_There Are Things I Want You to Know_ About Stieg Larsson and Me - Eva Gabrielsson [11]
I can honestly say that I was never afraid to come home in the evening, even after Stieg began to focus on right-wing extremists and we started receiving threats. We had the whole world at our doorstep, we didn’t need to travel abroad. In fact, when we moved into Stockholm proper in 1991, it was a real culture shock to find ourselves in a city that was so ethnically homogeneous.
IN ADDITION to politics, Stieg and I had long shared a common passion for science fiction. Our favorite authors were Robert Heinlein and Samuel R. Delany, and I had translated into Swedish Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, which describes what the world would be like if the Nazis had won World War II. As soon as we’d moved to Stockholm, we’d joined the largest Swedish science fiction fan club, the SFSF (Skandinavisk Forening for Science Fiction), a friendly and varied collection of likeable weirdos, all of them crazy about SF. We fit right in. For two years, we were the editors in chief of Fanac, the SFSF newsletter, and from time to time we managed the association’s science fiction bookstore on Kungsholmen, a large island to the northwest of Sodermalm in Lake Malaren and part of the city of Stockholm. As business ventures go, the bookstore and newsletter were duds, but that wasn’t important, because fandom is a way of life. We were dreamers, fascinated by the alternative universes we found in that literature. Especially when they became real on the Internet. Published in 1992, Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash is a good example of the cyberpunk milieu reflected in the cybernetic world of the hacker republic in which Lisbeth Salander is a model citizen.
In science fiction, cyborgs—half human, half machine—can plug directly into computers to join up with the cyberworld. Lisbeth Salander plugs herself into the Internet, and her extraordinary skills are quite close to those of a cyborg. The Millennium Trilogy could have made a good SF saga, too.
At that time Stieg had a job in the postal service, and I had my state scholarship. Our two incomes allowed us to live, but nothing more, especially since Stieg, unlike me, was a spendthrift. For example, even when we were practically broke, he always had breakfast at the cafe although it was rather expensive. I could point this out to him as often as I liked, but that’s how it was, he didn’t want to change. I was from a family of country people who had some land and a farm, true, but no money to spare. Stieg’s parents owned nothing and rented their apartment, but their furniture was actually more expensive than my family’s. Since they worked in a clothing store, they had lots of clothes at home and Vivianne, Stieg’s mother, would often give me some.
A FEW months after we moved to Stockholm, my father died. He was barely forty-six, an alcoholic, and he had started taking medications even though he was drinking, which is dangerous.
Two years earlier, he’d fallen so deeply into debt that almost everything except the family farm had been sold at auction. We’d also managed to save that little cabin and its forest in Onnesmark, sixty miles from Umea, which Stieg and I used to go take care of with my brother and sister every so often. When he’d drawn up the inventory, the bailiff had shown an interest in the property, but my father—or perhaps Vivianne, Stieg’s mother—had come up with a way to save it. Stieg and I were clearly a couple, and our families knew each other, so they worked together on this. My father signed a lifetime lease on the property for Stieg’s parents, which meant the cabin and forest could no longer be sold. Erland and Vivianne were very happy to spend all their summers there, and planted potatoes and strawberries on the property.
After the auction, my father’s debts were