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Welcome to The Epilogue... a writing podcast that goes deep into the art and craft of storytelling. Each episode, we sit down for a deep-dive author interview with a successful writer for an exploration of story and for writing advice you can bring to your own work.
In the corner of your eye, you see it. But when you look directly at it, it's not there. Something about this story is bigger, more complex than you bargained for. Your mind focuses on the familiar elements, the character, the setting, the dialogue. But everything is bigger somehow than the sum of its parts.
Michael:Uncanny. Your story defies description. It is complex. How do you tie it all together?
Michael:Welcome to The Epilogue where everything makes sense in retrospect. I'm joined today by Jeff VanderMeer, author of Hummingbird Salamander, The Bourne novels, Southern Reach series, the first volume of which won the Nebula and the Shirley Jackson award, which is an interesting combination, and was also adapted into a movie. He's also written about the environment in publications such as Time, The Nation, Current Affairs, and Esquire. His latest work was Absolution, which is a return to the Southern Region verse, kind of a fourth novel of the trilogy that would make Douglas Adams proud. So, Jeff, thank you again for being here today.
Jeff:Oh, sure. Absolutely. Thanks for having me.
Michael:Okay. Let's start by introducing your books here because I would like to obviously talk about Born and the Southern Reach series Would you like to give us an introduction to those universes?
Jeff:Well, I mean, basically, the Southern Reach is about the increasingly failed attempts by a secret government agency to explore an area where an invisible border has come down, and it's kind of an exploration of how lives get kind of distorted and alienated from the human in a way from continually trying to solve this thing that can't be solved. It is really about an inquiry into the unknowability of the universe, maybe even just in terms of the scale of it. Born is very different in that it's kind of influenced a bit by anime and manga. You know, it has a giant flying bear in it, but it's ostensibly a host collapsed city where a scavenger named Rachel is trying to eke out an existence, but is also trying desperately to keep community, keep love, keep relationships. And it's it's kind of like the warm equivalent of the coldness of the Southern Reach because in it the characters are all still trying to connect despite these very extreme conditions.
Jeff:Then I think in the Southern Reach, the characters again are kind of all alienated by their mission, and kind of their lives are destroyed in that sense instead. They're very different in that way for readers who like one thing, you may not like the other, and vice versa. But yeah, those are those two series.
Michael:In the Southern region, also in Bourne, you often are talking about things which are the scale is just off the page. Right? It's cosmically large, or it's uncanny in a way that seems impossible. You're making the reader believe in these things, though, with with a neat little bag of word tricks. How do you build an impossible monster to put on the page, and how do you make the readers believe it?
Jeff:Yeah. Well, I mean, I think it all comes back to things like the character point of view, characterization, and attention to tactile detail. So for example, the giant flying bear in in Born, how that came about is I had this vision of this character, Rachel, who who vaguely, you know, as a climate refugee came from the South Pacific and is now washed up in the city. And her reaching out to what in my mind initially was like a sea anemone in a bed of seaweed. And then as I saw it further, I realized, oh, it's actually the matted fur of a bear.
Jeff:And then as I thought about it further, the anemone was actually biotech of some kind, that it was gonna grow. It was not a sea anemone at all. And then as my imagination pulled back further, I realized the bear is enormous. Like, is five feet tall you know, five stories tall. And then for some reason, the bear flew off.
Jeff:And I thought, am I gonna try to pull off keeping a flying bear in this story? And what does that what does that mean exactly for the kind of story I'm telling? And so it's in the it's it's in that process, that kind of organic process that you get to something that seems fantastical or maybe too vast to actually be believable. But then it's two things that carry you through. One is your commitment to specific detail.
Jeff:So I did a lot of research about bears, and I applied that. I applied things like our cat at the time, Neo, having these huge hulking shoulders and looking very bear like with his black fur when he was lounging over a cat tree. And then also simply what you find in a lot of anime and manga, which is they'll give you a giant flying bear, and they won't explain it. They'll just expect you to believe it. And I think sometimes it's the overexplanation that kills the thing.
Jeff:And often if you're reading especially a speculative novel and you see, like, four pages trying to explain some fantastical or science fictional thing, it's usually a tell that, number one, the author doesn't believe in the thing they've created. They're afraid the reader's not gonna believe it, so they're trying to overexplain it. Number two, by overexplaining it, they're undermining the reality of the future that they're showing, for example, or the alternate reality or the fantasy world. If you think about it, if there were a novel written in the fifties and there's an extrapolation of a smartphone in it, there might be five pages explaining how a smartphone works. But us as modern readers would be completely bored by that and realize that we were reading something written by someone not from our era.
Jeff:So it depends on what kind of effect you want, but if you want a novel of the speculative or set sometime in the future to feel real, you have to not give a tell that the things you think of as novel that might not be novel in the situation, that you don't overexplain them, that you have explain them. So for Rachel, this bear is just part of her world. Later I'm able to give an explanation at some point later the bear stops flying, and there's some indication given that there's something about the company that built it that's turned a switch off. I think that's enough to preserve some semblance of this science fantasy as opposed to fantasy with regard to the bear.
Michael:Right. Well, do see that. Chapter one in Bourne, we're starting out. It's told in a very matter of fact way. Like, we're going along with her in her universe.
