Jeff VanderMeer, Acceptance

Writing, for me, is like trying to restart an engine that has rested for years, silent and rusting, in an empty lot – choked with water and dirt, infiltrated by ants and spiders and cockroaches.  Vines and weeds shoved into it and spouting out of it.  A kind of coughing sputter, an eruption of leaves and dust, a voice that sounds a little like mine but is not the same as it was before; I use my actual voice rarely enough.

A great deal of time has passed since I placed words on paper, and for so long I felt no urge to do so again.  I have felt more acutely than ever that here on the island I should never be taken out of the moment.  To be taken out of the moment is dangerous – that is when things sneak their way in and then there is no present moment to return to. (from the beginning to Part II)

It has been a short, strange reading trip this year.  Over the course of eight months, all three volumes of Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach trilogy have been released.  Each book has acted like an act in a larger narrative.  The creepiness inherent in humans invading a now-unreal nature gave way to clandestine agencies and territorial turfs battles.  Now in the concluding volume, Acceptance, the themes of the first two books, Annihilation and Authority, give way to a story that builds upon both while blazing its own path.

Acceptance is more in the narrative mode of Annihilation than Authority, at least in terms of its dependance upon establishing scene and mood in order to draw in the reader.  Passages such as the one quoted above capture well much of the thrust of this book.  Acceptance is a reflective book, one in which the characters' previous experiences help shape perceptions of what is unfolding around them in mysterious, dangerous Area X.  As Control and the mysterious returnee he has renamed Ghost Bird proceed into Area X, they encounter things that bring back memories of lives past, if not necessarily of lives lost.

The narrative alternates between a few PoVs, some of which are situated before the development of Area X thirty years prior to the events of Annihilation.  The reader learns more about the organizations involved in the area during this time and just how this region began to transform around the region of an old lighthouse.  In less skillful hands, this information could have clogged the narrative flow, weighting it down with its misleading importance.  VanderMeer, however, manages to walk the tightrope between explaining too much and leaving too little understood for the reader.  There are answers revealed, yes, but in a setting where the characters themselves barely understand what has transpired, there are plenty of mysteries that just cannot ever be explained.

The plot, intriguing as it is, is actually a minor part of the book.  It is good, gripping psychological storytelling, but in reading it, I was more drawn toward other, even more effective elements.  VanderMeer is an excellent craftsman; his descriptions rarely fail to ring true and the prose is carefully crafted to suit scene and character.  Sometimes this can lead to a hollow, too-perfect prose that feels somewhat empty of that mess we call humanity.  However, in this series and most especially in Acceptance, he manages to not only write eloquently and with purpose, but these passages and characters feel more alive, more akin to people on the verge of "an experience."  This is a very tricky thing to pull off, this sense of humans approaching the Sublime, yet VanderMeer manages to pull it off with aplomb.

In my earlier reviews of Annihilation and Authority, I focused on the traditional types of conflict (human vs. nature, human vs. self/society) present within them.  In the concluding volume, Acceptance, there are reverberations of these conflicts, but yet there is a quality to the story that makes it less about conflict, but about interaction and adaptation; acceptance, in other words.  It is in these forms of "acceptance" that we see Control, Ghost Bird, and others in new lights.  We also come to understand, imperfectly as humans are wont to be, just what might be lurking behind Area X.  Some messages are as simple and as complex as a leaf, a twig, a rabbit, and an owl.  And this, this is what makes Acceptance such a fitting conclusion to one of the best trilogies I have read in years.

A few, brief impressions of the Spanish translation of Jeff VanderMeer's Annihilation

Even though I'm an occasional translator, I typically do not buy a translation of a work if I can understand it in its native idiom.  But on occasion, I will make exceptions.  Sometimes, it is because I want to make double-sure that I get every single use of figurative or symbolic language.  Other times, it is as simple as wanting to have a nicely-designed edition on one of my bookshelves, awaiting my whim as to when I should peruse it.

Then there are those cases in which I want to collect editions by particular authors, even for languages that I do not comprehend at all.  There are only a few for which I'll do this, as collection costs can be prohibitive:  Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince (currently, I own just over 20 editions, 14 of which are print editions); the Bible (over a dozen translations, ancient and modern each); and now, the works of Jeff VanderMeer.  I've been reading Jeff's works for a little over ten years now and I generally buy any limited editions of his whenever they go on sale.  So when I saw the Planeta/Destino cover for the Spanish translation of the first volume of the Southern Reach Trilogy, Annihilation, I was fascinated for two reasons.  First, the cover is one of the better ones I've seen on any book in years in terms of capturing my attention and in seeming to correlate with what is inside the book.  Secondly, I was curious to see how the tone would translate across idioms.

This morning, I received my pre-ordered e-book edition of Aniquilación on iBooks.  I have spent the past hour or so carefully reading it, comparing it at times to the original US edition.  What I have noticed is that translator Isabel Margelí does a terrific job in capturing the feel of the opening scenes.  Even when she had to "break" the sentences in order to render it into equivalent Spanish, those changes felt natural and in tune with the flow of the narrative.  I have always enjoyed reading and listening to Spanish because of a perceived sonorous quality to its syntax and in reading Annihilation in translation, this quality meshes very well with the portentous atmosphere of the narrative.  Certainly, the first twenty e-pages (130 total on my iPad at its current setting) bode well for my enjoyment of this translation.

Jeff VanderMeer, Authority

"Okay, then.  Tell me about the thistles."

"The thistles?"  Her expressive eyebrows told him what she thought of the question.

"Yes.  You were quite specific about the thistles.  Why?"  It still perplexed him, the amount of detail there about thistles, in an interview from the prior week, when she'd arrived at the Southern Reach.  It made him think again of hypnotic cues.  It made him think of words being used as a protective thicket.

The biologist shrugged.  "I don't know."

He read from the transcript:  "'The thistles there have a lavender bloom and grow in the transitional space between the forest and the swamp.  You cannot avoid them.  They attract a variety of insects and the buzzing and the brightness that surrounds them suffuses Area X with a sense of industry, almost like a human city.'  And it goes on, although I won't." (galley pages 22-23)

When I wrote my review of Jeff VanderMeer's Annihilation, the first volume in The Southern Reach trilogy, back in February, I used the descriptor "transitional" to describe the events and themes of that volume.  "Transitional," albeit in a different sense, also can be employed to describe the middle volume, Authority, as the events within are shown in a state of flux that harkens back to the first volume while adding layers of depth to it.  Yet despite these similarities, Authority is a different beast from Annihilation, a story that contains its own mysteries and weirdness.

Authority is set a few months after the few days' events of Annihilation.  The new director of the Southern Reach, John Rodriguez or "Control," as he prefers to be called, finds himself at the heart of a new mystery as the "survivors" of the "twelfth" expedition have recently recrossed the border of the mysterious, vaguely nefariously Area X and have been held the past couple of weeks in isolation.  He spends the next few weeks reviewing the data collected on that expedition as well as those taken from previous experiments and expeditions and what he discovers begins to unsettle him.  Near the heart of it lies the returned members of the most recent expedition and what one of them says, or rather avoids saying, drives him to investigate further, uncovering certain truths that had been buried for three decades.

The premise, when stated in those terms, might seem to be familiar to those well-read in thrillers and espionage stories, but VanderMeer's intricate plot, buttressed by its economical and yet evocative prose, confounds those expectations.  What Control discovers is not so much new revelations but instead new, haunting mysteries; the picture becomes murkier instead of clearer, yet not quite without a sense that resolution may lie around the corner.  Each little piece of data contained in the Southern Reach file, each little oddity (such as an old, apparently failed experiment with white rabbits), they all somehow connect with each other, creating a complex ecosystem of creatures and creators, of words and images, that transition from one to the other, thus constructing a whole that is more varied than any of its constituent parts.

Whereas Annihilation focuses primarily on an external human vs. (weird) nature, Authority internalizes that conflict, expressing it as much through the mass of conflicting data and bureaucratic infighting as through the unnatural flora and fauna detailed within those reports.  In this sense, Authority is a complement to Annihilation while also simultaneously serving as a contrast in characters and situations.  The ecosystem interactions of Annihilation are furthered with that ultimate invasive species, humanity, is factored in.  The very title, Authority, in this regard is almost ironic, a statement of sorts regarding the illusory sense of possession of a nature that shows its threatening, incomprehensible elements in shorter yet perhaps even more impactful ways than its predecessor.

