"Annihilation" Q&A with Jeff VanderMeer *Spoilers*

[Penny]

Jeff VanderMeer has been kind enough to agree to join us for a Q&A about his novel Annihilation!

Our usual Q&A format applies - please submit questions for Jeff VanderMeer to this thread and he'll pop by to answer them sometime during the course of the month when he has the time.

Please do not to spoiler the rest of the series. Not everyone participating in this Q&A will have read it yet. If you'd like to ask about any books other than Annihilation, please do so without any spoilers or use spoiler tags, otherwise we'll be forced to remove your questions or comments.

Ask away!

[Katy]

Finished the series recently. Enjoyed the read.

[Ben]

Only read the first volume and been looking forward to reading the others. My question though is slightly off topic - whats next writing wise?

[Tom]

I'm curious to know Jeff's reasoning in identifying the expedition members not by name but by their professions.

[Kim]

Tom wrote: "I'm curious to know Jeff's reasoning in identifying the expedition members not by name but by their professions."

I wonder if it's to keep them separate. By not knowing each others name they might stay more professional, more detached from each other.

[John]

Hi Jeff, I really enjoyed this book!

I'm interested in the climactic scene where the Biologist describes/encounters the Crawler. To me the scene seemed almost psychedelic or mystical.

Could you tell us a little about how you went about writing that scene? Was it especially challenging? Did you start with a definite idea of exactly what she was seeing and/or what was happening to her, or did you try to only think of it in a kind of abstract way?

[Carson]

Questions for Jeff:
How did your idea for the Tower and Crawler start?
How did you develop the idea into its final form?
How did you know when you were finished developing the idea?

I'm always fascinated when writers take a common idea (a cave with a monster) and develop it into something unique and gripping. I'd love a window into that thought process.

[Michael]

Jeff,

The biologist in the story seems detached from the other team members and her husband. She comes across as an objective observer in both her professional life and her personal life. She seems to exhibit warmth toward her husband only in the conclusion when he is no longer accessible. Is this detachment something intentional and did it factor into the decision to identify characters by their professions rather than their names?

Thanks

[Valyssia]

I came up with a pile of comments after reading and recorded them here. In retrospect, I'm not sure that was appropriate. I think what I wrote is called 'a review'. I moved the entire mess to the place where we keep those. *sighs*

Here I will say that enjoyed the book very much. It did a wonderful job of turning on that part of me that loves to analyze things.

[L.E.]

I think dehumanisation is a big theme in this book. The characters have all been reduced to job descriptions and the psychologist tries to hypnotise them so that they respond to her commands like machines. The biologist’s husband seems to return from Area X having lost everything that made him a unique individual (later, we learn that he is actually a clone). And the lighthouse keeper appears to have become something other than human...

For me, one of the most poignant parts of the story was when the surveyor demanded to know the biologist’s name. The biologist saw no point in telling her, but if she had, perhaps their confrontation might have ended differently.

[Tom]

When I think about the book I keep returning to the idea of cancer. Area X is an unnatural place that corrupts and kills those who come into contact with it. It also expands in fits and starts as does a cancer. In addition, everyone who returned from area X ends up dying from cancer. Is there some sort of link?

[Jeff]

Hi! Thanks for the question. Just as certain organisms in our natural environment have defense mechanisms, Area X has an array of defenses against what it perceives as threats. One "level" of that is doppelganger/cell corruption, which is also a way of "reading" the threat and analyzing it. Assimilation is the usual method, when what's indicated as threat is low-level. I'd say more but I might be getting spoilery.

[Jeff]

Ben wrote: "Only read the first volume and been looking forward to reading the others. My question though is slightly off topic - whats next writing wise?"

I am writing a novel about a giant psychotic floating bear terrorizing a mid-Collapse city in an unnamed part of the U.S. I think of it as a Chekov play in the round with Godzilla and Mothra fighting in the background.

[Jeff]

Kim wrote: "Tom wrote: "I'm curious to know Jeff's reasoning in identifying the expedition members not by name but by their professions."

I wonder if it's to keep them separate. By not knowing each others nam..."

Yes--it's noted in the novel that this is a gambit by Southern Reach because they notice when the expeditions go in without names and are conditioned to think of each other in terms of function, Area X finds it harder to "hack" them. Really, those conversations about tower-tunnel are the first signs of Area X's influence on the expedition. Thanks for the question.

[Jeff]

John wrote: "Hi Jeff, I really enjoyed this book!

I'm interested in the climactic scene where the Biologist describes/encounters the Crawler. To me the scene seemed almost psychedelic or mystical.

Could you t..."


If you think of Area X as being very good at mimicry, and reflecting back at you things from your own mind, and the tunnel as being the purest distillation of whatever's in Area X, then perhaps that gives you an answer? I do have a good idea of what's actually down there, and I don't pull any punches in the third book. But here it was clear to me what the biologist would and wouldn't see.

[Jeff]

Michael wrote: "Jeff,

The biologist in the story seems detached from the other team members and her husband. She comes across as an objective observer in both her professional life and her personal life. She seem..."

I think reading the journal of her husband makes a difference in her perception of the situation. But she's also a mimic, just like Area X--she's more at home in the natural world and just kind of faking it in the wider world. For someone like that, any marriage would be difficult. Especially because her husband doesn't quite understand her.

[Liam || Books 'n Beards]

Really enjoyed it - firstly, what was the motivation (if any in particular) behind having the 12th Expedition be all female? Secondly, are you a fan of Lovecraft at all? I got a very Mountains of Madness vibe from a lot of the book.

[Norman]

I just finished the book and am looking forward to the next two. I enjoyed this one, although I felt there were more questions than answers (actually close to zero answers!) so I have to find out more about this place. I noticed the protagonist is a fairly unreliable narrator and probably nothing is as she thinks or reports it is.

I do have one quibble: as a biologist, the narrator should know the difference between venomous and poisonous snakes; she makes this mistake twice. I suspect this is an author error, but it took me out of the story, especially near the beginning. If it was intentional, then kudos for dropping a hint that the narrator may not be who she tells us she is. If not, then is there a chance of correcting this in future editions?

[Jeff]

Thanks, Norman. That's being corrected in a future edition. Although online even on nature sites it's a mistake made a lot.

[Parker]

Hi Jeff,

I enjoyed the book, and am now nearly finished with the whole trilogy. My apologies if this question is inappropriate for the thread, as it also concerns "Authority" and "Acceptance." Did you have the whole narrative structure of trilogy in mind when you wrote "Annihilation?" In particular, the points of view that you use throughout the three books impact the reading experience in significant ways (especially in "Acceptance"). I suppose the experiences I'm having are similar to what you intended, but when starting the series did you have the shifts in POV in mind, or did it develop as you wrote and revised the second and third books?

It makes me wonder what it would have been like to read all three as one volume, rather than one in the spring, one in the summer, and one in the fall.

[Jeff]

I did have the general story arc in mind early on, but the actual particulars of who Control was and the former director, and some of the others, didn't become clear until later. I always thought of them as three separate novels with very different structures.

Sorry I haven't posted much here--my computer died a couple of days ago.