Michael:The bear is just something that's it is, it's unexplained,
Jeff:and that
Michael:definitely that's one of the things that will draw the reader through, is that what I wanna find out more about But it is definitely everything about that, and the stuff that's caught in his fur, and all the other what are these device what is this thing that she found born, you know, that's in that first chapter. We follow her for the mystery of her life, and that's the story that we get, but we don't get all through the course of the plot, yes, there's the plot itself tells more of this explanation. But the reader the the character's story, yeah, we don't see that. That's that's very the matter of factness of that.
Jeff:Yeah. There were two influences on that I just want to mention. One is Angela Carter has a novel called Nights at the Circus, and one of the principal characters fevers, supposedly is part of a circus act where she actually flies with these kind of, as I recall, swan wings. And it's impossible, of course. And everyone assumes there are wires.
Jeff:Angela Carter never tells you by the end whether she's actually flying or if she's on wires. And ultimately, as the novel progresses, even though that's a hook into the novel, the way the novel progresses and what it's interested in talking about means that the answer to that question is less and less important. In fact, answering that question is actually antithetical to the themes of the novel. And I always found that really fascinating and brave that you bring this device up and then you don't answer the question, But you answer other questions, and the novel opens up in such a way where, again, at the end of the day, it winds up. It doesn't matter.
Jeff:And then Stepan Chapman's The Freiker, which won the Bill K. Dick award, which is a very un a very unfortunately forgotten novel, he does impossible things in every page. He does it largely by being matter of fact, we're not explaining and it shouldn't work. But in actual fact, it's brilliant. He gets to some amazing places ecologically and character development wise by just being ruthless in that regard and making the reader come along and then picking the spots when he does have to have some kind of explanation.
Jeff:But I've always admired those two novelists for what I would call kind of a bravery about narrative, and also the way that they treat their readers, which is they really trust their readers.
Michael:It was interesting you mentioned you're developing the idea of the bear, starting out as like the CNME, the texture, and pulling back in layers because we've it's almost a physical thing. You are layering these things up, and that's part of, I think, what's building this impossible description is like these things that they don't go together in somebody's head, but those are the things that are building up into layers until you get to climb the mountain.
Jeff:Well, there's also the way that our brains process things. To give you a small example, I was once the first time I went hiking in Australia, there was a flash of brown and something came out of the bushes. And my brain, used to hiking in Florida, immediately went to white tailed deer. It was actually a kangaroo. My brain froze for literally a second or two.
Jeff:There was nothing going on there before I adjusted to it. Similarly, in situations like an annihilation where the biologist finally sees the thing that's in the tower tunnel, you know, I had this challenge of like, how is she gonna describe it? Well, of course, her brain's not gonna be able to settle on one thing. It's going to see it. It's gonna go through a series of textures and ideas about what she's seeing because it's so alien and not be able to settle on one.
Jeff:And so some some reviewers just talk talked about how the description of the crawler was very inconsistent or whatever. But, actually, based on the character and based on the situation, it makes perfect sense that it is this kind of scrolling effective, like her brain trying to match it up with something real and kind of failing. And it seeming to me many things at once for that reason. So I think a lot about the psychological state of the character, the context in which they're seeing something as to how I build those those tactile sensations as well.
Michael:So you mentioned the psychological state of your characters, which is really I mean, the the entire southern reach is very much focused on that that that's it's a tangible aspect of the plot. The psychology of your narrator or your perspective character is affected by and affecting the environment. It's actually described as having a psychological effect. Like the reality, the state of reality is as much a perspective as anything else in some of this. Because it's almost like, you know, in a roadside picnic kind of way, you have these things that humans can't process, and something is being layered on top of it that is giving feeding them a different reality.
Michael:I think
Jeff:I think there's a few things. One, I really try just in general to reduce the the distance we have currently between nature and culture because I feel it's artificial, and it it kinda puts us outside ecosystem in a way that doesn't make any sense. So I try to make manifest things that are invisible in the real world as being more visible in the novels or having an affect they might not have in real life. And that obviously impacts characterization and landscape at the same time. Then there's simply the very real fact about every different person on this planet will have a different experience walking down the same street, the things that they notice, the things that they don't notice, the things they're experts on.
Jeff:If I walk down a street in Florida, I pretty much know every plant that I'm looking at that's a native plant. And I know the history of that plant. I know the history of landscaping and how a non native plant that's common came to be in the fifties and why that came through and what nurseries sold it. Another person might not know that. Here in Oregon, I walk down the street, don't know any of that stuff.
Jeff:So my experience of walking down the street is extremely different, to give you just kind of an obvious example. I'm always thinking about what does the character see and not see that I that I you know, so that I don't impose myself on the character. And to some degree, you are sometimes transposing your own, obviously, your own experience and your own point of view on your characters in addition to what you bring into them from the imagination. But ultimately, there is no landscape in my novels that isn't strained through a character point of view. And I think that that's really a very important thing for writers to think about, new writers, that it's not a matter usually in most character perspectives that you can divorce the landscape or the environment from the character point of view.
Jeff:It's not an objective place. And then in the Southern Reach, you have the additional thing which is that the Southern Reach agency is literally hypnotizing and subliminally affecting its own employees.
Michael:So
Jeff:that's another way in which they're imposed upon. And so these are all I think, interesting layering effects and they get to a greater interiority of character. They literally create plot and they create conflict and complication. And so you can get to a very organic kind of way of plotting and thinking about structure just by thinking of all the implications of that, let alone what else is going on in the story.