Authority's plot is more expansive than the narrower, more confined action of Annihilation and its action is expressed in a different fashion, yet it is no less exciting.  I found myself reading each paragraph slower than is my wont, savoring the connections that I perceived between certain events and characters.  By novel's end, the action had risen to a fitting and yet frustrating conclusion.  Frustrating not because it ended abruptly, but because of a natural desire to know more about the mysteries that Control had become to unravel.  There are very few flaws here.  If anything, perhaps Control's character could have been explored in even more detail, as this could have made the "control" aspect even more fitting, but for the most part, the characterizations were well-done and their motivations fit nicely with the narrative.  The themes in particular here, continuations of those from Annihilation, were explored excellently.  The end result was a very good novel that builds upon the strengths of its predecessor and leaves the reader excited about the upcoming September release of the concluding volume, Acceptance.  Highly recommended.

Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation

During our hike from the border to the base camp near the coast, we had experienced almost nothing out of the ordinary.  The birds sang as they should; the deer took flight, their white tails exclamation points against the green and brown of the underbrush; the raccoons, bowlegged, swayed about their business, ignoring us.  As a group, we felt almost giddy, I think, to be free after so many confining months of training and preparation.  While we were in that corridor, in that transitional space, nothing could touch us.  We were neither what we had been nor what we would become once we reached our destination. (p. 15)

The above quote, which appears early in the opening novel of Jeff VanderMeer's The Southern Reach trilogy, Annihilation, encapsulates much of what occurs within this story.  There are several boundaries here:  between nature and humanity, between the emotions of confinement and (temporary) freedom, between what once was and what is to be.  In trying to think of short, snappy descriptors for what Annihilation is, two came to mind:  transitional and uncanny.  In many regards, these two adjectives serve as incomplete attempts to explain the inexplicable, to provide a progression of form to something for which "form"fails to apply.

Annihilation is set some three decades after an unnamed, non-described disaster affected a coastal area (loosely based on Florida's St. Marks National Wildlife Refuge).  Eleven previous expeditions into this affected zone, Area X, have led to mysterious and occasionally violent ends.  The governmental agency Southern Reach is in charge of Area X and it zealously keeps others away from its terrible mysteries.  Four women, stripped of their names and known only by their professions (anthropologist, surveyor, psychologist, and biologist), have undergone months of extensive training and psychological testing (including induced hypnosis) in order to prepare them for what they may encounter in Area X.  Told from the viewpoint of the biologist, Annihilation possesses qualities of several literary genres, from psychological dramas to horror to something that defies quick categorization.

VanderMeer carefully doles out information throughout the narrative.  We quickly see over the course of a handful of days the dissolution of the twelfth expedition, but it is within those scant number of days that so many events occur.  VanderMeer does not set out to explain these events.  Rather, what occurs is an interesting series of narrative loops, as discoveries trigger flashbacks, mostly to the biologist's recent past and her relationship with her husband, a medic who was a member of the eleventh expedition.  As the narrative switches seamlessly between the (recent) past and present, there are some interesting clues that are found within this "tower" (some viewed it as a tunnel of sorts) near the expedition's base camp.  The reader encounters things in transition:  former habitations transforming back to a more "pristine" state, wildlife that seems to bear signs of change under the surface, structures that feel alive and which seem to exude something that the expedition members cannot grasp.  Yet none of these elements receives detailed explanations.  Instead, like the black box that each member carries, there is the sense that their purpose is not known, only that if a flashing red light comes on, it is best to high-tail it out of there.

Some reviewers have compared Annihilation to works by H.P. Lovecraft or to the Strugatsky brothers' Roadside Picnic.  Yet I found little of these within VanderMeer's tale.  If anything, the narrator reminds me more of Joseph Conrad's Marlow in Heart of Darkness in the way that she outlines the natural setting and provides a rolling series of contrasts between events prior to and after entering Area X that serve to deepen this sense of uncanny weirdness that is transpiring.  Yet what ultimately inspired the structure of the tale pales in comparison to how it is executed and in Annihilation VanderMeer has created something that feels at first familiar, whether it be in the human relationships discussed or the natural environment, before events careen toward something that feels in turn threatening and enticing. 

The climax is difficult to describe.  It is an encounter, of sorts, but it does not solve any mysteries cast up over the course of the novel.  If anything, it deepens them, furthering this sense that something beyond our ken is occurring and that what is important is not so much what we know but how we try to create patterns into which these uncanny events (and creatures) are placed.  There is a comfort to categorizations, which is why Annihilation's steadfast refusal to create such "safe" boxes makes this a fascinating opener to a very promising series.

Characterization is of paramount importance in stories such as this and the biologist is a fascinating character in that she is a very dynamic character in spite of the fact that she never really reveals herself to us.  We see how she changes and the transitions through which she passes in order to understand her husband and what he might have encountered there in Area X, but she herself manages to avoid scrying.  At novel's end, she is still in possession of her mysteries, as she continues to press on into the wild in search for more information about her husband and why Area X and its "tower" and distant lighthouse have come to the threshold of transition.

Although the second novel, Authority, will likely reveal some of these kept secrets, Annihilation ends on a pitch-perfect note:  much has occurred within it, but explanations are still left hanging in the balance for readers who want to puzzle out just what the twelfth expedition and its predecessors encountered there.  Everything seems to be in a state of flux, from the creatures within to the biologist herself.  It is this unsettling uncanny state of transition that leaves this reader eager to read more of this excellently-written opening novel.  Highly recommended.

Best of 2013: Three Books That Weren't Able to be Read in Time for Consideration

It is always inevitable, that no matter how much I try to plan reads ahead of time or how fast I can read, that there are always books that fly under my radar until it is too late in the year to read them or that something comes up in the way of me getting around to reading it before the rush of the holidays and the year-end posts (and the last-minute reads that I do manage to cram in, sometimes minutes before I do write-ups on various categories).

I just finished reading my 400th and last book for the year and have met or surpassed every single reading goal that I set for 2013.  That reading list will be posted later today if I have time or (more likely) on Wednesday afternoon before I go to work.  But here are three books (one I purchased last week, the other is arriving by UPS today, and the third I've had on my shelf for two months, awaiting the time that I can go through it carefully to see which elements I can lift and alter in case I have to teach English as well as ESL in the upcoming semester) that likely would have garnered at least some consideration for the category shortlists, if not the Top 25 itself:

3.  Shamsur Rahman Faruqi, The Mirror of Beauty

I had this book recommended to me on Twitter on Christmas night by Musharraf Ali Farooqi (2012 Man Asian Prize finalist; review here) and the premise is very promising for this novel that was only just recently released in the US in English translation from Urdu.  Hardcover copy should arrive today.

2.  Michael Cisco, Member

I think Cisco is one of the finest writers writing in the English language today, so it was to my great chagrin that it wasn't until a week or so ago (I believe it was on a Facebook post by Jeff VanderMeer) that I learned that Member had been out since mid-October.  Just not enough time to read it before the new year, alas, as I wouldn't have been surprised if it would crack my Top 25 list if I had somehow had the time to read it.

1.  Jeff VanderMeer, Wonderbook

I have been very curious about this "fully illustrated writing book" ever since Jeff started talking about it around two years ago.  A casual thumbing through has revealed quite a few interesting lines of thought when it comes to the art and craft of writing, but this book deserves much more time from me than I have been able to manage during the past two months.  It will be read in small segments during the early months of 2014 and I might just take a few notes to see how I could apply it in the classroom if I were to teach English/writing full-time again.

The Third Bear Carnival: The Use of "Voice" in Jeff VanderMeer's "The Quickening" and "Lost"

This critical essay is my contribution to The Third Bear Carnival that Matthew Cheney is hosting this month in honor of Jeff VanderMeer's second short story collection, The Third Bear.  Click on the link above for more details on this, plus click on this link to read Matt's take on "The Quickening."

Surrealist writing often can be the hardest literature for a reader to process.  Not only does the reader have to retrain himself to avoid disparaging reactions to the oft-fractured narratives because they run counter to received conventions on what is “proper” writing, but she can also find it difficult to find a “center” around which she can “ground” the narrative and begin to process what is transpiring.  Although the best surrealist narratives frequently do not have traditional plot progressions or characterizations, they often do tend to have something, whether it be a narrative “voice” that, whether or not it is attached to a particular character, helps the reader “ground” himself in relation to a narrative that usually is anything but predictable.

