Jeff VanderMeer's Blog, page 8

Global Warming Narratives: The Dangers of Pushing for Early Labeling

Lately, I’ve received considerable pressure from an individual who will remain nameless to adopt a particular term to talk about fiction that engages with global warming. I don’t particularly care for the term, but there are plenty of terms I don’t care for or I find limiting and in all cases I respect the freedom of other people to use them as they see fit. And with just one recurring exception, other people in turn have respected my right and freedom not to use them. (Any global warming deniers out there take note: global warming is 100% real and human-created. This post is not about being too early in affirming that.)

I’ve addressed in a couple of lectures, one of them up at Electric Literature, about why I prefer to use as few set terms as possible in labeling discussion of Anthropocene storytelling and fiction itself in this era. “Anthropocene” is one I do use, although I’m not wedded to it, either, in any permanent way if something more useful comes along. (I do find the A-word misused sometimes as an excuse to suggest we shouldn’t preserve our remaining wildernesses, which as E.O. Wilson notes in his latest book is a bullshit approach based on lack of knowledge.) Another is “hyperobject,” because it helps to map the effects of global warming while providing a metaphor that can also manifest in a concrete way for fiction writers.

But if I don’t extend largesse to much other terminology, especially not terminology that would identify a sub-genre, it’s because, for me at least, once you do so everything that lives within that boundary is one thing and everything outside of that boundary is another. On an issue this important, the resultant commodification and rendering invisible is a real problem. In part because we are at the very beginning of a narratological discussion and because, just like hyperobjects, fiction that pertains to this subject doesn’t actually exist in a way that a pat label can helpfully identify.

Much of the really interesting observations and theory and analysis of our current situation that occurs in fiction today occurs in novels in which the subject is not the main point or plot of the book. It may even only exist in a small part of the book or be entirely in the backdrop or be a subtext that manifests less in authorial intent than in readers’ observations of an extended metaphor. In other words, once you label some things as pertinent and some not, a whole body of relevant text winks out of existence. I would not want to label books like Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island or Elizabeth McKenzie’s The Portable Veblen or Zink’s Wallcreeper or Ledgard’s Submergence as being global warming fiction, to cite just a handful of examples. But neither do I want to exclude them, because at the paragraph level all four have extremely fascinating and sophisticated things to say about ecology, geology, the environment that in some cases is much more important or radical than entire post-apocalyptic eco-novels.

It’s ironic too that the obsessive and insistent pressure I have been subject to from one individual about adopting a particular term exemplifies the very things that are faulty about the human gaze and human impulses—the very things we need to try to get beyond if we are to save ourselves and our environment. The things we carry forward without thinking about it, that we need to be more aware of, and not give in to. The territoriality, the slash-and-burn ability to believe one particular “faith” will save the day. When what we need is everything, and to put aside our egos, and to share information, and to be our most generous and forgiving selves. This is difficult—thinking about global warming. It is at times depressing, as reports from scientists who have to look directly into the abyss confirm. We should not make it more difficult with petty factionalism. (This isn’t to say that on the issues and solutions there are not a hundred things to discuss and work out, but this is really not one of them.)

In a very real sense, I know that this insistence on a label has forced other writers off of social media or made them waste countless hours or just added to their level of stress. So in a very real sense this individual’s insistence on a set term has been detrimental to the very goals espoused by this individual. More lately, my inability to use the term has resulted in this person emailing organizers of conferences I’m speaking at to complain in advance of my appearances–multiple times. This is the kind of annoyance that doesn’t bother me, but it does waste other people’s time and if I were a less established writer, if I were a first-time novelist engaging with global warming issues and speaking about it at events…it could indeed be more than an annoyance.

So in this context, I want to reaffirm and restate that in  wanting to expand my inquiry and my thinking about this crisis we face and the baggage it brings with it, I cannot think in terms of labels in the way some people want me to. I understand that such labels may work well for others, and that classifications can help us. But for now I do not want to know where the boundaries of our empathy should lie, what fence will end it, or to be able to map it, to become a surveyor of a territory, when that territory potentially lies…everywhere.

And that’s not going to change any time soon.

 

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VanderMeer Events in March-April: Vanderbilt, the Netherlands, Paris

 

It’s a busy few weeks upcoming–with travel to Vanderbilt, and then to Europe for a series of events, including the Dutch Comic Con (with Ann VanderMeer) and the French release of Annihilation. You’ll find all of the details below. I hope to see some of you at these events. Meanwhile, Annihilation movie news should continue to pop up in the next couple of months. Thanks again to everyone for reading. – Jeff

Vanderbilt University, Nashville, March 14, Mon., 7:00 p.m., Wilson Hall 126 (Directions and more info here and facebook event page here) – As part of Vanderbilt’s Eos initiative, I’ll speak about climate fiction and the Southern Reach trilogy, including a reading from Annihilation. Book signing after.

Paris Book Fair, March 19, Sat., 2:00 to 4:00 p.m., and March 20, Sun., 11:00 a.m. to 2:30 p.m., Book Signing events, for publisher Au diable vauvert (Details here) – Attending the Paris Book Fair, I’ll be signing and talking as part of Au diable vauvert’s author contingent.