Michael:Oh, yeah. And there is a way you even made this more concrete in the story, like in the first Southern Reach Well, in the Southern Reach, you are establishing these characters as their role. It's the psychologist. It's the biologist, right? And your point of view character, the biologist, is seeing this through her function, but the environment itself is very much filtered through that.
Michael:You know, as we go through and we see the next book, we have the main character who doesn't even need to, but describes himself as as a as the the controller. As control. Yeah. As control. Right.
Michael:Yeah.
Jeff:Yeah. And I think also the thing there is I'm also accessing different areas of experience that I have. One thing I try to do is have most everything be from personal experience, even if radically changed or transposed or whatever in the novel. So obviously in Annihilation, one reason it's so seamless for a lot of readers I think is not just the brevity of it but also it's literally the 14 mile hike at St. Mark's Wildlife Refuge that I've done over and over again.
Jeff:I didn't have to think about the setting when writing it. But then the setting of the second one is similarly personal in that I had twenty years of contract jobs with software companies going into state agencies into really strange places and strange buildings and dealing with really weird and messed up bureaucracy. And so a lot of the things in there that are uncanny, that are not uncanny, that are just a bureaucracy are autobiographical. That also I think is really important. So what you're doing is it's controls perspective, but it's events and things that I'm familiar with then strained through his perspective, and that gives you both the personal and the uniqueness of the individual character, hopefully.
Jeff:And then also, obviously, there's quite a bit of imagination that goes into it as well. But at the kind of confluence of those three things is I think where you get to successful interiority and a book that's going to feel like it's layered, a book that you can reread, hopefully. And I'm not making any claims for the novels, but it is true that a lot of readers who bounced off of authority because it's so different came back to it later and were like, Oh, actually, this is something very different than I remember reading the first time. And that's because it's supposed to be. These books are supposed to change.
Jeff:The best books that I ever read were the ones where I read them at different ages and they were totally different books depending on where I was in my own life or just simply because the novelist had done a great job of putting so much into the thing while still being focused, that there's a lot there to absorb, and you're not gonna find everything first time around.
Michael:I have to say I love the framing of the tech consultant, software consultant, as as kind of a spy character dropping in. Speaking as someone who's done way too much computer work in my day. All right. Well, let's talk about Born too, because speaking of the psychology aspect of the characters, have with Rachel and Bourne. Mhmm.
Michael:And we don't go into Bourne's perspective right away. Like, he has all of these parts of him that we can't understand as readers. But psychologically, his existence has been defined, as far as he remembers, through his interactions with this human. And this puts certain kind of psychological traffic lanes on on what he pays attention to, I guess, that and and things that he can't knows he can't describe to her that we get a sense of, but we know are there, but they're not the main part of what he's what we get when we're in his perspective. Okay.
Michael:That's that's fascinating how you'd accomplish that.
Jeff:Well, mean, the thing is that it only works because we're we're not really in his perspective. It's a Rachel Fiance's diary, And then she experiences his his perspective through reading his diary.
Michael:That's true.
Jeff:And to me, this gets away gets around a thing that I find kind of hinky in science fiction novels, which is usually when you try to write from a truly alien perspective, I don't find it that convincing. And so in fact, Borg trying to be human by, like, keeping a diary but still giving something of his alien perspective, I think, is actually more effective and more clearly delineates it. And if I had spent more time in his point of view, actual point of view, I think it'd actually, after a while, be kind of oppressive or boring and kind of split the focus of the novel. So that was what I thought was an elegant solution to making it clear that Rachel's perspective on things is not necessarily the way that Born sees it. The other thing about the novel that I had to really think hard about is the spatial relationships are completely different than in The Southern Reach.
Jeff:The Southern Reach has all these claustrophobic interior spaces and these fairly claustrophobic outside landscapes and uncanny landscapes and weirdness there. The city in Bourne is kind of more like a bleached skeleton of a city with the points of interest really being the biotech, the giant bear, and and things like that. And I think that also affects how you how you portray characters and characterization and how spaces affect them is gonna be different to some degree. And so that also changes the kinds of scenes that you can show and and where the tension in the scenes is, I think.
Michael:That's been a trend, I think, in more recent years. Aliens who are actually even if they're not aliens, but beings who are alien to us that aren't just, you know, humans with a bumpy forehead. It's difficult to really make something human to define it so alien like.
Jeff:Well, mean, I think one thing I started doing early on is looking at what I think of as alien ecologies on Earth, which is say if you look at the life cycles of fungi and mushrooms and stuff, they seem very otherworldly and obviously very alien from our own. The same with regard to cephalopods and squid and stuff and so both of those are things I took crash courses on and really studied and started to extrapolate in my fiction, first in the Ambergris series with the mushrooms, and then in Bourne, kind of extrapolating what something that had the fluidity of a squid but lived on land, what that mindset would be with a distributed intelligence across its tentacles and being able to reform itself. And so there are real world things you can do and take as analogs. The the the fact of the matter is if you're really truly to write from an alien perspective and I'll I'll give you an example of you know, there's a kind of a sequel to Born called Dead Astronauts where there's a perspective of a fox. Well, if I wrote from a fox's perspective, it would just be 500 pages of smells and sounds because that's how they communicate and think.