Too often recently, I have read works where the authors have created these wild, crazy, manic settings, but regardless of how much talent they might have in creating an atmosphere or springing narrative series, often their stories fall flat because they do not “ground” the narrative.  There is nothing around which I can wrap my mind; zaniness for the sake of being zany can only carry a story so far.  Often, there needs to be something to tug the reader in, to make that reader go beyond the fractured, surrealist narrative surface in an attempt to discover something deeper about that work.

One author who manages to grab my attention in this fashion is Jeff VanderMeer.  Well before I got to know and work with him, I was (and still am) an admirer of how well he grounds his characters in settings that are anything but normal.  In reading his second short story collection, The Third Bear (released this month), I was enthralled by how he develops voice and character in his short fiction.  In this short piece, I want to focus on two stories from that collection:  “The Quickening,” which is published for the first time in this collection, and “Lost,” which originally appeared in 2005 in TEL:  Stories.

“The Quickening” is, on the surface, a talking rabbit story, or rather a story about a talking rabbit that rarely talks and who sometimes denies that he is a rabbit at all.  Fascinating as Sensio the talking rabbit may be, what I really noticed about this story was how around all of this strangeness surrounding the rabbit, there is a very different tale being told by the first-person narrator, Rachel.  Here is a representative quote that illustrates this second story contained within the first:

“That’s him,” Aunt Etta said, as if Sensio were her rabbit and not mine.  Shameful, but that’s what I felt that long-ago day:  Sensio is mine, not hers.  I was twelve in 1955, and big for my age, with broad shoulders that made me look hunched over.  I did chores around the orange groves.  I helped to get water from the well.  I’d driven the tractor.  In the season, I’d even harvested the oranges, just for fun, alongside the sweating, watchful migrant workers, who had no choice.  But I was still a kid, and as Aunt Etta put Sensio down and bound him to the post I’d pounded in the day before, all I could think was that Aunt Etta had no right to do anything with him.

“Do you have to tie him up like that,’ the photographer asked Aunt Etta, but not in a caring way.  He reached down to ruffle my hair and wink at me.  I flinched away from him, wrinkling up my nose.  People were always touching my head because of my curly red hair, and I hated it.”

Around this rabbit, who may or may not talk, is the story of young Rachel and how she sees the world in the Florida of the 1950s.  VanderMeer does not switch over to Rachel’s story from Sensio’s, rather the non-talkative talking rabbit’s tale becomes so intertwined with Rachel’s that the strangeness of one infects the brutally mundane coming of age tale, creating an amalgam that is all the more effective because while it contains elements of the quotidian, it also contains surprises; while there are some bizarre twists, these twists serve to frame characters who benefit from the weirdness that occurs.  If Rachel did not have a strong “voice,” Sensio’s tale in turn might not have carried as much meaning as it otherwise does.

Narrative voice also plays a large role in framing “Lost.”  This time, the narrator does not reveal his backstory, nor even his name.  The story begins with a simple question, which begets a complex response:

“Are you lost?” it says to me in its gravelly moan of a voice and for a long moment I can’t answer.  I’m thinking of how I got here and what that might mean and how to frame an answer and wondering why the answer that came to mind immediately seems caught in my throat like a physical form of fear, and that thought leads to this:  remembering the line of color that brought me here:  the spray of emerald-velvet-burgundy-chocolate mushrooms suddenly appearing on the old stone wall where yesterday there had been nothing, and me on my way to the university to teach yet another dead-end night class, dusk coming on, but somehow the spray, splay of mushrooms spared that lack of light; something about the way the runnels and patches of exposed white understone contrasted with the gray that brought me out of my thoughts of debt and a problem student named Jenna, who had become my problem, really, and I just

stopped.

right there. 

At first glance, this story seems to begin with a flashback that folds in upon itself, going further and further into a non-linear time, where mushroom growths collide against the apparent specter of a student named Jenna.  It is one thing to write complex, Ouroboros-like sentences that spiral around the narrative until their ends join together.  That is not hard to accomplish.  What is much more difficult to accomplish is to create a haunting, self-recriminating atmosphere so quickly utilizing such a method.  Yet this is what VanderMeer accomplishes with this.  The nameless male narrator stands at the heart of this weirdness, represented in the narrative form as well as in the events described in such an unusual pattern, and this narrator’s story is interesting.  Who is he?  Why is he having such thoughts?  What does it mean for him to be asked if he were lost?  Will there be a resolution of sorts to this?


These were the questions that occurred to me as I read this short, six-page story.  The weirdness of the situation was made both more strange and yet more understandable because of the narrator’s voice.  The narrative is grounded around him and since his character has such a strong voice, the rest of the story worked well for me as a result.  Too often a writer might try to craft a strange situation, but fail to provide a character or situation that accentuates and furthers that weirdness due to their own unique characteristics.  VanderMeer succeeds well in this two stories, just as he does in virtually all of the stories found within The Third Bear, because his characters’ voices contain strong counter-rhythms to the surrealist weirdness that envelops them.  It is this balancing of the two that makes his stories so enjoyable for me to read.
 

World Cup of Fiction: Interesting Idea over at Ecstatic Days

Read this about an hour ago at Jeff VanderMeer's blog where he queried about the possibility of people setting up a sort of "World Cup of Fiction" for the countries currently playing.  He's leaving the rules up to each blog that wants to participate and seeing how much I love watching the World Cup and reading fiction, I'm going to participate.

What I think I'll do, now that it's nearing the end of the initial group matches, is do write-ups for the countries playing that day (usually 3/day).  I will look at the fiction I own (or have heard of, at least), write an analysis, using pseudo-sports talk, of the strengths/weaknesses of that country compared to the other and then "predict" a winner of that literary/sports match. This should be fun, especially for those countries about which I know nothing of their literary heritage.

For those worrying that these posts might flood their RSS feeds, I'm containing all three matches in a single daily post, with other non-World Cup material interspersed between these daily posts.

Nebula Awards site interview I conducted with Jeff VanderMeer is now live

This is more of a coda than a second full-length interview, but do visit the Nebula Awards site and read the interview (and perhaps click on the link there or the one to the right under the Interviews category to read the earlier interview).

Thanks again to Jeff for conducting this, especially considering the time constraints both he and I were under at the time when we did this short interview.  In the next few weeks, there should also be interviews going live there that I conducted with N.K. Jemisin and Rachel Swirsky.

Limited-Edition Book Porn: Jeff Vandermeer's Finch

Was too tired to post this yesterday, but my copy of the ultra-limited edition version of Jeff VanderMeer's Finch arrived in the mail.  For those curious about the $110 version, the following pictures illustrate what I received.  The line quoted on the jacket was excised from the final text.  I received copy #30.  Love the gold cover, by the way.  Book is solid and opens easily.  Very nice to hold.

Exclusive to the Heretic Edition is a 22 page chapbook that outlines the original story that morphed into Finch.  Good story, but I believe I prefer the final version much more.  Also included was the soundtrack to the novel, composed by Murder by Death.  Very good, atmospheric instrumental music.

Finally, here are two little extras: an Ambergris-inspired beer label sticker and a letter written on a special letterhead. Nice touches, but the other extras were the reason that I bought this limited-edition.

Was it worth $110? It depends on how much of a fan of an author's work you are. For me, it was worth the money, especially since I have hardcovers of the other two Ambergris Cycle novels (including the limited-edition for Shriek:  An Afterword that was published last year).  Hopefully, others purchasing this or the $50 other limited-edition version will find satisfaction in their purchases.

Jeff VanderMeer, Finch

Wyte stopped walking, faced him.  Finch had his back to a crumbling wall veined through with fungus so blue it looked black.  An overlay of scattered bullet holes.  Across the street, a laughing pack of Partials shoved a couple of prisoners ahead of them.  A middle-aged bearded man with a bandage across his forehead and angry rips in a shirt discolored pink.  A woman who could have been the man's wife, her long black hair being used as a leash by one of the Partials.  Just a jaunt around the block before getting down to business. (p. 85)

History, or rather its root of "story," can be a cruel, deceitful monster.  People inspired by one telling of the past may go forth and butcher their neighbors, just because of stories that may not ultimately be "true."  Memories can be haunting by themselves, but when infused with stories from the past that are tinged to place might and right on one's side, who can fathom the depths to which one may be self-deluded or, ultimately, betrayed?  What may seem insignificant in the present may have antecedents that were considered to be momentous, or perhaps the mundane present can give birth to unimaginable futures.  History's treacheries may inspire or crush societies, but no society ever truly remains static or totally free of being enslavement to (false?) memories of the past.