Librairie Charybde, Paris, March 22, Tues., 7:00 p.m. (129, rue de Charenton; details here) – A bookstore signing for Annihilation

Dutch Comic Con, Utrech, Netherlands, March 26-27, Sat.-Sun. (Details here) – Ann VanderMeer and I will be on four panels, ranging in subject matter from art to horror and more. Check their schedule for times and locations.

Gala voor het Fantastische Boek, Amsterdam, Netherlands, April 2, Sat. (Facebook event page) – Along with Susan Ross and Thomas Ross, I’ll be a guest speaker at the Gala during the Harland Awards ceremony. Earlier in the day, Ann VanderMeer and I will also lead a discussion about publishing and author careers in the modern era, with possibly one other event as well.

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Leena Krohn’s Collected Fiction: The Book Too Big to Ignore

As some of you know, Ann VanderMeer and I run Cheeky Frawg Books. We primarily publish international fiction, and have lately focused on Finnish authors. The culmination of that interest took the form of the 850-page Leena Krohn: Collected Fiction, which we released in early December of last year. This omnibus collecting novels, novellas, and short fiction from one of Finland’s most respected writers took three years and more than half a dozen translators, as well as two designers, to get off the ground. Thanks to everyone who helped out–we couldn’t have done it without you. (Press kit here.)

We decided to publish such a huge compilation because we thought it would be hard for anyone to miss it–after all, it weighs almost five pounds! And since publication we’ve been blessed with so much amazing love for the collection–including from the New Yorker and the New York Times!–that I thought I’d post some of the relevant links. It’s not often that a quixotic project like this one receives the recognition it deserves, and we’re very grateful. We’re especially grateful to Kirkus for posting a starred review to get things rolling, Bustle for putting it on their best December books, and to AV Club for putting it on their year’s best list–as well as SF Signal for sharing the table of contents. We even got a shout-out from the New York public library.

REVIEWS AND FEATURES

Elizabeth Hand in the Los Angeles Times: “This is a writer whose work can rewire your brain, leaving you with an enhanced, near-hallucinatory apprehension of our fragile planet, and of all the beings that inhabit it.”

Peter Bebergal’s feature “Cracking the Codes of Leena Krohn” in the New Yorker: “n when working with fantastical elements, Krohn is perpetually attentive to what different forms of information—intuitions, the Internet, the inner lives of other creatures—can reveal to us about ourselves.”

New Yorker‘s list of “books we loved in 2015,” selected by Joshua Rothman: “Krohn writes like a fantastical Lydia Davis, in short chapters the length of prose poems. Her characters often have a noirish toughness.”

N.K. Jemisin’s review in the New York Times:  “A haunting, lovely book.”

The Mumpsimus’s musing about the collected fiction: “This book is as important a publishing event in its own way as New Directions’ release earlier this year of Clarice Lispector’s Complete Stories.”

NPR.org’s Jason Heller covers Krohn and other “hot” Finnish writers: “Its centerpiece is Tainaron, Mail from Another City, a breathtaking tale told in letters home from a city called Tainaron. It’s an unmappable, magic-realist sprawl of allegorical weirdness and symbolic wonder, an ever-morphing metropolis that wouldn’t feel out of place in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities.”

Johanna Sinisalo at Lithub on Five Finnish writers you should know: “A new omnibus of the best of her beautifully strange, often laconically philosophical novels and short stories that—with a touch of the surreal and fantastic—explore contemporary social and scientific issues with phenomenal clarity of both thought and style.”

An interview with me at io9 about Krohn and international fiction: “What I loved about Tainaron was this mosaic way of putting a novel together, but even more so how Krohn manages to make the most surreal concept pragmatic and tactile. She makes the impossible believable, and often in a way that’s both direct and poetic.”

An interview with Krohn at Electric Literature: “I think that the human brain weaves stories even when sleeping in order to stay healthy and functioning. I often write the stories or ‘acts’ that make up my novels without deciding their order in advance.”

An interview with Krohn at Lightspeed: “I try to be short and clear and rich in my writing. These were the three virtues of a writer, which H. C. Andersen talked about. (I love Andersen, because he knew that everything in the world is living.) Our life is consisting of short fragments, which our consciousness tries to unite. Our selves are the integral part of all happenings. There are no incidents without an observer, and where there is an observer, there are incidents. Writing is uniting.”

Literary buzz about Krohn at Publishing Perspectives.

Des Lewis’s real-time review of the entire collection!

 

EXCERPTS ONLINE

Three Excerpts at Weirdfictionreview.com: (from Tainaron and others)

“Lucilia Illustris at Electric Literature (stand-alone story)

“Gorgonoids” at Lightspeed (from Mathematical Beings)

 

 

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The Anthropocene, Rick Scott, and Malign versus Useful Stories

(Humboldt’s vision of complex, interlocking ecosystems…and the holding pond near my house, where an animal has built a home in the midst of trash, plastic, poor water quality. This animal has no particular rights in this context, nor could this animal be said to be remarkable beyond simply wanting to survive. Given that the world is not at the point of looking like this holding pond–yet–at what point do we begin to realize that human survival depends on maintenance of complex ecosystems, and our ability to create soft tech to fit in with and supplement that environment? Or is that not a story we want to tell? Do we prefer a story in which traditional hard tech imposes human systems toward ultimate control? Which story is more likely to result in success?)