Michael:We
Jeff:just have to kind of interpret what we think of that. It would be like the Ulysses of the fox world. But in actual fact, concede is that this fox has been somewhat altered by humans to be more human. And that gives me the leeway in my mind to legitimately have a point of view that is different and shows you the difference, but is comprehensible cheap. It allows me as a novelist to grapple with that.
Jeff:Otherwise, feel like it becomes something where you're kind of lying to some degree in trying to portray something. And so at least to me, that's like a shorthand way of getting there.
Michael:So ecology, the environment, both of these series are very strongly, first of all, the environment itself is a character, especially in the Southern Reach, but also in the Bourne novels. Like, there's the setting as a character, environmental aspects of this, and the, yes, it's metaphorical, but it's also plot, like how this is affected. And you mentioned, like, the the humans are nature, which is you know, it's not man made or natural. It's it's you know, if man made it, man is nature.
Jeff:No. Actually well, yeah. But I mean, in terms of where we are in terms of the things we create, it's so dysfunctional that we're no longer in any way balanced with the world around us. And part of it is because we don't acknowledge that we're part of nature. It's kind of a complicated argument.
Jeff:And I do see people saying, well, anything that humans do part of nature because we're part of nature. And it's like, no. Actually, really, reform post capitalism capitalism is not exactly what I think of when I think of closing the gap between nature and alcohol. So there's a lot of dissonance and there's a lot of what I would call derangement, mass hallucination of what you'd call it. I don't know what you'd call the SpaceX valuation, the ultimate hallucination goes on a real ultimate divorce culture.
Jeff:There's some real questions to interrogate there. And there's a complexity there that that, you know, is important to retain as a novelist and not reduce it down to general generalities for sure.
Michael:Right. Well, yeah. Like, the humans in there in here, all of the a lot of the mess, a lot of the military environmental catastrophizing in the past that's happened with with Bourne's universe, right, is a result of that. Like the out of balanceness that humans have put into things.
Jeff:I mean, think, you know, often the environmental messaging in these novels, like in the Southern regions, has been hardwired into the backdrop. And then, you know, I remember very clearly talking to an environmental science class in Upstate New York at a college there. And one person raised their hand and said, Well, appreciate it just being kind of baked into it, but have you ever thought about doing something more direct? And I was like, Well, I don't think of novels as being didactic. I don't like message driven novels.
Jeff:I don't like the idea of novels supposedly meant to drive policy. I think novels are good for showing you psychological reality of something like in Born really is showing you the psychological reality of living in a state of scarcity where you have to scavenge for food and water every day, which is something that people in this world do now. But the predictive nature of things, I think, is is a is a bad way to go. So but I did think about that. I did think about, like, you know, how can you be more direct?
Jeff:And so I wrote dead astronauts to be more didactic and clothed it in lyricism. Mhmm. Have a lot of poetry background in it. And then also, how can you hardwire it into plot? That the result of that was Hummingbird Salamander where the etymological detail literally impacts the plot.
Jeff:And so it becomes something other than exposition, it becomes an active ingredient, something proactive rather than sitting inertly on the page. And so it is something to grapple with too, even thematically, especially because theme usually I think is best when it comes into your rough draft because it's just there. You're not thinking about it. Maybe you look at your rough draft and say, well this bit about the environment actually I can tease this out and in the next draft I can actually make this a little more explicit or a little more on the surface if I want to. But it's whatever was there originally.
Jeff:And so the other thing about it is that after Annihilation came out, I consciously kind of went back to school because a lot of people interpreted it as an environmental novel when I wrote it in a fever dream and didn't really think about one way or the other what it was. But I felt responsibility to learn a lot more about Florida's ecology, for example. And actually, again, non fiction lectures and things about the environment as a result of that continuing education. But it really is important what you put into your head in that regard. And so one thing that's been quite fascinating is that with 17,000 papers written about annihilation, many of them about the environmental aspects, Reading those papers, then reading the primary sources that they reference has then created a kind of a mulch in the back of my brain that has affected the environmental message or themes organically in later novels like Born, like Hummingbird Salamander.
Jeff:And so you can ask me about environmental themes and I can talk about it on kind of like a analytical level, but a lot of it just gets in there subconsciously as subtext. And again, I sometimes then put some of that into starker relief when I recognize it. But hopefully it's just there organically to begin with, which I think it should be part of this Right. On a perfect age of of a lot of novels where it isn't there, actually.
Michael:That's a wonderful segue, actually, to talking about Wonderbook from a kind of a little bit of a self serving perspective. I had actually focused on how world building affects theme in my master's thesis, and Wonderbook was an excellent resource for that. Would would you like to talk about about that?
Jeff:Yeah. Well, I mean, first of all, I'd say that Wonderbook is a general writing book for beginning and intermediate writers that happens to use science fiction, fantasy, and nonrealist fiction examples. And the reason for that is because when I was growing up, all the general fiction guide guides used kind of ultra realist examples, and I felt that was kinda leaving out something. So it's not really a science fiction fantasy writing guide, though it can be used in that way. Oh, no.
Jeff:And it's also been used actually by unbelievably, it's been used by musicians, by nonfiction writers, and nonfiction writers as well. And I've actually had people from teachers from, like, fifth graders fifth grade teachers use some of the diagrams, the more playful ones, out of context to the full book. And, you know, the full book has has got some adult images in it too, all the way through master's class. So I've been really thrilled by the response. The worldbuilding chapter very specifically kinda like I think I don't really think of I don't like the word world building because I don't like divorcing it from characterization.
