Photo by Ditte Valente

Jeff VanderMeer is one of the key voices in modern speculative fiction. With works like City Of Saints And Madmen (2001) he helped pioneer the New Weird. His Area X trilogy – comprised of Annihilation, Authority and Acceptance (all 2014), redefined modern speculative fiction and became a surprise bestseller. The series, about a place on the Florida coast called Area X which is transfigured by an inexplicably alien manifestation and the bizarre bureaucracy that has sprung up trying to understand it, is an important work of Weird fiction and climate change fiction. Since then, with novels like Borne (2017) and Dead Astronauts (2019), VanderMeer has continued to explore the posthuman condition with formally experimental novels. He has also edited many anthologies with his partner Ann VanderMeer, including The Weird (2012), The Big Book of Science Fiction (2016) and The Big Book of Modern Fantasy (2020). Now, ten years after the original release of the Area X trilogy, VanderMeer has returned to Area X with a fourth book, Absolution (2024), which is just as wonderful, bizarre and surprising as the original three books.

On the UK leg of his tour to promote the release of Absolution, Jeff VanderMeer was kind enough to speak with the Fantasy Hive.

Your new book Absolution, the fourth book in the Area X trilogy, has just come out. Would you be able to tell us a bit about it?

Yeah, think of it as a trilogy that now has a doppelganger attached to it. There were definitely some unanswered questions about Area X that I thought were worth answering, without dispelling the whole idea of the project, which is to grapple with this thing that’s unknowable. Even though there are actually probably more answers than some think! I often believe the paranoia in the second book destabilizes things, and by the time readers reach the third, they don’t trust the answers they get. But for this book, I was really driven by the fact that there’s the Seance and Science Brigade in the first three books, who are a kind of amateur psychic organization exploring things on the Forgotten Coast. And there’s a lot of that which I couldn’t explore about in the three books, It just didn’t make sense to include it. So I got the idea for exploring more of that right before Area X comes down. This idea of this expedition of biologists in the area 20 years before Area X , and what they do influences how Area X forms. And then I always wanted to tell the story of the first expedition into Area X. And these seemed like disparate things, but they actually came together as a novel kind of a flash of inspiration last year, where I just wrote non-stop for six months

As you said, the Area X books are about exploring the unknowable. How do you balance exploring more of it without destroying the mystery?

I think it’s more that every each novel of the series generates new questions. So I can solve some things in part, and keep that mystery because new questions arise. And I think they’re usually the kinds of questions that readers enjoy grappling with. One thing that’s been really flattering and humbling is how many readers have engaged in imaginative play with the series and enjoyed that space that I try to give them. Just in general, I think I’ve been very, very lucky in that regard.

It’s been a decade since the original three Area X books came out. At the time, did you feel that you would eventually return to it?

I think really what it was is that in addition to what I’ve talked about, I’d always wanted to show what happens with regard to Area X after Acceptance, but I thought that it would be so alien and non-human that it would be hard to really describe. Maybe some other medium would be better to express it. So a novel seemed impossible. But then when the idea for Absolution came to me, I was really energized, because it’s a prequel, yes, but it’s sneakily also a sequel. It gives you glimpses into Area X after Acceptance. And so I was really excited about that, that I could have what I think is an entertaining and fun novel, with more uncanny elements than I’ve ever had before. But also give you those alien moments.

One of the things I love about Absolution, and the original books did this as well, is that rather than telling us what happens next, each book problematizes what happens in the previous one so you get a different perspective…

I’ve always loved that in novels that I read. One of my favourite novels is Consider Phlebas by Iain M. Banks, where the sting in the tail is actually in an appendix at the very end of the book. It changes how you feel about the rest of it. And then I also just like it, because it reflects reality, especially in this fragmented media environment that we live in. We’re piecing together things from various sources, and often our view of things is changing radically over time, because we can’t get all the information from one source and be accurate. That’s also how we build up views of people, right?  So that really appeals to me. And it appealed to me to have this layering of history of this expedition of biologists influenced by Central that really does impact what happens later. 