 

This past week, I spoke at the University of Florida’s climate change conference. You can find the video of the panel discussion between some participants here. The video of the talks at the climate change conference will not be posted online, so I’m posting my preamble below, in case it is of interest. The rest of the talk constitutes the core of a book I’m writing about fiction and the Anthropocene–it is more broadly, though, about storytelling in the Anthropocene. As, in a Baudrillardian sense, we move further into a terrain or terroir in which the divide between fictional and nonfictional storytelling is eroded, “storytelling” becomes a more fluid term, and one with possibilities of transfer between two worlds. Please note that this preamble does not unpack the ideas it brings up because they are further explored in the body of the essay and in ongoing notes and chapters I’m working on. Thanks to UF entomologist Andrea Lucky for providing a scientist’s response to the lecture and the Southern Reach trilogy. The idea of putting fiction and science in conversation in that way is a good one.

You can find related ideas and text–especially about the role of animals mentioned below, in my two essays over at Electric Literature: Are We Alone? and The Slow Apocalypse and Fiction. – Jeff

***

I want to begin by talking a little bit about useful and unuseful storytelling, given that global warming and other effects of the Anthropocene may indeed be vast and taken in total hard to hold in the mind at one time.

Yet just as all politics are local, so too is global warming. And we happen to be in a state, Florida, where the effects of the Anthropocene sometimes manifest much more clearly. Florida has a unique environment, but is subject to the usual human pressures of population, with no real sustainable plan for the future, while also being on the forefront of sea-level rise, as recently noted in the New Yorker.

Florida also—more uniquely but sadly not sui generis—has a sitting governor, Rick Scott, and a department of environmental protection, largely in thrall, that showcase a particular approach to the Anthropocene and its effects—and this involves storytelling to a great degree. In short, in storytelling terms Scott and his proxies represent a nexus of counterfactual fiction—fictions spun out in the service of a particular agenda, occupying a traditionally nonfictional space that has become remarkably less so over the last 20 years. There is the world in which we breathe, eat, create waste, and absorb toxins from the air, earth, and water—and then there is an invisible world composed of strands of human thought that makes malign story-telling easier to sustain, for a variety of reasons.

Within this context, Scott represents a fiction that has metastasized as fact—deforming, creating stress for, and living in the bodies of those ordered to carry out missives they know are destructive. In trying to sell the fiction of fracking along with mis-use of state parks, among other policies, Rick Scott is displaying an impulse toward a culture of death, or death spiral, that eco-psychologists 50 years from now will still be studying the pathology of.

As a localized version of a wider phenomenon of denial, representing a kind of selfishness and cowardice in the face of the fundamental challenge of our times, Rick Scott’s directive to ban the use of the term “global warming” and the trickle-down effects of that decision in this state showcase how the way we view fictional and nonfictional narratives impacts the world.

On the opposite side of this country, Oregon recently experienced not the tale of robber barons, but the reappearance of Manifest Destiny, in the form of the Malheur occupiers—terrorists if you prefer—militia members who cling to another kind of fiction as their truth: That there never really were any Native Americans with a claim to the land and that Nature is just there to drive a road through and wildlife is just there to be used, and scientific discovery on the refuge is pointless.

We might think of the Malheur occupiers as outliers, but, in fact, like Rick Scott’s narrative of business and industry, what the Malheur incident lays bare is just a more extreme version of ideas encoded in the DNA of the United States and expressed in what is widely seen as acceptable ways—coursing through the subtext of car commercials, movies, books, and cultural and societal conversations.

Even a seemingly innocuous movie like Terence Malick’s The New World creates agitprop by depicting a past starved of animals, despite accounts from that era of sheer numbers of wildlife that would, to the modern mind, appear ridiculous if shown on the screen. On the micro-level The New Yorker blog reports that some dictionaries are being purged of words about the natural world in favor of words about the human-created world. (Acorn being replaced by motherboard is perhaps the saddest trade-off I can think of.)

We live in a time when dedicated, brave people in the world of science and technology are providing common-sense solutions to some of our problems, which often involve so-called “soft tech” in areas like energy conservation, alternative energy sources, and other areas where a growing knowledge of animal, fungus and plant life is beginning to have practical ramifications for our daily lives. Mushrooms in particular hold great “green tech” benefits that we are only just figuring out.

Yet scientific exploration isn’t without problematic storylines either. Sometimes it’s due to a specialist talking about a subject outside of his specialty, like Freeman Dyson on NPR saying that global warming isn’t a big problem. Other times it’s gender bias—as when a male-dominated field led to the assumption that the planet represented by the human egg played a passive role in relation to the expedition known as sperm—an assumption now known to be wrong.