Jeff:But in the context of characterization, there are moments obviously where the author knows more than the characters do. Sometimes that's not true. Sometimes it's really important for the writer to not know any more than the characters to be able to live in the interiorities of the characters' minds in the right way. But there certainly are times as with the Ambergris series where basically I was chronicling a hundred years of this imaginary city's history through the lives of its characters where literally some of the structural notations and plot lines were the history of the city through various years and then where were the characters during these years and then what are the scenes during those years I was gonna dramatize for those characters. And so it does get down to something that's still about characterization, which is a lot of times we think of characters as having much more agency than they actually do.
Jeff:The actual fact is we're all very much constrained by systems, by the places that we live and their rules, and even how cities are laid out. I'm living in Portland now. It's a very walkable city. It's a city where you can bike through it quite easily and safely. The city I lived in, Florida, was not that way.
Jeff:It really changed the spatial relationships of where you would have to go to get food, for example, or how you can get around, really affected also inter personal relationships and affected your level of stress and all kinds of things like that. The way the local government there responded to just basic queries with like F off as opposed to Portland where it's not perfect, but you get a six page newsletter from a engineer, road engineer apologizing for why a pothole wasn't fixed in time and explaining why from an engineering point of view it was so difficult. All of those things impact, along with socioeconomic stuff, what neighborhood you're in, all of those things are in a way world building. They're also about character. And so what I do like think to about with regard to the world being, how does the world that the character is in and their status or their place or their identity impact things like agency?
Jeff:How easily does this world allow your average person to move through it? I think of Nabokov's Ben Sinister where the main character finally gets this visa to go across this bridge to another country. They're both authoritarian countries. The regime in the meantime, literally in the last hour before he's crossed the bridge, has changed on the other side. They don't accept his bonafides.
Jeff:By the time he crosses this long bridge back, the government's changed on the other side, he's trapped on the bridge, to give a very extreme world building and character. So those are the kinds of things that I think about. And I think the world building, quote unquote world building chapter in Wonderbook, I hope, does a good job kind of showing that kind of wider view and the more personal view and how these things interrelate. It's a challenge when it comes to agency because and world building because the world literally does make it hard for most plots of novels that are currently in existence, especially in a fancier science fiction, actually be things that would happen.
Michael:Yeah.
Michael:I think that's a danger. Yeah.
Jeff:So at the same time you can't ever get full fidelity. A novel is still not real life so you are always having to have slow cuts and things. I like to say if you were to really have fidelity to world building, then for example, a place like my office, you could probably write 200 pages of detail about this office if you wanted to truly convey the reality of this office. But, of course, in many in many ways, on many things, we're still doing a shorthand in in the novel, in part because we're also trying to give the reader space to bring their own imagination to bear, but also because ultimately, reading a realistic novel isn't all that realistic.
Michael:And and, you know, people who are are just listening aren't gonna see us, but it is Wonderbook. I happen to have it just on my shelf right here anyway. So this isn't this wasn't planted. Mhmm. Because this is a very lovely book with wonderful illustrations in it as as and diagrams.
Michael:It is ostensibly it does take a lot of example from, you know, imaginative fiction, but it is definitely, you know, going through this as as looking at the processes for how you are interleaving scenes or or thinking of of of the characters or mapping the the layers of your world, that is something that to some degree will benefit just about any kind of story that you're telling.
Jeff:Yeah. I mean and not to not to steam my own horn too much, but, you know, basically, happened because the steampunk bible, which I did for Abrams Image, did so well as a coffee table book. And they just said, what do you wanna do next? And then threw a bunch of money at me to to do the thing, including bring it to them camera ready. So we were able to do the world's first and still only fully illustrated general writing book in part because they did that because what you don't see when you read one book is the number of diagrams, the number of pages we tossed because there were things that you had to first try to do visually before you realized, oh, that actually still is better to convey in text.
Jeff:And so there were a lot of starts and stops on it. And at one point I wasn't even sure there would be a book because it was something that had never been done before. There really wasn't much of a template or other examples to look at. So it's definitely also, I think, very complex book in the sense that I do think it's good to dip in and out of. I wouldn't necessarily read it all the way through.
Jeff:You can, but it's just a lot to take in. It's kind of a really cool gift shop, but they've got layers. Like, you have to look at what things are concealing as well as what's on the lower shelves, what's on the walls as opposed to on the mantle, so to speak. And it takes a while to kind of absorb it all.
Michael:Well, it is its own thing for sure. And it is definitely The illustrations, in addition to being quite bold and fantastical, they are an intrinsic part of what you're portraying in the text as well. This is something that obviously, as a novel writer primarily, you are usually just working with the prose. But that actually brings up a good question or aspect of this, like working with the illustrations, especially they're not just like pictures of what happens in the story. They're they're telling a part of it on their own.
Jeff:Yeah. All of those are final illustrations, you know, based on sketches that I did. You know, my mom's an artist, and I grew up in the studio. And I think I have a very strong visual sense and a good visual sense. But my one frustration is I'm terrible at actually doing art.
