellwether, is an academic with a conscience. That’s hardly a problem when she is a junior in the most junior department. But, when Boudain is found dead in mysterious circumstances, Auli finds herself promoted to the exulted rank of Principal Investigator and thereby privy to some of Bellwether’s darkest secrets.

The Salt Oracle, then, is a murder mystery. As such is has a plentiful collection of red herrings, people with dark pasts, people having secret affairs, and an all round air of mutual suspicion. I’m not an expert on crime, but Wilson seems to manage the job well enough to keep me intrigued.

The book is also a story of a love affair. In the past, Auli had a relationship with Raphaël Giroux, the Head of Security for Bellwether. He proposed to her, sort of, but she had been warned by another female academic that he was not to be trusted beyond a casual fling, so she tuned him down. As such the book starts at the half-way point of a traditional romance plot. Our hero and heroine have already had their falling out, and must find their way back to each other before there can be a happy ending.

Most of all, however, The Salt Oracle is a story about the sea. Wilson, like me, is an oceanographer by academic profession. Unlike me she lasted a lot longer in academia, and probably spent a lot longer actually at sea. She understands its dangers well. And if you put something that attracts ghosts on a rig in the middle of the sea, even a relatively shallow and placid millpond like the Baltic, the sea will deliver up ghosts that mariners know only too well.

I should note also that the college doctor, Niki, is a non-binary person who has fled Poland because of the anti-queer attitudes there. They get accidentally misgendered a couple of times in the copy I have. I’m pretty certain that’s just typos, and I hope that can be fixed, at least in the ebook, and hopefully in a second printing.

As to the success of the book, it has something of the feel of a middle book in a trilogy. We don’t learn a lot more about the nature of the post-Crash world, or internet ghosts in general. I’m hoping that Wilson has a third book planned that develops that side of the story more fully. In the meantime, The Salt Oracle does well enough with its murder and romance plots to make a satisfying book on its own. You should probably read We Are All Ghosts in the Forest first to get a full sense of the world, but it is not essential.

I should also note that the number of SF&F books set in Åland is vanishingly small, and if Wilson doesn’t get an invitation to Åcon sometime soon I shall have words with my Finnish friends.

Title: The Salt Oracle
By: Lorraine Wilson
Publisher: Solaris
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
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