Even the push for outer-space exploration—the idea that we will one day colonize distant planets—could be said to be about not just the joy of discovery but also, an unthinking continuation of the idea Manifest Destiny—frontiers and settlers. [Note: Essential expansion of this idea in the first half of this essay.]

My point is that without beginning to question mundane, every-day assumptions about the lives we lead and the things we want, there is no path past the Anthropocene—and one important part of that self-awareness is to make sure we are not somehow propagating untruthful or unhelpful narratives.

It is also important to make sure we do not engage with and learn from environmental science and ecological causes through the fallacy of a single story. In the words of writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, from a TED Talk in 2013: “The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.”

Indigenous people, for example, are impacting the narrative of global warming, in part by showing what they value. First Nations in Canada have recently rejected an oil pipeline running through their lands, despite heavy pressure and short-term financial reward. They have also aided habitat preservation, pushing back against logging of old-growth forest, and helped negotiate permanent protection from logging of important wildlife refuges. In Arizona, Native Americans have protested copper mining under lands sacred to them that also have ecological value. Rather than being peripheral to the conversation or in some way thought of as “in the past,” indigenous peoples must be a central part of the changes in thinking that bring us past the Anthropocene.

As Nancy Turner writes in Ancient Pathways, Ancestral Knowledge, “There are compelling lessons to be learned from indigenous knowledge systems as a whole. The processes of knowledge acquisition and transmission and the values underlying–indigenous relationships with other humans and nonhuman species and entities may in fact be key to our global efforts to stem environmental destruction.” And this means in practical ways, not further fetishizing of “mystical elements” by white people.

Human narrative, and what we value or spotlight and what we don’t, both impoverishes and enriches our scientific and historical understanding of the world. And while it may seem optimistic at best to think that better storytelling can have a noticeable impact in the brief 30 to 40 years some estimate we have until the total or partial collapse of civilization, one relief among all of the hypocrisies we cannot outrun is to acknowledge that even as we must come to accept our condition to solve it, we also by our engagement express hope. And fiction, at its best, shows us how to accept and gives us hope. You can’t quantify hope, but you can say that hope exists because of the very act of writing.

As science turns from specialization to more of an emphasis on inter-disciplinary approaches to deal with global warming, the goals of fiction writers dovetail with those efforts. Fiction writers can, in the laboratories of their novels and stories, combine in chemical reaction all sorts of situations in ways that are as interdisciplinary as, say, scientists delivering their findings in the form of poetry in the 1800s or the “philosophical stories” that influenced Jules Verne–early scientific papers in the West by the likes of Francis Bacon and Johannes Kepler in which the fictional framework of an imaginary or dream journey surrounded some sort of scientific speculation.

If environmental scientists should keep in mind some version of Humboldt’s Naturgemalde—or “painting of nature that implies a sense of unity or wholeness,” then fiction writers should as well—in a context wherein the complexities of ecosystems are translated into narratives that try to incorporate useful granularity without lapsing into the didactic.

It is also important in this context to recognize that moving beyond the Anthropocene isn’t just about global warming. There are many effects of the era that may be incidental to or have little impact on global warming that are nonetheless devastating to the planet, to wildlife, and to human health. Moving beyond the Anthropocene is not just about confronting global warming—it is about rethinking the future, and starting over.

In this context, particular areas of interest to me fall into the following categories: Use and misuse of philosophy; Reimagining Narrative, with particular emphasis on: The Role of Animals, De-familiarization, and Combining Vectors.

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My Incredible, Life-Changing Predictions For 2016!

As we all know, authors make great predictors of the future. Looking at anyone’s twitter or facebook page will prove that the average writer (1) has an opinion and (2) has a brilliant, all-seeing mind. Therefore, it’s important for all peoples that we predict the future. Here are my predictions for 2016. Happy New Year! – Jeff

In 2016, potato chips will also be computer chips.

In 2016, 3D printers will create the next boy bands.

In 2016, orcas will run a Land World show with humans jumping through hoops in the middle of a never-ending sea.

In 2016, Al Pacino will play himself in a movie and get it wrong.

In 2016, cheese will be apples and social media will be anti-robots.

In 2016, Lifetime original movies will become self-aware and form a skynet across Earth’s social network systems.

In 2016, novelists will reject all money for their work, saying “it is for the people” and musicians will only accept fish for downloads.

In 2016, Florida’s 20 million people will become one mega-giant named “Florida Man,” lurch to life, and take over the other states.

In 2016, editor-writer provocateur Nick Mamatas will start a sanctuary for baby ducklings and form a folk band playing only “soothing” cover songs.

In 2016, Adam Sandler will make a movie titled Wedding Singer’s Cobbler: Return of the Pixels and intelligent piranhas will feast on his flesh.

In 2016 Marxists and Capitalists will argue about which of their stupidest outdated ideas can doom the planet in the era of climate change.

In 2016, Julian Assange and Edward Snowden will merge online to become “The Unf*ckable Julian Snowden” and rule social media for 12 hours.

In 2016, writer Kelly Link will be declared Supreme Commander of the Northeast U.S. and put in place “stone animal” laws. With ice cream for all.