In Jeff VanderMeer's Ambergris Cycle, the various false faces that history and memory can wear are interwoven into the fabric of these tales.  From the myths surrounding the razing of the gray cap city of Cinsorium to the fates of Samuel Tonsure, Voss Bender, and Duncan Shriek, there are layers upon layers of shaded meaning.  What is happening between the lines?  Which writers, if any, manage to follow that old deceiving adage of historians, wie es eigentlich gewesen?  In my recent re-reading of VanderMeer's first two Ambergris books, City of Saints and Madmen and Shriek:  An Afterword, I found myself referring back to this adage of Ranke's.  How can one even hope to believe that "how it actually has been" can be found in narratives like that of Janice and Duncan Shriek?  Who is "lying," and who merely is self-deceived?

In the concluding book to the Ambergris Cycle, Finch, the issues surrounding the relationships between past and present are brought to the fore in VanderMeer's apparently most straightforward narrative yet.  Set around 100 years after the events in Shriek:  An Afterword, Finch is on the surface a noir-like murder mystery.  Ambergris, after decades of internecine warfare between two leading trading companies, fell under the control of the gray caps in the Rising six years before the present story.  The city, always in a fragile state, has become a brutal occupation zone.  Passages such as the one quoted above pepper the narrative.  Humans are herded into quasi-concentration camps or they are subdued by the gray caps by means of hallucinogenic mushrooms that provide euphoria and substance to the addicts.  Bands of altered human quislings, called Partials, spy on the population, trying to stamp out the last vestiges of revolutionary activity inspired by the enigmatic Lady in Blue.  Ambergris is rotting on both the inside and out, or perhaps being on the verge of a transformation may be a more apt description.

In this chaos, just as the gray caps are nearing the end of a momentous building project, two bodies (one human, the other half of a gray cap) suddenly appear, dead.  The gray caps coerce the human detective, John Finch, to investigate.  Over the course of several days, Finch follows leads provided through the gray cap's strange abilities to draw memories from the dead bodies, but ultimately each clue leads Finch further down into a rabbit hole in which reader assumptions about Finch, Ambergris, and even the stories told about various characters' pasts are challenged. 

Finch is written in the style of a hard-hitting noir mystery.  Finch speaks in clipped sentences, often fragmented.  He is introspective, but not overly so.  He has a deadly mystery to solve, while all the while trying to stay alive while some truly horrific events happen.  Since much of the impact of the story comes from its excellent use of the mystery model, nothing much will be said about the plot.  Instead, as already noted above, it is the thematic elements of Finch that make this perhaps VanderMeer's best novel in one of my favorite fiction series. 

Readers who are new to the Ambergris setting certainly can read Finch first.  After all, it is akin to reading a historical novel about the 16th century Tudors before reading a story about the split of the Plantagenet ruling family near the end of the 14th century.  Sure, the prior events, as detailed in City of Saints and Madmen and Shriek:  An Afterword will provide extra context (and contextual mysteries) for the reader.  However, a major strength of Finch is that the "present-day" story is so strong that prior knowledge of the Ambergris setting is not necessary. 

As with any hard-hitting mystery novel, there are several twists and turns, several of them surprising at the onset but logical when considered in relation to the story as a whole.  Finch as a character changes dynamically, at least how the reader interprets him.  What was fascinating to me was how VanderMeer manages to show this to the reader, while still having Finch attempt to deny this for most of the novel.  This narrative tension between what the reader "knows" and what the protagonist refuses to admit to himself made for an intriguing read for me.  Add to that the parallels between occupied Ambergris and what is transpiring in the world today and the story takes on several layers of meaning, many of which I am certain that I am not detailing here.

The narrative, as noted above, is crisp and fast-paced.  VanderMeer does not embellish much here, an interesting contrast to the styles he chose for the previous two Ambergris books.  If anything, there are times that it feels too fast, as though I were missing something even after a re-read.  This feeling was strongest toward the final scene, when so much is happening that it was hard to keep track of everything.  But I suspect that might have been the point of it - to show that there are certain events whose significance may be beyond our ken.

Finch is certainly one of the best novels that I have read this year.  Despite the minor quibbles that I noted above, there is so much that VanderMeer did "right" in terms of balancing narrative, characterization, and themes that I have found myself thinking about some of the issues related to this novel (and to the series as a whole - see the recent interview I conducted with VanderMeer)  for several days now.  Finch is a novel that I believe would appeal to a wide range of readers, from mystery fans to lovers of surreal fiction to those readers who want to "think" and "feel" simultaneously.  It's just a damn good book and I suspect future re-readings will only strengthen my appreciation for what VanderMeer managed to accomplish in this novel.  Most highly recommended.

Publication Date:  November 3, 2009 (US; some copies shipping currently from Amazon).  Tradeback.  UK edition forthcoming from Atlantic's Corvus imprint.


Publisher:  Underland Press 

Disclaimer:  I was sent a PDF of this book by the author back in April 2009.  However, this has had no real impact on my take on the series, as I've been a fan of VanderMeer's writing for over five years now.

Interview with Jeff VanderMeer

Jeff VanderMeer is a multiple award-winning author of several books, including one of my favorite fantasy settings, Ambergris.  The Ambergris Cycle is composed of City of Saints and Madmen (2002; rev. 2004, 2006), Shriek:  An Afterword (2006), and the just-released Finch (2009; review forthcoming).  In addition, VanderMeer has edited several anthologies, with recent ones being New Weird (2008); Steampunk (2008); Best American Fantasy (vol. 1, 2007; vol. 2, 2009); and the soon-to-be-released charity anthology of flash fiction, Last Drink Bird Head (2009).  Finally, VanderMeer also just had a non-fiction guide for writers, Booklife, released this past week.  

This interview was conducted via email from October 14, 2009 to October 18, 2009. 

The past year has seen quite a bit of activity from you. What are some of the projects that you have completed or are in the process of completing that will be out soon?

It's such a muddle in my brain right now, I'm just going to list them in no particular order: The Kosher Guide to Imaginary Animals, Last Drink Bird Head (antho), The Leonardo Variations, setting up Best American Fantasy with Underland, working on the Shared Worlds writing camp, tweaking The Best of Leviathan, starting research for the Steampunk Bible and pre-prep on Steampunk Reloaded (a second Steampunk reprint antho), continuing work on the graphic novel version of The Situation for Tor.com, and others. Booklife, Finch, are out in the next week or two and represent the two central, major projects I've had since Shriek came out in 2006. You may remember more than I do, frankly. There are too many. I need a break.

That pretty much is all that I can recall off-hand, with the addition of your upcoming 2010 story collection, The Third Bear. Correct me if I’m wrong, but aren’t most of these projects due for a 2010 release, or are some slated for 2011?

Oh, also Monstrous Creatures, my nonfiction collection, although I haven't turned that in yet--I'm generating so many essays and articles related to Finch and Booklife due to requests that I want to wait and turn it in the end of the year, so I have the largest pool of material to choose from. Last Drink comes out in 2009, in a couple of weeks. Most of the rest are 2010 or 2011. Ann and I are still working out the schedule so that we don't have too much out in 2010. I need a good five months to finish off the Steampunk Bible starting the beginning of 2010. I also need time to recharge.

You have worn many hats over the past few years, from anthology editor, short fiction writer, novelist, columnist for Amazon’s Omnivoracious blog, and now the writer of Booklife, a strategy guide for writers. Which one (or ones) of these roles has been the greatest challenge for you and how have you adapted to the demands of these diverse jobs?