One of the surprising things about the original trilogy at the time was the extent to which they took off, they really caught a moment in the imagination despite being deeply strange books. How did that feel? 

I mean my previous books sold well enough that I still was able to publish. But you’re absolutely right, they were more like mid-list, the sale numbers. And actually, the thing that’s funny about that is I’m most proud of the seven years I was a full-time writer before Annihilation came out, because that was a lot of hustling! I always knew when I wrote something that was more directly about the real world that I had a better chance of reaching readers. Because it was kind of a lower barrier.

I’ve always had readers from both genre and the mainstream, but the mainstream readers are a little less willing to accept something like an imaginary city. So there’s been more crossover here, and that helps me in terms of numbers. But I also don’t know really how to explain it. I feel like there is an alternate universe where Annihilation sells 1000 copies, has a gloomy, black cover with a lighthouse on it instead of the bright covers that initially came out, and it passes, it’s not anything to write home about. But, especially on this tour, because I haven’t toured behind the books since they first came out, it’s been really revelatory. The number of people who told me they got back into reading because of Annihilation, which is very like you said, unexpected. There’ s something in the narrative that must drive you forward, some hypnotic quality. But yeah, I can’t explain it, and I’m incredibly grateful for it. It made Absolution really easy, because, again, the readers have been so generous that I didn’t feel any pressure in writing a fourth book. I just felt they’re going to want me to really go for it.

You’ve published a number of books since the original Area X trilogy came out. But instead of playing to the mainstream, you’ve written some of your most ambitious and weirdest books yet…

Well, I think it’s more that I can only write what I want to write. Now it’s true that I usually have three or four novel fragments in front of me, and I can choose to work on the one that’s more commercial over another, but I can’t even really tell. Borne over time, in the US, has sold maybe a quarter of a million copies by word of mouth. It did okay when it first came out, but then it just kept selling at the same rate. Whereas, with Dead Astronauts, I literally approached my US publisher and Fourth Estate in the UK and said, look, I just wrote this really strange formally experimental novel, but you are under no obligation to publish it! And yet they managed to publish it in such a way where it did numbers that were comparable to my earlier mid-list novels. So I’ve been incredibly lucky again, but I totally understand what you’re talking about. I hate to keep saying it, I sound like a broken record, but I’m just really thankful to the readers. I am also, quite frankly, thankful that the next three novels I’m working on are very short. They are a more modern idiom, contemporary with uncanny elements and a strange architect, but they’re not quite as strange.

A thread running throughout your work is your engagement with the non-human, the beyond human, the posthuman, with characters like Borne or the Blue Fox in Dead Astronauts. Dead Astronauts is probably my favourite of your books by the way… 

I appreciate that, it’s also one of my favourites. It let me reset after the movie because I felt like I was being kind of colonized by the commercialization around that. Because of the movie, I felt like right I have to write the strangest one of the books in front of me! 

So how do you get into inhabiting these non-human mindsets?

I think first of all, for me, I have to have some kind of logic there where I can write it. So the logic is usually that they’ve been interfered with or experimented on by humans in such a way that they’re altered a little bit to be a little more human. And so that allowed me to rationalize writing from a fox’s point of view. Because, as I joke, otherwise, the fox’s point of view would have been 500 pages of smells and tastes. I’m not sure that is a novel, and I still like narrative! So that’s the kind of thing I think about.

Sometimes I think about the rhythm of the language, like this part of Dead Astronauts where you get the viewpoint of a psychotic duck – which is also a challenge, because most people think of ducks as being very cute, so how can I create the most terrifying duck in the history of literature! But the rhythm of the language got me into the voice. And so having been a poet when I started has really helped me with that novel. Some other cases where you’re trying to do something a little unique with the language, to show that it’s not a human perspective, and you’re still just doing an approximation. There’s no real objective way to do it, but maybe it gets the reader outside of themselves enough that they see the world in a slightly different way. 