In 2016, nations will be snapchats and snapchats will run the United Nations.

In 2016, Karl Ove Knausgard will write a 48-hour episode of TV show The Walking Dead, causing members of the Nobel committee to become incontinent.

In 2016, Ted Cruz will be discovered in two-person gimp suit with Santorum, while a gleeful Huckabee in a clown costume giggles nearby.

In 2016, ponies will become unicorns and take over the world, in the process debunking the religion of all bronies.

In 2016, tardigrades will become human-sized and appropriate all glass for their own purposes, leaving the world windowless.

 

Bonus: In 2400 last human brain cell will be assimilated by an Uber Tardigrade the size of a T-Rex…and used to solve localized equivalent of week’s crossword.*

*not Uber the company.

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My Nonfiction for the Year

My year in review included writing two novels, working on some stuff for other media, teaching at Yale and UBC, book tours in Canada, Sardinia, and the Netherlands. My wife and I co-edited an anthology titled Sisters of the Revolution and we published a huge omnibus of the fiction of Leena Krohn. The Annihilation movie from Paramount continues to chug along, with shooting supposed to start in May of 2016. (And, in terms of continuing coverage of the Southern Reach, I think I got the biggest kick out of this New Yorker piece on the subject.)

But I also published a fair amount of nonfiction this year, especially in the long-form. I  wrote introductions or forewords to quite a few books. I also did a few other pieces, like this interview with musician Vernon Reid for Esquire.com (pictured above) and this one with novelist Monica Byrne for Electric Lit.

I’m proud of these pieces–and thankful for the opportunity to write longer essays for various places. Thanks to the Atlantic, Electric Literature, the Guardian, and Slate. Electric Literature in particular has given me the opportunity to talk about subjects I think are important. (Next year it looks like I’m doing an intro for a book from NYRB Classics and some reviews in the spring for the Washington Post, as a start.)

Anyway, happy holidays/new year–and in case you missed any of this and find it of interest, the links with excerpts are below.

LONG-FORM & REVIEWS

From Annihilation to Acceptance – My tragi-comic account of writing and touring behind the Southern Reach Trilogy, for the Atlantic. “The next morning, I get back in the car to run an errand and find the mosquito’s body obscured by a quick-acting fungus composed of delicate white filaments. I am in such a state of superstition, influenced by the novel, that I cannot bring myself to get a napkin and wipe it away. I am not even sure now that I swatted the mosquito in the first place. Is someone getting inside my car?”

The Slow Apocalypse and Fiction – Thoughts on fiction and climate change for Electric Literature, initiated by attending the Sonic Acts Geologic Imagination conference early this year. “Given our modern predicament, readers may soon reject myths that aggregate as they do in many near-future novels as wistfulness for car commercials, for Starbucks lattes, or for a thousand trifling conveniences….Who, sane, ethical, would wish for a time like ours of unrelenting animal carnage, for example? For the dead wreckage of our systems being sold to us as the height of technological evolution?”

The Unusual Mind of Clarice Lispector – A happy discovery this year was Clarice Lispector, when Slate asked me to review her Complete Stories (New Directions). The review went a bit long, which only made sense given the depth and breadth of material I needed to cover. “Sometimes when you don’t care about how many writing rules you break, you wind up somewhere sublime and subversive and original. Reading Lispector, you see this happen with startling regularity.”

Are We Alone? – Thoughts on extraterrestrial life and fiction for Electric Literature, in part through the lens of life on Earth and our unquestioning allegiance to modern tech. “How horrific would it be if humankind reached the stars, landed on a planet, and wound up eating sentient life-forms without realizing it?” Expanded slightly from a presentation I gave at the Arthur C. Clarke Center for the Human Imagination

Are We Alone? SF is as sure a guide as any – A much shorter version of my “Are We Alone?” essay, for the Guardian, that focuses on one section of the four-part longer essay, with some expansion therein.

Epic Best-of-2015 Essay – I took a lot of time and care in crafting the descriptions of the books on my list. It’s meant to be a joyful exploration and discussion of some amazing fiction and nonfiction. “Working on a couple of novels, I closed myself off from the internet for several months and during that time I wrote in the mornings and afternoons, then did nothing but read in the evenings—long, uninterrupted reading that healed a fragmented brain and energized my writing. With that isolation, I found it possible to once again live in my own writing and the writing of others. It was one of the most peaceful periods of the last few years for me.”

INTRODUCTIONS & FOREWORDS

Foreword to Songs of a Dead Dreamer & Grimscribe by Thomas Ligotti – It was a great pleasure to pen a foreword to this reissue from Penguin Classics. “Ligotti’s fiction, temporarily unhooked it from the weird, is best understood as a continuing interrogation of the legitimacy of our modern lives. He is exploring the underbelly of modernity—personal and societal. His interest is in the blight beneath, whether it occurs solely in the mind or is expressed through actions. For this reason, the films of David Lynch and the fiction of Thomas Ligotti sometimes speak to each other in interesting ways.”