I was and am a fiction writer first, a book editor and nonfiction writer second, and everything else third, although I really enjoy the challenges and rewards of teaching. I always thought, growing up, that writers always wore lots of hats and did many different jobs within that rough description of "connected to writing". I never thought of it as the idea of being a "man of letters" or anything pretentious like that, but it was an idea that to do so was to be well-rounded. I also knew early on that I had the kind of talent that could be flexible and multi-various if I developed it properly. I've also never shied away from a challenge--forced myself to jump head-first into scary writing situations. I love the diversity of it, in part because it all feeds into everything else. My editing gives me insight into writing fiction and vice versa. The business end gives me insight into editing, etc. The main challenge as a full-time writer is learning how to take time off, because without time to recharge, writing and editing all the time, you can easily burn out. Part of that, too, is playing to that idea of variety. It was a relief after Finch not to have to do a major fiction project for awhile and turn to other writing--even better to have the next major fiction project be so different: a collaboration with Australian writer Tessa Kum on a Halo novella for Halo: Evolutions. (Which means the next fiction project I'm taking on, a long story called "Komodo" is, of course, like something William Burroughs would write after getting drunk with Philip K. Dick and Angela Carter. I hope. )

The greatest challenge wasn't actually Finch, because even if I've never written a novel like it, I have written short fiction a bit like it, and although the Predator novel was completely different, I used Predator to experiment with different approaches to pacing that worked great for Finch. Booklife turned out to be the greatest challenge because half-way in I suddenly realized: Oh, yeah--I've never written a nonfiction book before. This is going to be more work than I thought. Since the deadlines for Finch and Booklife were almost identical, juggling two such major projects was also difficult. I'm happy to say that they both came out as I wanted them to , though .

But in terms of pivoting left and then pivoting again and moving amongst a great diversity of things--I thrive on that so long as the workload isn't insane. I jump into that willingly without a safety net. Just in the last few months I've plunged headlong into new challenges. It's important because it makes it difficult to get stuck in ruts. And there's still a connected narrative thread that runs through a lot of my projects, so there's still a sense, for me at least, of an overall structure that's consistent.

You mention that you enjoy the challenges and rewards of teaching and you have detailed on your blog and elsewhere the experiences you’ve had the past two years teaching at the Shared Worlds program offered by Wofford College each summer. In what ways has teaching in that program and at Clarion and Clarion South helped you develop as a writer and communicator?

I think the Clarion and Shared Worlds gigs have crystalized for people that Ann and I are also teachers, but we'd been teaching workshops and doing public speaking for years before that, all over the world. My first guest lecture was given to a writer's group in Orlando when I was sixteen, and I've done critiques and whatnot since that time as well. I think the difference with Clarion and Shared Worlds is just that they're longer, which is an important difference. It's one thing to come in and do a day-long workshop. It's another thing to be immersed in a teaching situation for one or two weeks. First of all, you wind up deploying most of your "material" and thus have to plan out what makes the most sense timing-wise. You also have to have an overall plan and sequence that takes into account, at Clarion, the efforts of the teachers from the weeks before you, and, at Shared Worlds, how to best use all of the visiting writers. Shared Worlds is the most intense. First, it's two weeks, second I'm not just teaching I'm also part of the planning/management/administration as the assistant director. And while you want to have a plan in place, you also have to be adaptive to the situation and to each student. To that end we added individual one-on-one sessions where each student got to sit down with me and Ann or one of the guest writers and talk about what they wanted to get out of their writing, how they were enjoying the camp, etc. I'd say that Shared Worlds has given me more opportunities to be involved in planning something large-scale, whereas teaching at Clarion helps me by reminding me of the basics of creative writing and by seeing the sometimes new approaches used by the next-gen of SF/Fantasy writers. It's not as pronounced at Shared Worlds, this learning from their writing, just because they're so much younger, 14 to 17, that they're still finding their voices and dealing with basic technical issues , but in having to communicate effectively to them I do rediscover hidden truths about even the most basic subjects . They have a lot more energy, too , and, man, it is tough work keeping up with that pace for two weeks.


 Bob Dylan released an album several years ago called "Love and Theft," devoted to honoring the musicians that had an influence on him. What writers or other people have had a profound influence on what you write and how you write?

Influence is a strange thing. I see it in terms of acquiring technique, because acquiring technique is the process of acquiring a kind of mastery. But that's all it is. You cannot teach yourself voice and imagination from other writers--you either have that or you don't. You can draw it out and develop it, true, but not spontaneously create it through mimicry. So those I acquired technique from include Thomas Pynchon, Edward Whittemore, Vladimir Nabokov, Angela Carter, Stepan Chapman, and quite a few others I'm probably not remembering. I quite clearly recall reading a passage in Perfume, for example, that did something unusual, and wholesale transferring it to the story I was working on. I took it out later, but in the meantime that helped me see how it worked. At another time I copied passages from Proust and from Joyce for similar reasons. To copy is to inhabit the ghosts of the decision-making processes, and from that comes understanding. And with understanding comes the ability to internalize, and then you are simply applying an ever-growing variety of technique and approaches to accentuate and strengthen your own natural voice and imagination.


From what I understand, based on your comments in other interviews and on your blog, Ecstatic Days, your Ambergris stories have had a long gestation period. Looking back on these stories, how much of the stories were envisioned beforehand and how much came to develop unplanned/unexpected branches and dimensions?

By 1998 I had a clear idea in my head of the entirety of the Ambergris Cycle. Which is to say, that there would be three or four books, ending at a certain point. It became three books because Shriek ate parts of the fourth and then the third ate the rest of the fourth, and the end point changed because it always does when you actually write the material. The overall underlying reason for things, the mysteries behind the city, have been pretty consistently unchanged since 1998--which is important, because otherwise the three books wouldn't actually form a cycle, the cause-and-effect would be off. Many, many details changed, though. Many characters went away and new ones came to the fore. So basically those things that had to stay the same stayed the same and the rest changed as I changed. Also, the details of Ambergrisian's surface history were always meant to change as our own world changed. So in Shriek you see the beginnings of war and global warming, albeit possibly caused by the gray caps. In Finch, in terms of the occupation and torture and interrogation, it's the internalization of the whole sorry eight years of American foreign policy. I let these things wash over me and then they come out in the fiction in an organic, non-didactic way.


But with some very key differences between the real-world inspirations and your writings, right? Is it safe to presume that an allegorical reading of the Ambergris Cycle would distort quite a few of the stories’ thematic and structural elements?

Changing the context to a fantasy setting gives me the distance to let that kind of thing come into the writing without it being a point-to-point allegory. I find this process replaces the specificity of situation from the real world with the specificity of the fantasy setting while retaining the universal elements of the situation, if that makes sense. The essential questions remain the same. But I am always disappointed when a reviewer or critic focuses on, for example, squid or fungus, without seeing the core of the work. I think I was most disappointed in reviewers of Shriek who, even though it got many good reviews, didn't even try to "unwrap" the novel so to speak. There's a ton of stuff woven into the surface of the story that takes on various ideas about history and how we process information. Among other things. I'll shut up now.


Interesting point about Shriek. When I re-read it recently, I thought about how personal prejudices and fears (especially as personified by Mary’s later treatment of Duncan) often shape societal views of past history. Furthermore, there seems to be connection between this and what you raised above about Finch and its internalization of actual history. To what degree would you agree with the argument that each of the books in the Ambergris Cycle deals with different facets of memory and the manipulation of interpretations of both the past and present? Or is there even more to the overall picture than that?

Shriek was always meant to encompass as much of the world, personal and public, as possible, and meant to be read from and interpreted from several different angles. It's also meant to be one of those novels that changes each time you read it, depending on where you are in your own life. Those are the novels I read that I love the most, and if I was going to write a sixty-year chronicle about fucked up artists, historians, and art gallery owners, I thought I might as well do it right.

I'm fascinated by those very issues you raise--the fact that most of history and historical theory is so shaped by individual neuroses and prejudices and the need by those interpreting history for us to put their own spin on it, bring in even their most personal hang-ups. Growing up, you take classes and are told that certain things happened this way or that way, and then when you start reading on your own, outside of class, you find that even the supposedly most factual accounts are full of liberties taken by the writer. We live in a reality we continue to spin every day, every minute. We're each of us telling stories all the time, but trying to present them as fact.

Regarding your point about memory and manipulation of interpretations--sometimes that's the point of a section of one of the books, sometimes its a strategy to build either characterization or view of the city. I'd say it's one point among many, that Ambergris has always been, on one level, about having a setting malleable enough to do several things at once with it. For example, here's one of my favorite reviews of Shriek because it looks at the novel from the viewpoint of environmental history: . Another one I'm fond of, at Pinocchio Theory, that emphasizes the element of absurdism and rejection of institutions in my work that is essential to who I am as a human being and comes out most perfectly in Shriek: .

I'm curious about reviews of Finch, because I've set up a few traps in there, but unlike the previous two books, the traps are less obvious because of the approach to narrative and pacing I've chosen. Although I'm somewhat gleeful about having pulled off several experimental techniques essential to the story that no one has pointed out because they don't call attention to themselves in the normal way we think of when we encounter the word "experimental".