Jeff:So it's great to find someone in Jeremy Zurfos where I can give him an absolutely nutso looking, you know, rough sketch and that he could make it something that really kind of was streamlined enough and vibrant enough to convey the information while still being playful. So you
Michael:had what seemed like a complete trilogy with The Southern Reach. And then you you you dipped back in with another well, it's definitely another layer with absolution. What brought you to want to go back to this or to try and
Jeff:reframe this again? You know, I really am leery of, like, sequels to sequels to sequels. The one I joke about, which I think is punching up so it's okay, is, like, I never wanna write townhouses of Dune. And I I think Dune at a certain point, like, by the time he got to chapter house Dune, that thing was done. And and what happens Yeah.
Jeff:Not series. It's a series is they get more attenuated. They get more abstract. They get more symbolic. What's on the page is not really at the street level, and it's kind of like haunted by the ghosts of the prior books, but not in a good way.
Jeff:And so I was really resistant to adding to it at all. But then I'd always had this short story called The Birdwatchers, which had some elements of what's in the final book. And I had this idea of, oh, what if there had actually been an expedition of biologists to the Forgotten Coast years before anything happened, but that something about the expedition was connected to Central, the secret org organization that eventually forms the Southern Reach. And what if that actually precipitated or influenced things that happened later in books? And it just opened up from that.
Jeff:And there was this moment where it's like, you know, the the moment before you know you're gonna write a novel and the moment you're gonna write a novel. And I woke up on 07/31/2023, and I had the entire novel in all three parts in my head. And I was really excited because I realized it was three different styles, that they interlocked these three parts, three totally different styles, but that they made a complete story. And what I loved about that was that I was gonna be able to move information, so to speak, around reveals. I didn't have to put everything in the first book.
Jeff:I would be writing all three sections simultaneously and organically. And then it was kind of like a fever dream. It was like the extended version of Annihilation, the writing process. I literally don't remember much about that period, but on December 31, I had a complete 120,000 word novel composed of three parts in a final draft. And that means I'd actually written a few thousand words over that time, which is ridiculous.
Jeff:And I just wrote in the night. So what happened was the thing overtook my imagination. I'd been thinking about these things for a long time, and then my my sub subconscious just delivered basically. Nothing went away. And the only reason that I and why I was excited too is because it was alive on the tactile level.
Jeff:It was alive. It didn't seem like it was getting attenuated or abstract. It was actually in some ways more tactile and more more more uncanny and horrifying than the first three. And so I trusted myself. I had no choice either.
Jeff:I I I just had to write it. I was compelled to. And that's kind of the way it goes with all of my novels. I didn't expect to write dead astronauts. And then the fact that there were those dead astronauts kind of tugged at me and I couldn't let it go ultimately.
Jeff:My imagination couldn't and had to build a story around it. You know, it's funny because there are so many fans for The Southern Reach that you get so many different responses. There are those who don't want me to write anything other than the first three. There are those who are thrilled there's another one. There are those who are thrilled there's another one, but really unhappy with the number of f bombs in the third section.
Jeff:There's always, always very things you can't predict. Like of all the things in any of my novels that I couldn't predict would be reacted to in a certain way, the number of people unhappy with the f bombs in part three of Absolution still cracks me up to this day. Like, there's actually very graphic cannibalism scene in Absolution. That's apparently okay. A number of f bombs for many readers.
Jeff:I've never seen more Goodreads reviews that are four stars instead of five based solely on taking a star off for swearing. And That's hilarious. It is hilarious. It's fine.
Michael:That's very interesting.
Jeff:But it's fine for the course with the series too because it's funny too seeing absolution reviews from people who hated the first three books and yet grappled with them enough to write reviews of them and read the fourth. So there's something about it, something about the irritation that must still be compelling. I don't know. It's just been quite interesting seeing the polarization on those novels. And I absolutely believe that any reader should be able to just say, I hate this stuff as much as they want.
Jeff:And I'm in a comfortable position of them being successful enough that it's interesting to observe rather than in any way affecting me. Continue to do it. It's not hurting me in any way, it's just fascinating what the reaction has been to the series across the board.
Michael:How much when when you were writing Absolution, how much there's a there's a dark mirroring to this, like, in the structuring even in the three parts to the the original trilogy, how much were was that intentional or organic just because of of revisiting?
Jeff:It was kind of organic, but when I recognized it, even though it does pretty much differ, like, the third part is not at all, like, acceptance. It's just but but when I noticed that I I did reuse the section, the part titles from Annihilation for, I think, part two for those for the sections in part two in reverse order. I don't know if anyone's noticed that necessarily, but there's some sneaky callbacks to the original three books in absolution without being what I would call gimmicky or fan service. They're just simply things I think are interesting illusions that create an additional layer to things if you notice them. Mhmm.
Jeff:I think more what struck me after I finished is how much darker it was than the first three books and more cynical about institutions. And I think that's just simply a reflection of where we are today as opposed to where we were ten years ago in The US. I think Censhell much more terrifying as an organization in absolution than in the first three books, you know, where they they they could even seem a little more innocent than than in contrast even though obviously they're like a CIA surrogate, so Naive.
Michael:In a way.
Jeff:Yeah, naive.
Michael:Yeah. I mentioned at the beginning that the same work, but both a Nebula Award and Shirley Jackson Award, which you're speaking with science fiction, fantasy, and also horror. Like, there's aspects of eldritch horror or or Uncanny horror in this, as well as obviously a lot of of scientific. Your characters are very scientific. The world that they come from is a scientific examination of what's going on with this horror around them in a way.