American Kafka? – My introduction to Michael Cisco’s The Narrator (Lazy Fascist Press), for LitHub. “These feats depend on a layering that’s extraordinary for weird fiction and is given rare power by the attention to detail in the brilliant set pieces that Cisco strings together to tell his tale.”

Introduction to Strugatsky Brothers’ The Dead Mountaineer’s Inn – A romp of a farce with mysterious weirdness and weird mysteriousness, published by Melville House. I was honored to be able to write about two of Russia’s most famous writers. “Confused? Don’t be. Think instead of the movie Clue or any number of British slapstick mystery-comedies. Perhaps with a hint of the Twilight Zone. Because not only does every man wear the face he deserves, but in The Dead Mountaineer’s Inn the Strugatsky Brothers, creators of the Forbidden Zone in their classic SF novel Roadside Picnic, give every reader the farce they deserve—with possible infernal devices thrown in to spice up the recipe.”

Introduction to Sisters of the Revolution (with Ann VanderMeer) – Ann and I had one co-edited anthology out this year, a feminist speculative fiction volume, and I co-wrote the introduction with her. “Our contribution to the conversation includes the great flowering of feminist speculative fiction in the late 1960s through the 1970s, which created the foundation for the wonderful wealth and diversity of such fiction in the present-day. The entry into the field of so many amazing writers at once transformed science fiction and fantasy forever.”

Introduction to The Bestiary – Ann VanderMeer’s Bestiary anthology needed an introduction, so I wrote a rather fanciful piece for it. “Tales of the first failed bestiary come to us from Roman-conquered England, where a goatherd claimed to have witnessed a wondrous zoological triumph “from the lands beyond.” However, upon closer examination, these wonders turned into a herd of burly goats dressed up or shaved in ingenious ways to make them resemble mythical beasts like the chimera and the phoenix.”

Foreword to Leena Krohn: Collected Fiction – Through our Cheeky Frawg press, we published an 850-page volume of Leena Krohn’s collected novels, novellas, and short stories. Normally I wouldn’t do the introduction for a book I published, but there was so little on Krohn written in English prior to this publishing event that I turned out to be one of the few experts on her works in English.

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Holiday E-Book StoryBundle: Leena Krohn, Anna Tambour, Berit Ellingsen, Michael Cisco, with China Mieville, Catherynne M. Valente & More

If you’re looking for a last-minute holiday gift, or even just after the holidays, I’d like to recommend our current StoryBundle, which features a select mix of novels, novelettes, and anthologies. Much of the content is not available elsewhere right now–for example, the e-book of Anna Tambour‘s novel Cranolin, Ann VanderMeer’s The Bestiary anthology (featuring Mieville and Valente), Egner’s The Eisenberg Constant. Others, like Leena Krohn’s Collected Fiction and Berit Ellingsen’s Not Dark Yet are brand-new releases. Add to that high-quality fiction anthologies from Clarkesworld, Athena Andreadis and Kay Holt, Marian & James Womack, and you’ve got a lovely assemblage of the best in modern speculative fiction. The Leena Krohn 850-page collection pictured above with an author photo is on the year’s best list of both the New Yorker and the Onion’s AV Club. It’s the most mammoth release yet from our Cheeky Frawg Books.

Where does the money from this StoryBundle go? Well, first and foremost to the writers and publishers. In some cases, the writers will earn out their advance from the proceeds. For our part, our cut (as publishers of some of these books) goes right back into research on international fiction and into translations. The expensive involved in translations can preclude them from being included in anthologies. What we work hard to accomplish is the idea that translations in our anthologies are part of the plan every single time. We do the investigative work necessary to track down fascinating and unique voices. We find the right translators. Our goal on anthology projects, to be quite frank, is to cast as wide and deep a net as possible, to the point of throwing our part of the advance into the story permissions pot. Material from this research also winds up on Weirdfictionreview.com, and this StoryBundle serves as an unofficial fund-raiser for that site as well.

So, for this StoryBundle, running until December 31, I thought I’d tell you about three titles included that I really think should be in anyone’s library: Crandolin by Anna Tambour, The Narrator by Michael Cisco, and Not Dark Yet by Berit Ellingsen. I think they’re all modern classics. The reason I group them together in this post isn’t just because they’re in the StoryBundle, but because I think they typify some of the great work that’s currently being done in the fabulist/speculative mode.

Perhaps the hardest novel to describe is one of the most delightful: Crandolin by Anna Tambour. In a medieval cookbook in a special-collections library, near-future London, jaded food and drink authority Nick Kippax finds an alluring stain next to a recipe for the mythical crandolin. He tastes it, ravishing the page. Then he disappears. As the ad copy goes, “The only novel ever committed that was inspired by postmodern physics and Ottoman confectionery.” There are adventures and also clever conversations, there are characters named Falderolo and Savva. There’s also a drunk with a fish, but perhaps it’s best not to mention him. The novel is episodic and wondrous, reminding me of the best of Merce Rodoreda, Rikki Ducornet, and others of that ilk. With a little dash of Don Quixote thrown in, lingering in the background. What I particularly enjoyed was the mix of the fantastical and the science-fictional. Not to mention…The Omniscient (you’ll know what I’m talking about when you read it). In short, utterly original and a work of great energy and originality. “Isn’t a cyclops quaint? And wolves that eat little girls, etcetera?” I’m not at all surprised it wound up on the World Fantasy Award shortlist as well as praised by Ellen Datlow and Lucius Shepard.

