“Leena Krohn: Collected Fiction” is the most extensive English translation yet of work by the celebrated Finnish writer. Photograph by Laura Böök

In Leena Krohn’s novella “Datura, or A Figment Seen by Everyone,” the narrator, who works for a paranormal-news magazine, transcribes the inscrutable fifteenth-century text known as the Voynich manuscript while slowly poisoning herself with the seeds from a datura plant. Datura is known to cause delirium and dissociation, but it may also ease the symptoms of asthma, which the narrator has. Though she is skeptical of supernatural phenomena, the datura slowly undermines that skepticism; each day seems to bring one serendipitous event after another, not to mention mild hallucinations. The narrator describes feeling as though meaning is floating on the surface of things, untethered from their physical reality. “What does the word refer to,” she asks, in a deconstructionist turn, “does it really signify anything at all?” But it’s not that meaning is absent; rather, it is hidden in layers of signification. Like the manuscript she is working on, all books are “ciphers, cryptographies, beyond all interpretation.” A friend urges the narrator to stop eating the seeds, but the damage is done: the hallucinations persist, and in the end she succumbs to the visionary reality of the plant, which she says “took me towards the ultimate secret of existence,” so that she was “willing to trade all that had come before in exchange for it.”

“Datura, or A Delusion We All See” is one of the standout stories in “Leena Krohn: Collected Fiction,” published late last year by Cheeky Frawg Books. The collection is the most extensive English translation yet of work by the celebrated Finnish writer, who has been a finalist for the prestigious World Fantasy Award and is a winner of the Finlandia Prize, the country’s most important literary honor. The novels, novellas, excerpts, and short stories included in the Cheeky Frawg collection are not narratives in the traditional sense so much as a series of contextualized impressions. Plot is hard to come by. Instead, Krohn offers up the narrated inner lives of characters trying to make sense of their environments, and of the other people whom they encounter. Many of the works are set in cities, but the worlds that Krohn’s characters inhabit never feel concrete: everything is mediated through particular characters’ perceptions. The reader is left with the sense of having intruded on someone’s dream, in which symbols are revelations of intimate details.

“Absolute reality is and always will be unknowable to us,” Krohn wrote to me recently, in an e-mail. (Her responses to my questions were translated from the Finnish by J. Robert Tupasela, one more layer of decoding.) “Dream images and delusions throw up information, often metaphorical or allegorical,” she added. “In my books, I try to use every channel of information possible, keeping in mind that information is not what is most important in literature, meaning is.” Krohn was born in Helsinki in 1947. Her childhood was full of books and art—her father, Alf Krohn, was a journalist and the editor-in-chief of a Finnish art magazine called Taide—and she picked up an interest in spiritual matters from her paternal grandparents, who were theosophists. Krohn read the “Kalevala” and “Kanteletar,” the mythopoetic epics of Finland, but it was writers like the early twentieth-century poet Eino Leino who affected her most. Leino, in Krohn’s words, “renewed the language of Finnish folkloric poems. The collection ‘Helkavirsiä’ in particular,” she added, “still sings in my memory.” Krohn describes having “ecstatic experiences” while reading poetry at a young age. She studied theoretical philosophy, general psychology, and art history at the University of Helsinki in the late sixties and decided early on that writing was the way to marry her varied interests.

Krohn’s work is often categorized as science fiction or fantasy. While her stories do tend toward the speculative—artificial intelligence, transhumanism, otherworldly metropolises—Krohn doesn’t see herself as a genre writer. There “are elements of science fiction and dystopia in my work,” she acknowledged, but in addition to the lyric poetry that influenced her when she was young, today she finds herself influenced by “all prose that is also poetry and philosophy.” Nevertheless, Krohn recognizes the value of science fiction and fantasy to her creative process: she compares such works to the daemon-like entities of Finnish folklore called etiäinen. “They are phantom doubles that precede a person—in that they can anticipate, predict and warn,” she explained. “They are tools with which to poke small peepholes into the mist shrouding the future.”

Krohn is fascinated and troubled by the ways that we comprehend reality, and the ways that we fail to do so. “Every computer is now like a neuron in a neural network encompassing the globe,” she wrote in one of her emails. “At best, it will be the next leap in evolution. At worst, it will combine the various absurdities of artificial and human intelligence.” The risk, as Krohn sees it, is that we will lose control of our creation and it will become a tool of “subjugation.” Krohn’s skepticism toward official accounts of reality extends to some serious specifics: in a piece published on the website kaapeli.fi, and dated September 11, 2005, Krohn questions “The 9/11 Commission Report” and cites the work of David Ray Griffin, whose books on the subject are popular with 9/11 truthers. “I do not nominate myself for a truth movement activist,” Krohn told me; still, she is doubtful that the media has accurately portrayed what really happened to the World Trade Center towers, and why. “The media picks a reality for us and hypnotizes us into believing it," Krohn said. “We have to use both our sense and sensibility, when we choose in what we trust.”

Even when working with fantastical elements, Krohn is perpetually attentive to what different forms of information—intuitions, the Internet, the inner lives of other creatures—can reveal to us about ourselves. To this end, the consciousnesses of non-human species figure prominently in her work. One of the most moving passages in the “Collected Fiction” concerns the inner lives of dogs, and in particular the inner life of an old dog named Faith. “Their lives are balancing acts between a humanized being and an older, wilder nature,” Krohn writes. “Dogs are interstitial beings, not yet human, but no longer wolves. That is the unresolved paradox of doghood.”

In the short, lyrical story “Tainaron,” another unnamed narrator wanders through the eponymous city, which is populated by insects. The narrator is guided by a friend, whom she knows as Longhorn, and as she encounters the city’s various denizens, she begins to reminisce about her life before she came to Tainaron. At one point, she watches a cult of self-immolating insects try to cleanse the sins of the world by throwing themselves on a bonfire. Krohn’s narrator is horrified, at first, but she continues to watch: “Last night was calm, the sacrifice burned evenly. It was a candle on the table, the night’s focus and its terrible purifier. Who was he who was burning with such a high and unwavering flame.… And I had gazed on the blaze as if it were a midnight flower, rejoicing!”

I asked Krohn what the lives of insects could teach us about ourselves. “One of humankind’s great illusions is the belief in the total superiority of Homo sapiens over other species,” she replied. “Humans aren’t the only ones with language. In an anthill, information necessary for the existence of the colony reaches all of the inhabitants with unbelievable speed.… An ant colony can be seen as a kind of superorganism, like a data network. There is nothing more important to humans than our own consciousness,” Krohn continued. “It is our only tool for interpreting and studying reality. However, I think that consciousness is spread throughout space-time, varying in density and depth, and that it will possibly develop in computers and new generations of robots.”

The robot that wants to attain personhood is one of science fiction’s most persistent tropes. In many such stories, humans push robots toward self-actualization. Krohn gives us a different version. In “Gorgonoids,” a scientist becomes infatuated with insect-like computer-generated life forms. The gorgonoids “always stay in their own world,” she marvels. “They cannot approach us, and we cannot approach them.” She begins to identify with them. “My life began to thin out strangely, to empty as if from the inside. I began to become detached, abstracted. I still had a body, and my body had mass, but I was conscious of its existence only momentarily.”

Krohn herself sometimes sees self-awareness as a kind of affliction. The title character of the novel “Umbra” is a doctor who one day receives a strange request from a married couple. Their home robot, it appears, has started to experience fear. Like the scientist in “Gorgonoids,” Umbra is not certain that being more human is something the android should evolve toward. “Stay in the kingdom of pure abstraction,” he implores.