Traps, huh?  Guess I’ll have to be careful when I review Finch then.  But going back to what you said about the liberties that history writers took when recording information, wouldn’t it be fair to say that history (whose etymology just means “story”) is perhaps the closest brethren to fictional storytelling, since it seems there are many goals and elements in common?

I'm kidding. There aren't any traps. (Yes, there are.) I just wanted to see how you'd respond, so I could include that in the next novel. (Yes, there are traps.) But, no, there aren't any traps. Why would I do that? Regarding histories...yes, I'd agree with that statement. For most history books for a general audience, you have to find that narrative thread that will bind it all together, and thus you're already weaving story. It's impossible not to, and we all know, stories are full of lies. Some lies are just lies and some lies are actually a kind of truth, though. It's also interesting that historical novelists face some of the same challenges as SF/fantasy writers, in terms of having to create a place that does exist (any more).


Hrmm...I’m beginning to wonder if Duncan Shriek has managed to make his own commentaries to your responses to my question, Jeff ;) Which I guess might in turn serve to further reinforce the need not just to question what is going on within the stories, but also what has been going on with our recorded histories?

History is rife with texts not written or not written entirely by whomever gets the byline. You should just be glad that I didn't let Evil Monkey anywhere near the computer...


In the "About the Book" section at the end of Finch, you note how each of the three books in the Ambergris Cycle vary in structure and approach, but with each ultimately building upon and developing a greater understanding of the other books in the Cycle. Ambergris itself emerges as a sort of quasi-character in these books, seen from various vantage points, leading to a place that to me seems to resemble in some aspects what M. John Harrison did with his Viriconium stories. Was there an intent to create a sort of meta-narrative revolving around the city and how it exists in so many places and yet does not seem to be of any particular time/place at all?


The publisher put the "About the Book" section together, but I did provide them with that description of the three books. I don't think a city exists without the people who live in it, so when you say the city is a character I think you mean "the city looks different from different characters' points of view." I think City was meta enough to take care of all of that, and Shriek and Finch were actually getting out from under the meta aspects of the first book. Which isn't to say I don't love all three equally, but that the second and third books couldn't be meta because that would just be repeating, for diminishing returns, what I'd already done. Shriek: An Afterword is written as it is, sees Ambergris as it does, because of who the narrator is--it comes completely from the character, and the same for Finch. I'm also not sure that it's all that meta to think of a city existing in so many places, because that's the nature of cities anyway, that's how people perceive them. As for Harrison, he's going for something even more metaphorical.


So in other words, while each of the three stories complement each other, there is never a retreading of structural elements? What about thematic elements in common?


Structurally, yes, the books are completely different. But in terms of characters often seeking something they're obsessed with but might be dangerous if they found it...that's a commonality. A sense of the absurdity and contradictions of the world. The subjectivity of anything approaching "truth" or a common reality. The way that the events of history shape character, and how character can rise above history, if with a monumental effort. Finch is trapped by history, in a sense, and yet literally fighting his way out of it. Janice Shriek is trapped by a sense of her own mortality, and struggles against that. Voss Bender creates his own history but then falls victim to his own myth, history eating itself. Institutions, standard modes of thought, critics trying to interpret the personal from the public all come in for a heavy beating in these novels. Imagination--our ability to perceive something beyond our situation--is often paramount, and characters live or die, succeed or fail, based in part on how imaginative they are, except in cases where an imagination is so profound, like Duncan Shriek's (despite his other faults), that the popular conception of reality in the form of the mass opinions of other people will not support it--in fact, actively punishes it.


So in part, the characters’ conflicts are rooted in a larger conflict revolving around different interpretations of the past and how myths are created?  Also, just how subversive would “imagination” (or creation) be viewed by the authorities who are in charge in each of the books?

Everyone wants their story to be the dominant one, even if it only dominates their own mind; when this happens, we call the person "crazy". As for authorities, I think the gray caps are the harshest toward those with good imaginations, because their own imagination is so different from a human imagination. This is what creates the (deeply) darkly humorous bits in Finch, where they just cannot understand humans and the manifestations of human imagination--when they try to lock in on that, they produce things for their detectives like disgusting fungal guns that leak (and, in an early draft, actually bleated and chirped).


Finch combines elements of noir, thrillers, and surreal-like fantasy. After writing Shriek: An Afterword, how difficult was it for you to create a story that differs as much in narrative tone and characterization from its predecessor as Shriek did from City of Saints and Madmen?

Luckily, I had the Predator novel as a palate-cleanser. But I don't think it would've been difficult anyway. It's always just a matter of finding your way to a particular tone and way of thinking about the character as cross-hatched to story/style. I guess it doesn't strike me as difficult to do precisely because I rarely repeat myself, especially at the longer lengths. So I am used to having to start from scratch, so to speak. But in a larger sense, I see something "difficult" as something that isn't fun to do. I love finding the right approach, so the stops-and-starts involved were a joy to me. I love facing a problem in fiction and having to solve it.


Speaking of tone and character, you have stated on your website and elsewhere that Finch, both the character and narrative style, changed quite a bit from the original plan. Did these changes take place because of external influences (such as reading other authors’ ways of dealing with similar characters or situations) or through internal shifts based on your own experimentations with the text?

In part because the original Finch was entirely too enamored of Alexander Theroux's Darconville's Cat, and although I could've eventually digested and assimilated that influence, I think in the process the novel would've become something I've always feared in working with fantasy: too removed from the real, flesh-and-blood world. Also because I workshopped (at Turkey City) an early draft of my new approach to Finch after wrenching it totally out of the Theroux mode and found that oddly enough the delivery system not the content was the problem. People weren't buying things that made perfectly logical sense because their perception of the idea of "detective" and the idea of "murder case" didn't include a Shriek-like approach to style. Once I changed the delivery system, too, I had a much, much better idea of both character and story. It's a bit like being an actor and picking up the right nuance and inflection that then opens up the character they're playing. I never ever see style as separate from character and story, so before I get too far into a piece of fiction, I have to have those things correct. And one reason I think I had only gotten 60 pages into the new Finch when I workshopped it wasn't because there was necessarily anything wrong with the plot or the situations, but that the tone was just wrong--it was the wrong delivery system, the wrong entry point for the reader--and thus I needed to rethink that. The great thing is that in addition to a terse style being right for the novel, writing in that mode has given me a whole new arsenal of approaches to fiction. I feel a certain flexibility gathering, even as flexibility flees my joints and bones in anticipation of encroaching old age and senility.


The gray caps, or fanaarcensitii as they call themselves, are a cipher throughout the Ambergris Cycle to date. What do you make of reader interpretations of the gray caps as being representations of "the Other," of our own tendency to misunderstand our own selves, or of them being a possibly "damned" species? Are there any clues in Finch about their origins, goals, and societal characteristics?


I think there are more clues in City of Saints to their way of life and organization and society. In Finch, as is often the way, being actually confronted by them, having them speak, puts them at a remove. In a sense, you are so close to them you can't really have the perspective to see them. You're living with them and with the consequences of them being in control, but that's a different thing. I always thought the gray caps could be interpreted in many different ways, but I have always first and foremost seen them as somewhat alien living, sentient creatures. I haven't seen them as representing anything. In "An Early History of Ambergris" I did allow commentary on their society to create a sense of "the Other." But as you may have noticed in Finch, there's another "Other", and one I've been waiting for readers to pick up on: the actual indigenous tribes living in the area, displaced in part by the gray caps and then totally disenfranchised by the original founders of Ambergris, in a sense. Their path through the history of Ambergris has not been well-documented, but it begins to take shape in Finch, as they're one of the players in the political and military fabric of the city. If I were to write more books set in Ambergris, that is one strand that I would explore more fully.


I did notice that and how it was embodied within an important secondary character.  Is the near-silence on those indigenous tribes before Finch itself a commentary on the self-delusions and quasi-imperialistic views of the invading settlers who razed the land to create Ambergris?  Or does their relative silence reflect even more upon certain real-world situations today?