Michael:It's not necessarily, depending you on your perspective, a horror, I guess, for them. You're not trying to blend genres. You're just looking for the story, and then it shows up on the bookshelf wherever it gets put. Is is that an accurate way of describing your your process for for these? I think
Jeff:that there's a difference between your public and your personal book life, and so I try very hard not to think about the positioning of a book or anything of that nature until I've completely finished it. And then there's also the fact that I'm heavily influenced by reading just a lot of mainstream literature, fiction, poetry, and stuff like that that goes into the mix. And when I first was writing short stories, I'd give them to friends who had read my poetry and they'd be like, this is very Kafkaesque and strange. And I'd be like, really? Because I thought I just wrote an ordinary story about an ordinary character.
Jeff:So sometimes I think it's just a kind of, like, uncanny or occulted world view, almost akin to, like, the ecstatic nature you find in Thoreau or even some of Rachel Carson's work where there's an aspect to the real world that's hyper real or that in a moment you see as being more fantastical than maybe we think of it on a daily basis. But yeah. And I think that the reason the books and I the Southern Reach books were very successful is in part because the covers did not go with a gloomy lighthouse. They went with these, like, bright, shiny, different types of covers that didn't really kind of say, you know, just kind of types typecast what it was you were getting. They were released all in the same year, so there are these positive feedback loops sales wise.
Jeff:And then also they were put out by Farris, Strauss and Giraud, which is a mainstream literary publisher. And they were in the mainstream fiction section, the general fiction section. And what I found over the years is I do best when I'm I'm when I'm positioned in general fiction. And I also maybe am in the science fiction section, if bookstores can accommodate that, sometimes they do. But if I'm just in the science fiction section, then the general readers who tend to like my work because of the fact that they're blending a lot of things don't tend to find them.
Jeff:Whereas science fiction readers can find them if they're in the general description section. So it's been kind of a fascinating thing to chart the way the sales have gone because then the movie came out. The movie was clearly, you know, middle of science fiction. And what happened as a result is the Southern Reach then got put back in the science fiction section primarily. It wasn't found in general fiction for the most part in most bookstores.
Jeff:But by that point, they'd been so successful and the movie made them more successful. It didn't matter what section. But I stand by the idea that if they hadn't been in the general fiction section to begin with and marketed that way, that they not have sold as many copies as they did. But no, I didn't think at all. Like when I first finished it, I thought, you know, I don't even know if this is a novel.
Jeff:It's about four women wandering in the wilderness and it's not even a novel. I sent it to my agent. They're like, oh, this is a novel. We should send this out. So yeah, it's that level of cluelessness.
Jeff:But then having come up to the small and independent press, I am very PR savvy. Am very much on that side because you kind of have to be when you write weird, uncanny stuff and you come in with small press. You have to be your own best advocate and you have to learn all that stuff. So I do think about the positioning. I do think about what makes the most sense.
Jeff:I have a lot of input on and final approval of covers and things like that because I think that positioning, even the copy on something on the back of the book can really be the right entry point or not. Born can either be a story about a giant psychotic bear rather than the city or it can be about a parent child relationship. And what you emphasize really matters to how the reader begins to think about the book before they've even opened it. And and so I think sometimes books stand or fall, you know, on these distinctions and how our publishers decided to present them.
Michael:That's a very interesting point about, like, coming in through the literary fiction door. Mhmm. Because structurally, the Southern Reach as a trilogy, each of those is a a short story compared to the, you know, the the shelf busting stuff that seems to be popular in in sci fi fantasy. They're all inter structurally interrelated. They are, like, codependent as as a work.
Michael:Okay. They reinforce each other. And there's a philosophical aspect. As a thread, the main thing that the characters are dealing with is how to make sense of all of this compared to the the physical how to mechanically deal with it. There's that is definitely a much more literary approach and maybe would have been something that would have been more difficult for from the novel standpoint of science fiction.
Michael:There's a lot of more experimental structural stuff I know in shorts short stories. I I guess nowadays, there's there's a little bit more, but structurally like that.
Jeff:Well, I think what you're really talking about is completing the character arcs, not completing the story arc because you can't because you're dealing with something where you're literally grappling with the ultimate unknown. And the the point is you can't ever grasp it, which, you know, obviously can be frustrating for some readers and can be frustrating for me who knew that I could write a a three act structure with traditional closure like in Bourne. But, yeah, so I do remember there were several offers on Annihilation and a couple of them, and they were from more commercial publishers, wanted me to do things like foreground the biologist relationship with her husband, make it clear she's going in to save her husband, and then rejigger the plot so it would be more traditional like that. And that already to me indicated that Heroes. That was not going to be a good process for me because they were basically asking me to change who the biologist was as a person.
Jeff:And in doing so, were also going to make it an untraditional plot like you're talking about. And that might've done very well too, but it wouldn't have been personal to me. It would've been kind of excruciating to do. It would've betrayed the character. And so it's kind of satisfying that I wouldn't call these books experimental, but that they are a little nontraditional.
Michael:No. No.
Jeff:No. Not they resolve things. Yeah. They've done so well regardless. But also, you know, the thing that was so amazing about the Absolution tour, which is I hadn't toured behind the book since the year they came out, is they were jam packed with people who'd read the first three books who had personal stories.
