Robin Sloan
asked
Jeff VanderMeer:
Throughout the Southern Reach books there's a great creepy litany that we hear many times, the one that begins "Where lies the strangling fruit that came from the hand of the sinner …" How did that come to exist? Did it spill out of you in a feverish torrent, never to be revised, or did you polish it like poetry?
Jeff VanderMeer
Hi, Robin! For better or worse, those lines came to me in a dream and I never revised them. Interpreting what they meant for the series was a whole other matter. I did think they had a kind of weird old testament feel to them, and liked that some of the phrases definitely make sense and others flirt with sense enough for readers to be able to bring interpretations to them. But I didn't really realize how weird this all was until I put all of the sentences together on a powerpoint slide for a presentation. First time I showed it, this kind of gasp went up from the audience and I looked at the slide and thought, "Yep, that is *not* normal."
More Answered Questions
Suyi Davies Okungbowa
asked
Jeff VanderMeer:
Jeff, I noticed a lot of plant biology recurrent in Southern Reach, presented in a lot of sweetly disturbing ways. Was it a product of really extensive research (and if it was, what rigors did you go through to attain such knowledge?) or do you have some sort of background in plant biology?
Ali Mcghee
asked
Jeff VanderMeer:
The collapse of the anthropocene is a theme in your works, but they also hold out potential for a transformed human agency. Grotesque shifts still leave behind a residue of the human. Annihilation is on this track with the biologist's contamination. Do these transformations relate to your sense of human (d)evolution? What is gained or lost by leaving behind individual consciousness for something more rhizomatic?
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