In Michael Cisco’s The Narrator, the narrator Low is conscripted into an army to fight against the “blackbirds,” who possess lighter-than-air armor. But first, our hero must play a waiting game in a city of cannibal queens and uncanny dead things, with priests for both the living and the dead. The Edak, strange remnants of a mighty imperial power, must be avoided at all costs. Once his unit is mobilized, Low sets off on a journey that is by turns absurd, surreal, deadly, and one of the great feats of the imagination thus far in this century. These feats depend on a layering that’s extraordinary for weird fiction and is given rare power by the attention to detail in the brilliant set pieces that Cisco strings together to tell his tale. I’ve rarely come across so many instances where I was simultaneously in the moment of the novel but also recognizing that I was encountering images and situations unlike any I’d ever read before–like sleepwalkers that bruise the skin of reality and assailants who skim the surface of the water in armor that’s lighter than air. Yet the true wonder of The Narrator is that in addition to the hauntings and unique marvels of the supernatural on offer, the novel is also an extended treatise on the negation of meaning that is war. The individual meaninglessness of it and the group rationalization of it. The result is to come close to conveying the derangement required to wage war. “An army is a horror. It’s a horrible thing.”

As we enter farther into an era of climate change and environmental instability, the rules for fiction change a bit. The usual attitudes about animals and how we view the landscapes around us will become altered, and some fiction will become extinct or unreadable except as toxic nostalgia. Berit Ellingsen gets the complexity of what faces us, and has found interesting and sometimes startling ways to express it through fiction in her novel Not Dark Yet.  An ex-military man, Brandon, goes off to be alone in a remote cabin in the mountains–abandoning his boyfriend in the aftermath of catastrophe in a day job that involves experimenting on owls. From that anchor, Ellingsen weaves a tale of true character and narrative complexity, one that opens up into Brandon’s past and forward into his future while examining the ways we deal with the ways in which our world is being altered for us and by us. From the astronaut program to sustainable farming, from eco-terrorism to animal behavior, the novel has a sprawling and impressive range. It’s powerful and sometimes surreal stuff, and Ellingsen doesn’t try to provide clear-cut answers or to lecture. More, she follows her character and we come to see the strangeness of the world through his eyes. This is the best work yet from a truly unique writer who clearly will be a name to conjure with for decades to come.

On the StoryBundle, anything you can do is of use–even just sharing this link. We’d love to reach our goal, and we’re close to it but need a little help from friends, a little push to get us over the top. Thanks!

 

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2016-2017 Trias Writer-in Residence: Hobart and William Smith Colleges

I’m pleased to announce that I’ve accepted a very generous offer from Hobart & William Smith Colleges in upstate New York to be their 2016-2017 Trias Writer-in-Residence. I’ll teach one class in the fall of next year and come back a few times in the spring of 2017 to work with a few select students. This residency has additional interest for me because I get to help curate a reading series, be of use in the community, and hopefully liaison for some interdisciplinary project involving the environment.

“The Peter Trias Residency at Hobart and William Smith Colleges is designed to give distinguished poets and fiction writers time to write. Academic expectations allow for sustained interaction with our best students while providing the freedom necessary to produce new work. Residents are active, working artists whose presence contributes to intellectual environment of the Colleges and the town of Geneva.”

I’m very excited about using some of the more advanced material in my writing guide Wonderbook as a jumping off point for discussion and creating a reading list for the class. My wife Ann VanderMeer, an award-winning editor, will be coming with me for the fall semester, although she’ll be working on her own projects.

 

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Toward a Better Vision of the Present & the Future: Are We Alone & the Slow Apocalypse

Ever since the Sonic Acts Geologic Imagination conference in Amsterdam early in 2015, I’ve been thinking about how to articulate ideas about our reality and our fiction–our storytelling about the present and the future. I find myself drawn to consider what is going extinct in fiction and what is pushing up through the cracks to blossom. These are secondary concerns, perhaps, in terms of the future we face in reality. However, as our perception of the world continues to fragment at an ever greater rate and become layered with both the real and the not-real, the factual and the not-factual, the least fiction can do is try to tell some kind of truth or not participate in agitprop.