I think it's there in the "Early History of Ambergris," but the main reason it's not front-and-center is that I've been focused on the gray caps and it's too much to cram into one story arc. But it's clear from the start that the inhabitants of Ambergris have committed crimes against not only the gray caps but the original inhabitants of the area. I have had characters like Sybel in Shriek who were from the indigenous tribes, but those characters have been integrated with the mainstream of Ambergrisian life. In Finch, readers discover that some of the narrators they've had in previous stories/novels set in Ambergris may well have been telling history by leaving out the inconvenient or the disenfranchised. My feeling is that in the future after this third novel, it's this group, the dogghe and nimblytod who have joined forces, who not only adapt best to the changing cityscape of Ambergris but begin to re-assert their primacy. So, perhaps, in a way, what you're saying is correct.


So instead of readers worrying about whether or not they need to read City of Saints and Madmen and Shriek before Finch, perhaps it might benefit readers more to (re)read those novels after reading Finch?

I see them as self-contained stories, with the history of the city running through them. If you only take away the history of the city from the series, then I guess you could say Finch might take away a few surprises in the previous two books. But all of these stories are about human beings and only work if you believe in the characters. In that respect, going back would only deepen an understanding of the city. Also, despite some of the central mysteries about the city posed by the first two books are answered in Finch, there are many subsidiary mysteries and many other pleasures that are given short shrift in Finch. At least, that's my perspective. I'm genuinely curious as to how it actually plays out. I think Shriek: An Afterword, for example, actually gains pathos after reading Finch. Certain stories in City of Saints gain a different texture, too. But the writer is not the person to ask--readers will decide. There will also be readers who loved Shriek who hate the noir style of Finch, and then those who read Finch and find Shriek a pretentious mess. That's their right as readers. It's also my right as a writer to want to do something different, and to let the demands of character and story determine the style. I'm at peace with that.



In addition to Finch, you just had your guide to writers, Booklife, come out. In what ways has the writing market changed that makes a book such as Booklife worth reading, compared to other books for writers that came out say ten or twenty years ago?

We're completely and utterly enamored of and often enslaved by new media and opportunities on the internet. These opportunities have also been of great benefit--they've leveled the playing field for the disenfranchised quite a bit, given a voice to the voiceless--but they come with a lot of risk. Most writers do not think strategically, which wasn't a problem pre-internet when there were just a few opportunities and more support from publishers for books. It was pretty hard, I think, to really risk fragmentation of your mind in that paradigm. Now you most definitely can over-extend your brain in a sense--you can have so many open channels that I'd argue it's like having a thousand extra voices in your head, with a direct conduit to your brain. Also, people think they can just get on Twitter and Facebook and start talking about their book and that that constitutes a plan. It doesn't. So Booklife is in part an argument about (1) knowing what you're getting into and the possible good and bad permutations of that, (2) being more organized so that you can actually be less stressed and have more time for your writing, and (3) making the kinds of decisions that support the health of your creativity while also acknowledging that if you want to build a career you have to find some time for that as well.


When I read Booklife recently, I was struck by how much the focus was not on prescriptive, authoritative “solutions” that are self-based, but by how much time was devoted to presenting others’ perspectives that seemed to underscore the “networking” aspects of writing.  When you began writing Booklife, did you have this focus in mind, or did it come gradually to you as you wrote?

As a teacher, I know that you must check your ego at the door. Often, what you're trying to do is find the best way to communicate information to a beginning or intermediate writer, and also figure out what they want to do with their writing and their career, and just try to be a conduit to help them achieve that. This means adapting to the student while not abdicating your authority, which you've won primarily through experience: encountering so many contexts and situations in your writing and career that you have this databank of information you retrieve in the right combinations to be of use for the individual person.

In writing Booklife I wanted to apply the same philosophy. The book has to have a single author that the readers believe is being honest and accurate and transparent--and in control of the narrative. But at the same time, every writer is different and there are many different solutions to the same problems. So I have the other voices in there not just to lend support to my ideas, but to express different points of view. In some cases, they directly contradict me, and that's perfectly okay. Sometimes they just present a slightly different point of view. What I wanted Booklife to be was coherent on a macro level but to be full of other voices on a micro level. A good example is that I think many computer tools to help with writing are just distractions or actively a hindrance to writing. But I know many writers who swear by them. Would I be doing a service to writers by just stating my opinion? No. So in those cases, I very firmly make my argument for my position but also provide the other side's position.

On another level, besides Ann, my friend and publicist Matt Staggs and my friend and Australian writer Tessa Kum were perhaps most influential on the narrative. Matt is gung-ho for new media and has a high tolerance for open channels and seeking out allies. Tessa is introverted and has no tolerance for open channels. Their very different reactions to the material not only helped me to test it--they also helped to then shape it by including elements of both extremes (although I hesitate to use the word "extreme" because it's not a spectrum--there's no "normal" position; there are only individuals with their own individual, very valid needs).


You’ve had two novels, a non-fiction guide for writers, several short stories and novellas, a handful of anthologies, and a few podcasts here and there released in the past couple of years.  What do you plan to do to recharge your creative batteries if you begin to feel drained?

Oddly enough, this five-week book tour for Finch and Booklife will help quite a bit, since I won't be multi-tasking, and I always get energy from seeing new places. But, also, the schedule gets easier after the tour. Most of my focus will be on the Steampunk Bible while Ann will be handling the other projects. And then starting in September of 2010, our schedule really opens up. We definitely need to slow down. I'm quite frankly surprised I've managed to do the books so far to the standard of quality I expect from them. But I don't think that would hold true if we continued at this pace. It's taken a lot out of both of us.


I remember reading in Booklife where you touch upon the writer’s need for balance in his/her everyday life.  Are there any non-writing/publishing pursuits that you have contemplated (or are currently doing) that helps maintain this balance?  I know you’re an avid sports fan, but are there other hobbies or activities that help keep the writing aspects from overwhelming you?

Hiking and weightlifting are the major ones. Also going to movies with Ann and things like that. Reading itself--hours of uninterrupted reading for myself--are also highly recommended. As I say in Booklife, if you lack the ability to concentrate on a book, especially a serious book and especially if you used to have that ability...something's wrong in your life.



Thanks again Jeff for agreeing to do this interview.  For those wanting more information about the author, one can visit his personal site, Ecstatic Days, or the recently-opened companion website to Booklife, called Booklife Now.

Fun with signatures

Earlier today, my copy of the limited-edition Shriek: An Afterword arrived from Wyrm Publishing. Apparently, it did as well for its author, Jeff VanderMeer. Seeing Jeff's post reminded me of a little amusing thing I noticed about his signed books, so I thought I'd share them with you (since it's a boring Saturday and all):



From this signed copy of Jeff's The Situation, you can see he only signs half of his last name, which is a bit different from...


Secret Lives, where little more than initials are given. But for...




...my personalized copy of Steampunk, it's a full first name, but after the initial V, it all is a lined blur, but then looking at...

Shriek, one can see a full signature. Almost makes one wonder if Jeff gets bored with signing his books or if each book gets its own special signature style. :P Anyone care to weigh in on this?

Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, Steampunk

Personally, I think Victorian fantasies are going to be the next big thing, as long as we can come up with a fitting collective term for Powers, Blaylock and myself. Something based on the appropriate technology of the era; like "steampunks," perhaps ...

- K.W. Jeter, letter to Locus magazine, April 1987

Although Jeter's letter is widely considered to be the terminus a quo for the usage of the term "steampunk" to describe those tales that utilize and (often) subvert Victorian Era steam-based technologies to create fantastical, adventuresome tales, steampunk-like stories can be traced back at least four or five decades, to the inventor/adventurer/conqueror pulp fiction called "Edisonades" and to the reactions to the oft-jingoistic, racist undertones of such novels. It is this juxtaposition of 19th century positivist attitudes towards technology and our more recent concerns with social relations (among a great many other things) that makes steampunk fiction a very popular and creative literary cousin to the cyberpunk movement of the 1980s.

In Ann and Jeff VanderMeer's just-released anthology, Steampunk, the editors begin by noting the influences on steampunk, its various forms and foci, and how interest in all things steam-driven has created a subculture that revels in brass knobs and gears affixed to their computers or other everyday appliances. Since steampunk doesn't have the attribute-defining problems that New Weird fiction does, the editors instead have structured this anthology differently from their February The New Weird anthology. There is an introductory article written by Jess Nevins that explains the 19th century origins of steampunk fiction, which goes into detail describing the rise of the Edisonades and how by the 1960s, authors such as Michael Moorcock had begun writing stories that took the the Edisonades' entrepreneurial spirit and subverted it, creating tales that were much more complex in their focus and which contained quite a bit of ambiguity in regards to the notion of "progress" being sacrosanct. This article sets the stage well for the 13 stories/excerpts that follow and for the two concluding articles written by Rick Klaw and Bill Baker.