Jeff:Everybody who came up in the signing line had some personal story like annihilation got me back into reading or annihilation got me through my divorce, all kinds of unexpected things. And so I guess one thing about it that was really surprising was for whatever reason, the ambiguity of the series, while turning off some readers, gave enough room for other readers' imaginations for them to become really stuck in and invested in it because it's almost like they're creating it. They're filling in the gaps, the speculative gaps, some of the other stuff as well, and willingly doing so because there was just enough that's concrete for them to hold onto and for it to be very personal. So so that was quite fascinating. It kind of remade how I thought about the space you leave for a reader in a narrative, which had already been evolving since I was narrator where I was very arrogantly like, I wanna control everything and everything has to mean the thing I mean it to.
Jeff:Everything should be on the page and so on and so forth. And from reading people like Karen Joy Fowler and others who leave a lot off the page, I started thinking about creating a different kind of space for the reader, and that first manifested in annihilation.
Michael:Yeah. When you're leaving that much you're leaving that much up to interpretation. There's an awful lot of room for the readers to bring whatever they want to it. And yes, experimental is definitely not the right word. It was definitely more of a nontraditional or unique way of structuring it, especially as a series that all goes together, and it's not marching one book, then the next.
Michael:There's this new thing that they threw in there just that wasn't even thought of with the first book. This all is very much part of the same fabric, I guess, is the way I would describe it. So it definitely worth reading for people even who are not science fiction or fantasy fans as we've covered. It's it's got a lot of aspects to it. And both from a literary standpoint and from just looking at the way it's structured and how the characters and environments interact.
Michael:Like, it's really some good lessons in there. So what's next? Not to be greedy, we just had absolution this past year, I think. What are are you working on something that you're eager to share, or a break, or are you just we're heads down and we don't talk?
Jeff:No. Well, I mean, I just had a pretty major short story out in the MIT technology review called Constellations that I'm really proud of. It was one of those things that just kinda came out all of a piece. You know, it's not that it's not that, like, stopping and starting on a short story and it's a parts of it being a slog mean it's any better or worse, but the whole experience from beginning to end was literally like three hours and then an hour of revision, and I was done. And so when it happens like that, usually it means that there's something you've caught something that works.
Jeff:Whether the readers agree or not is different, but so I'm really proud of that. And I am working on one last Southern Reach novel that again came out of the blue that isn't gonna provide all the answers, but I think is is very evocative and features a fire breathing oyster catcher, which is I think always a good thing. And and there's a Southern Reach coffee table book coming out from Abrams, which is gonna be very fairly atypical because it's not like The X Files companion or something. It's it's It's got a bit of narrative to it and extends the story, but allows me to do a lot more visually obviously. I've commissioned some stuff for that and even taken photos of white rabbits a professional photographer has in an abandoned swimming pool.
Jeff:A lot of dry ice. It's very, very evocative kind of evocation of area in world Along with some other like real world photo shoots and builds because I really don't I hate AI and I don't like CGI very much. So pretty much everything will be some kind of built environment if it's not something we're repurposing that's already out there. And then I am working on a new series, the Strange Architect series that I'm really thrilled about. And that's one of those things where I've been doing research for ages because I like to do the research well before I write.
Jeff:So that whatever comes onto the page, it's just
Michael:a matter of
Jeff:a reminder. If I've forgotten it, then there's a reason and probably the reader will forget it too if I put it on the page. And I'm really psyched about that. That's a major new series. There should be news about that soon.
Michael:Great. Well, I think I speak for anybody who is a fan of the Southern Reach, you know, as an entirety, that if you do answer everything, we will be disappointed. Right. It's just, there's probably something to that. Like, whenever you try and answer everything, it just always it's it's you get to the end of the the shelf busting sci fi.
Michael:Mhmm. There's an answer, and it's like, oh, well, I was liked before the answer. Yeah. Okay. So just being, you know, cognizant of time here, I want to make sure I give you a chance.
Michael:There's anything else that you would like to bring up, or should I ask about? Has nobody asked you about? No, is. If you'd like to bring out? I
Jeff:think it's been pretty comprehensive. Thanks.
Michael:Oh, great. Well, once again then, thank you so much for joining today. For sure. And I know this is probably a little bit different than some other interviews, so thanks for sticking with us. And I really appreciate it, and I hope we get to to chat again sometime.
Jeff:Yeah. Absolutely. Thanks again for having me. Appreciate it.
Michael:Your reader is going to live in your story. Follow your character to all the story spaces. The world around them will be as full or as thin as it is for your characters. Pay attention to the detail, the immersion that they experience. Your story is not just the things that happen or the names and faces of the character.
Michael:The world, the atmosphere, the voice, these things are your readers' tether to the world you create. Many, many thanks to Jeff VanderMeer for generously spending time with us to geek out on story craft today. His website is jeffvandermeer.com and has some really interesting graphics right now promoting his southern reach series and his most recent return to Area X with his novel absolution. You can find links to Absolution and Jeff's other books that we talked about in the show notes. Links to his books go to bookshop.org to help support independent bookstores.
Michael:I would encourage you if you can to get an actual physical copy of Wonderbook. It's a great craft book, but it's also very beautifully illustrated. And having a nice tactile immersive book can really help you feel like putting all that craft advice to work. If you prefer audiobooks, the links in the show notes go to libro.fm, again, to support independent book stores. Clicking on the links in the show notes may support this show in a small way.
Michael:Remember to subscribe or follow this show in Apple Podcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, or your favorite podcast player. Visit the epilogue.net. Sign up with the newsletter to keep up to date on any announcements so you don't miss any future guests.
Michael:Thank you.