In April, Electric Literature published my long essay about the Slow Apocalypse and Fiction–inspired by participating in the Sonic Acts conference. It served as both a review of the Geologic Imagination book accompanying the conference and a rumination on the ways in which environmental change and apocalypse is portrayed in fiction. Very often these portrayals are neither truly dystopian or utopian, but in fact just escapist disaster porn, in part because of the commodification of some parts of book culture–the ways in which the broadest visions of the present and future in commercial films and the media colonize fiction. As I wrote then:

Given our modern predicament, readers may soon reject myths that aggregate as they do in many near-future novels as wistfulness for car commercials, for Starbucks lattes, or for a thousand trifling conveniences. On the other hand—suspended in this slow apocalypse as we are, neither raw nor fully cooked—we may soon not accept these things in novels set in the present-day, either. We may begin to see novels of the mundane and modern that seem like they could be written thirty years ago, give or take a smart phone or two, as symptomatic of a failure. The only form of nostalgia not seen as grotesque may be a yearning for that moment in time before we had set upon a course that would ultimately require radical change to ensure human survival or the survival of the planetary biosphere. Who, sane, ethical, would wish for a time like ours of unrelenting animal carnage, for example? For the dead wreckage of our systems being sold to us as the height of technological evolution?

In light of that statement, I find particularly interesting that as my year in reading has developed I’ve seen more and more mainstream literary novels set in the present-day that are aware enough of the larger picture that ecological concerns exist within them at the right level of granularity. You could say that these novels accept the science-fictional present of our world–and many times they do it better than outright SF, especially SF that’s just disaster porn masquerading as mid-apocalypse or post-apocalypse. The counter argument, of course, is that we need escapism at times. Maybe we do. But a steady diet of it serves as propaganda for a reality that does not exist and a near future that is already our present or our past.

This kind of writing is very hard to get right because every context is different and thus the level at which the setting exists and impinges on the characters and storyline is different. There’s always something that you sacrifice because the world is always more complex and specific than fiction. For example, in my Southern Reach novels, the role multi-national corporations play in our view of our present and future is completely absent, a necessary omission in order to get greater complexity and granularity into the examination of the dysfunctional and absurd secret agency exploring Area X. But an argument could be made that this simplification is a problem in the novels.

Another part of what the Slow Apocalypse essay was getting at was the need for a new relationship with our world, and especially with the animals in that world. The new essay that Electric Literature has published, Are We Alone?, speaks to this issue in more depth. It’s based on a speech I gave at the Arthur C. Clarke Center and in altered form part of it appeared at the Guardian over the summer.

Rejecting false information and finding a new path is incredibly relevant to human survival because our current crises are in part fueled by mindsets that see animals and our environment as disposable. But it is also relevant to our search for alien life, and our expectations and assumptions about that life.  Because ultimately we must come to terms with the fact that other forms of intelligence always lived among us and that we ignored these forms and have also terribly abused them. Because this may help us to understand more clearly that ideas like Manifest Destiny that still permeate our society, sublimated in a devotion to unsustainable and endless growth and, yes, a reaching for the stars, also pertain to how we might treat aliens from far-distant places.

By examining the question of extra-terrestrials–which do not as yet exist, in that we haven’t found any–we can examine a wide range of other issues that have to do with how we frame our ET search and what we’re missing as a result. In addition to talking about animals and how we think about animals in wrong or incomplete ways, the essay interrogates our assumptions about the underlying rationality of the architects of the information age and also questions the very drive for expansion, the kind of bizarre imperative that leads to, for example,”let’s colonize Mars” seeming like a foregone conclusion and a desirable objective.

I don’t expect to have gotten everything right in these essays. But as a fiction writer I’m interested in the ways we tell our stories and I want to find ways to dream better, to understand more. The basic mistake made in thinking about dystopias or post-collapse literature is that it’s “pessimistic.” But the best of this fiction–and of lit set in the here-and-now that grapples with these issues–is optimistic precisely because it’s about seeing clearly where we are and where we are going. You just cannot get to solutions if your underlying assumptions are wrong.

I have a couple more essays in this vein that I’ll be writing over the next year or so. I hope readers find of them of interest. On a purely selfish level, writing about these topics is of incredible use to my own fiction, at the very least.

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The Southern Reach: Events in Vancouver and Calgary for Literary Festivals

We’re headed to Canada for a two-week mini-residency at the University of British Columbia–should be fun. But I’m also a guest at Calgary’s Wordfest and Vancouver’s Writers Fest, in support of HarperCollins Canada’s release of a beautiful omnibus trade paperback of all three Southern Reach novels as Area X: The Southern Reach Trilogy. It really is a gorgeous edition.

In Calgary, I’ll be participating in their Literary Death Match on Thursday night at 9pm (Oct 15) and then on Friday night (Oct. 16) participating in a late-night series of reading and interviews with Nick Cutter, Irina Kovalyova, and Neil Smith.

In Vancouver, I’ve got three events, with details on all of them available here. Two panels: Labels and Fables (Oct. 20, Tues, 6pm) and then Weird Fiction (Oct. 21, Wed, 8:30pm), both with Kelly Link and other great writers.

Finally, there’s An Evening with Jeff VanderMeer on Saturday night (Oct. 24, Sat., 8pm).

For the “evening with” I’ll be sharing the experience of writing the Southern Reach trilogy, including the rather dark and absurd real-life events that went into creating the characters and situations in the novels. This should be a very entertaining event–at least, I promise to give you some juicy and candid behind-the-scenes anecdotes.

All of these events are ticketed–please check out the links for details. I think it’ll be a lot of fun and I’m looking forward to meeting a lot of wonderful writers and readers. So, please join me.

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