The stories chosen represent a cross-section of authors who are primarily known for their steampunk fictions (Joe R. Landsdale, James Blaylock, and to a lesser extent, Paul di Filippo) as well as those whose works utilize steampunk tropes on occasion (Michael Chabon, Ted Chiang, Michael Moorcock, and Jay Lake, among others). Although some of the more famous steampunk writings do not appear here because they are novels (such as William Gibson and Bruce Sterling's The Difference Engine), the stories that do appear in this anthology are very strong choices.

I usually don't spend much time reviewing individual stories when I comment on anthologies, since I am much more interested in seeing how "well-glued" the anthology is rather than elaborating at length on each of the stories. However, I do want to point out that in each of the stories presented here, we see evidence of the various motifs that Nevins discusses in his introductory article. We see the use of an industrial golem in Ted Chiang's brilliant "72 letters." In an excerpt from his 1971 novel The Warlord of the Air, Michael Moorcock explores questions of whether or not gadgetry employed for destructive purposes is something that ought to be glorified. Some of the tales are funny or satirical, such as Paul di Filippo's "Victoria," while others contain gruesome warnings, such as that embedded in Jay Lake's "The God-Clown is Near."

As I read each of these tales, I could not help but to reflect back to not just Nevins' introduction, but also to the closing pieces by Klaw and Baker. In their pieces, the two discuss what it is about steampunk that creates such a lasting impression on the reader or upon the movie/TV viewer who enjoyed shows as diverse as the old Jules Verne-based movies from the 1960s to the original TV version of The Wild Wild West. As I read these stories in light of the point raised by these articles, I could not help but to remember reading one of the last major Edisonades, the reworked and updated Tom Swift novels released in the 1980s, and thinking about how there was so much that appealed to me then but which now leaves me feeling uncomfortable with the underlying assumptions behind writing such tales. Reading these steampunk stories served to highlight their distinctions from the earlier Edisonade form, while they still managed to capture some of the energy and spirit that makes such works exciting reads. Based on this, the VanderMeers' latest anthology works both as a historical piece that concisely tells the origins and importance of the steampunk subgenre and as an enjoyable set of tales that ought to appeal to a wide range of readers. Highly Recommended.

Publication Date: May 1, 2008 (US); tradeback.

Publisher: Tachyon

Jeff VanderMeer, The Situation

Some of the strangest fiction is based on everyday relationships. From the rituals that people do in waking up, to how we hope for a desired outcome (from praying to the various "rain dances" seen during dry spells, etc.), to how we engage in power struggles along the way of developing personal and professional relationships with other people, when we extract these actions from their "normal" setting and place them in an imagined situation, all sorts of strange, unsettling interpretations can ensue.

In Jeff VanderMeer's just released novella, The Situation, office politics plays a central role in creating an atmosphere that is as haunting for how familiar it is for the reader as it is for its modified humans and the rather grotesque objects being produced in this office situation. The story opens with a description of the narrator's manager:

My Manager was extremely thin, made of plastic, with paper covering the plastic. They had always hoped, I thought, that one day her heart would start, but her heart remained a dry leaf that drifted in her ribcage, animated to lift and fall only by her breathing. Sometimes, when my Manager was angry, she would become so hot that the paper covering her would ignite, and the plastic beneath would begin to melt. I didn't know what to say in such situations. It seemed best to say nothing and avert my gaze. Over time, the runneled plastic of her arms became a tableau of insane images, leviathans and tall ships rising out of the whorling, and stranger things still. I would stare at her arms so I did not have to stare at her face. I never knew her name. We were never allowed to know our Manager's name. (Some called her their "Damager," though.) (p. 5)

Many of us have known supervisors that we would never dare think were human or who actually possessed a heart; some I never dared call by anything other than "sir" or "ma'am." Imagining a boss with such metaphorical features as a non-functioning heart as becoming literal in this story helps to draw in those readers who need some sort of "anchor" to fasten themselves to the story unfolding here. But as easy as it would be to develop a tale revolving solely around an employee's precarious position with his/her bosses, it is in the complex, byzantine relationships that the narrator/employee has with his colleagues that makes this story easy to relate with, even as the strangeness of the company grows with each passing page.

Co-workers are often as much of a nuisance as a comfort, when they are not outright being one's enemy. I have worked mostly as a schoolteacher over the past decade and while the politics there differ greatly in some aspects from those of business offices, there is still quite a bit of professional jealousy that transpires between the classrooms as there does from cubicle to cubicle. Add to that the pettiness that supervisors or other colleagues can have from time to time, and the situation can grow quite hairy:

For a while, everything went well. We built the fish by hand and it took shape with a coherent design. I noticed a certain reluctance on the part of Scarskirt and Leer, but in general everyone seemed happy with my efforts.

Then the Manager finally decided to attend a meeting. Ten minutes into the meeting, she burst into flames and stood up.

We all shied away from her as she said, "The fish was to have my face. That is the last design to materialize in my office and none of what you have done since has been sent to me for approval, or is acceptable to me in any way."

This business about approval was blatantly untrue. I had sent her several messages about the changes. I had used her favorite message method: tiny crunchy bats that spurted the long-lost flavors of marzipan, chocolate mousse, and apple pie into your mouth even as you cracked down on the bones to receive the information.

But when my Manager visited my office later, she professed ignorance. She said she had not gotten any of my messages. (pp. 20-21).

Behind this weird design product and the equally strange message delivery system lies familiar territory for a great many workers: turf battles, the desire of superiors to put their own stamp on matters, and the profession of ignorance when it suits the person involved. Perhaps the oddities mentioned in this story are all the more noticeable because many readers might find themselves remembering how the foreman somehow managed to get his/her name added at the last minute to a group project that they had shunted away to another to handle during the formative stages, only to assume control when the process was nearing completion. Maybe this situation is not as far-out as one might presume from a simple glance at the surface features.

For me, the central theme of the story is revealed when the narrator describes how one of his co-workers has changed:

Complicating matters, Mord, I soon discovered, had also become part of their network. Despite all of his promises, Mord had changed once he moved to Human Resources. He was now partially composed of some large furred animal, almost like a bear. He began to emit a musk that someone told me was supposed to have a calming effect on the employees. He retained his hands, but they morphed to become more like those of a raccoon. His eyes had been enlarged and refitted so he could see at night. In the dark hallways of some floors it was rumored that he whirled around and snarled and bit the air, as if encased in a straitjacket.

For a month or so, Mord had taken to following me around, and this gave hope that all would be normal. He wouldn't talk to me, but he would stand in the doorway of my office. Waiting.

Soon, though, I discovered it wasn't really Mord. It was just a shadow Mord had made of himself, and at the Manager's direction each employee had been assigned shadows. After a time, I ignored Mord's shadow and it went away.

As for the real Mord, he rarely came to our floor anymore, and if he did it was to visit Leer's office. I only saw him if he had official business.

When I suggested he come over to my apartment sometime, he ignored me.

When I suggested we go looking for sparrows, he ignored me.

For all intents and purposes, Mord had forsaken me. He had become Other. (pp. 22-23).

I have worked with people who have changed when they gained a promotion; currently, I am experiencing something akin to that now that I am working in a different capacity in a place with many co-workers of mine from a former department. It is odd, rather unsettling at times, how people distance themselves when new responsibilities are added. It can create a sense of alienation, especially when some question just how you managed to rise to such a position without you breaking any ties or changing from what you were. It is as lonely at any new position as it is at the top. This seems to be part of the narrative undercurrent here and in this scene, where Mord has become "Other," it feels so true, in part because I have been through it before on occasion.

These passages highlight only the beginnings of the narrative disillusionment and separation that precede the events of the last half of the novella. VanderMeer's characters stay true to the form established in the opening sections and as the narrator's situation, trapped in a place where he struggles to maintain himself against the crushing pressures from peers and supervisors alike, develops, the reader likely will find him/herself identifying more and more with what is transpiring, until the end is reached and the silly, stupid weirdness of such a corporate setting is revealed for what it truly is: a wretched situation. Highly recommended.

Publication Date: March 2008 (UK only), limited-edition hardcover; released as a free e-book.

Publisher: PS Publishing