Few novelists are as adept at inspiring both fear and awe as Jeff VanderMeer. The author is perhaps best known for his award-winning Southern Reach series. The first three of them areextinction, authority and consentThe book follows a cadre of scientists on an expedition to Area X, a pristine wilderness along the coast of Florida. There, nature has changed inexplicably, and not only has nature itself changed, but so have the people and things that are seen as threats to its existence.
None of Vander Meer’s novels are easy to categorize, but many fall into the tradition of queer fiction, a genre that combines elements of fantasy and science fiction while touting the unknowability of the universe. In VanderMeer’s world, the genre is the slipperiest, the slipperiest, and the creepiest. There, wild landscapes and their inhabitants take on characteristics usually attributed to humans. The plants and the sky itself appear as if they were. clock; rabbits look just like they understand; insects are simply Too I understand.
This month, VanderMeer continues this strange story with the publication of her fourth Southern Reach novel. pardon. Like its predecessors in the series, it’s filled with humor, horror, and a visceral compassion for the natural world. The three-part structure exemplifies the author’s keen attention to detail and narrative structure, which he says was influenced by his interest in science. “I’m interested not only in science, but also in the story of science, how science corrects itself over time,” he said in a video call from his home in Tallahassee, Florida. Like any strange fiction, he added. We don’t have to explain everything because we keep learning new things. ”
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scientific american We spoke with VanderMeer about his latest novel and why he feels environmental education for young people is needed now more than ever.
(An edited transcript of the interview follows:. )
It’s been 10 years since I published the first three books in the Southern Reach series. What made you decide to write the fourth?
I read part of the story I was working on at a convention called Readercon in the summer of 2023, and there was a huge response, which led to this. Over the next few months, I experienced a series of setbacks in my writing career as I became embroiled in the kind of toxic local politics here (Florida). At that moment, the whole idea of the novel suddenly appeared in my head. I started writing it, but it turned out to be crazy. I continued to write every day, morning, noon, and night until the end of the year. It flooded me so much that I had to hire a research assistant, Andy Marlowe, to go to the Forgotten Coast (Florida) and gather more details. I knew that if I stopped to research, I would somehow interrupt something. Andy brought so much to this project. Even if their research is not necessarily published in books, there are still echoes of that research.
I’d like to ask you about one of the most disturbing scenes in any novel I’ve read. It will appear in the corner called “The House Centipede Incident.” I live with several house centipedes. Most of the time I leave them alone because I know they are beneficial and will eat insects that I don’t really want in my house. But they are very, very leggy. Without giving too much away, how did you come to write about what you did with this creepy arthropod?
When I’m writing a novel, I don’t really look for inspiration. Rather, it’s like anything that comes to my mind gets swallowed up in a novel—if it’s appropriate. In the case of this scene, my best friend Lyla texted me and told me that she was horrified because she had stepped on one of her grandma’s favorite foods, a centipede. She called it “Grandma” because it had been in the house for at least a few years. It happened one night while walking to the bathroom in the dark. Her story stuck with me because I too had the disturbing experience of encountering a centipede in my house. While I was teaching in South Carolina, something huge lunged towards me. I swear to god this thing was about 6 inches long. It must have been really old. I love them, but you know, I was surprised at how it turned against me. As I was writing, I was thinking about both incidents and how people have complicated relationships with centipedes and even with people who like centipedes. I wanted to dig a little deeper into that. Hearing about a friend’s actual emotional response is, for me, much more powerful than reading something for research.
They don’t look like normal slow-moving centipedes. they are very fast.
I didn’t know (Publisher) pardon) planned to put pictures of house centipedes throughout the book.
Let’s talk about the people in your book. What made you want to write about scientists?
It basically goes back to the fact that I’ve always been surrounded by scientists. My father is an entomologist who studies fire ants, and when we lived there he studied beetles in Fiji. One of my most vivid memories is of trying to catch an invasive moth in Ithaca, New York, in the middle of winter. It started flying over this raging river, so he insisted on walking through the water. He caught it, but almost got carried away by the current. My mother was a biology illustrator until computers took over. And my stepmother is a lupus researcher. My sister is helping create a safe haven for hedgehogs at Edinburgh University. With these influences, writing about human and non-human intelligence, as well as science, felt very natural.
Do you think you inherited some of your family’s scientific curiosity?
Yes, definitely from both parents. My mother’s biological illustrations and art provided a helpful way of seeing the world. And my father was the kind of scientist who took great pride in spending years carefully building a body of evidence before writing. Some of his best papers required years of painstaking work, but in the end, his careful approach led to some surprising discoveries. I did. These were two very different ways of looking at the world in detail, but in a way they coalesced in me and in my novels.
You write in a tradition called strange fiction. Uncertainty about how the universe works is a hallmark of this genre. Are there similarities between weird fiction and science?
At its best, strange fiction actually does something quite different from what science does. Outside of philosophy, science, and religion, it provides a space to explore the unknown while incorporating all three of these elements. At the same time, this work depicts many things that could be called “scientific exploration” into the unknown, and the characters attempt to learn about the unknown using rational methods. If they did fail, it was not necessarily a failure of science, but a failure of the tools they were using or the composition of the expedition. I think this is very interesting because failures exist in science as well, and they can sometimes manifest themselves in the form of bias. One of the more obvious examples is the widespread belief that the human fertilized egg is passive, and that it is the man who provides the active element of conception, although the relationship is much more complex than that. That’s the idea. However, because many male scientists were the first to study this phenomenon, a more negative narrative persists.
Another outlandish example of prejudice can be found in the following book: penguin It starts out as a beautiful general book about penguins from the 1960s. But by Chapter 3, it’s incredibly clear that the researcher who wrote this book hates this other (Penguin) researcher. He writes about the theory of evolution, and he’s starting a book about proving this other scientist wrong. In a sense, this scientific book is also a work of fiction because it fully reflects the idiosyncrasies of the person who wrote it.
Do you seek expert opinion from scientists when writing a novel?
I read a lot of nonfiction books, especially in the environmental field, but I prefer to talk directly to experts. The way scientists communicate information to you is often very different from what you read in a book. One of my most notable collaborations was with biologist Megan Brown, who came up with the idea for the “hummingbird salamander,” the central animal of my novel of the same name.
Speaking of exotic animals, you live in Florida and have recently emerged as an activist and public defender of the region’s biodiversity. You’ve also started a nonprofit organization to protect Florida’s wild spaces. What do you think is the biggest threat to the state’s biodiversity?
Land is being snapped up rapidly by developers, and with little regulation, the biggest threat is literally who is buying the land. I spoke to Lily Bird, a North Florida plant expert, who told me that there are areas in Florida that are the last bastions of more than a dozen rare plants. Without protection, those plants will become extinct, and about four of them will become gas stations. These plants, which have been around for millions of years, could become extinct because of gas stations. It’s really sad.
Our nonprofit, the Sunshine State Biodiversity Group, is too small to stop development on our own. So what we’re doing is acquiring grants that can contribute to the larger effort. We also address public environmental education, which is severely lacking in Florida, by funding organizations like local 4-H clubs and clean energy summer camps. One of the best ways to bring about change is to educate the next generation.