That formal experimentation is something I always enjoy in your work. Over the past ten or fifteen years of science fiction, you almost have two science fictions. One that’s very traditional and conservative in how it approaches the world and how it presents its ideas, and then on the other hand you have the stuff like you do. We can talk about this being part of the New Weird, but there’s an extent to which it feels like you’re working beyond the New Weird now…

That feels like a moment in time to me. I feel like it’s convenient for critics to latch on to it. And I think some of the reviewers of Absolution have done so. That’s fine if they need that anchor, but it feels a little reductive. Just because since then, I’ve had a ton of other influences, and life experiences, and everything else. But I was appreciative at the time, because it created this space that allowed me to be published by a major publisher. The books may have not done as well as I would have liked always, but it allowed that space. Kind of like Alastair Reynolds and whatnot in space opera allows this really interesting, creative space for really strange stuff. It was almost like New Weird, except space opera. And I always enjoyed that moment too, because I love the weirder space opera. So yeah, it’s a good enough term. It’s just, especially in  the States, when they ask you about that they didn’t have any idea of the real history of it. And when you Google it, people seem to have made up stuff about how it was generated. Which is kind of hilarious. It’s almost like there’s fiction about the New Weird in a way…

Which in some ways is kind of New Weird! 

Right, exactly, and kind of New Wave…

Yeah! Because some of that formal experimentation does come from the New Wave… 

Yeah, because that is definitely an influence for me. The idea that you could be this experimental, intellectual, rigorous, but also the other things it was doing.

There’s been the big film adaptation of Annihilation. I guess Alex Garland the director probably had to take it in his own direction because that’s part of adapting to a different medium…

I think it’s part of him being an auteur more than anything else.

Has there been any other film/TV interest in your books? I’d heard there was going to be a Borne TV series….

Yeah, AMC just optioned it again for a fifth time because they actually have a pilot, fingers crossed. I can’t say much more about it, but we’re at the point where good things are happening in a way where something actually appeared.

How much control do you get over these adaptations? 

I have to be honest. To be candid, at the beginning of the process, out of respect for another creator, I told Garland that I didn’t want to interfere. Because he kind of gave me levels I could operate at. And afterwards, I kind of wondered if maybe I should have a little bit if I wanted it to be more faithful! So I didn’t have many conversations with him. There was one thing that was a little pivotal, because we talked about the fact he was replacing the dolphin with a human eye with a white alligator. And I was like, there’s never been a movie made of a white alligator that was any good, and he just in a kind of very confident way said, Jeff, this will be the first! But it did stick with me. Why did I not use an alligator? And it may be because they’re a cliché in Florida. Then thought in the back of my mind, I want to write about an alligator and it came out in Absolution.

But with Borne it’s incredibly faithful. The kinds of recombinations they’re doing are necessary for the translation you’re talking about. So there are changes in what I’ve seen n the treatment, but I haven’t had those moments of anxiety.

That’s always a positive thing!

Yeah, nice. I like no anxiety!

As well as being an author, you and your partner Ann do a lot of editing anthologies, including The Weird Compendium, The Big Book of Science Fiction and The Big Book of Classic Fantasy. These have been interesting because they expand the definition of the genres to include a lot more works in translation and work that we wouldn’t traditionally think of sitting so easily within the genre. How do you see your work as an anthologist and curator and how does that feed into your writing?

This may seem like a weird thing to say, but it’s really relaxed me quite a bit. Because I’m very competitive in addition to everything else. But I think it’s useful when you write strange things to do extra! But it relaxed me because, you see – oh, there’s this writer from the 20s; this guy is contemporary, that everybody loves, is basically writing fan fiction of. And you get a sense of people’s careers, and you get a sense of how you don’t have that much control over time, whether you remembered or not, or things like that. And some of your favourite writers were not successful at first and then only successful after they died and things like that. There’s that aspect of it, their lives. And so you get very blasé even about being up for awards and things, and it kind of helps centre you in your work.

But then also, you’re not just reading those stories that you put in the anthology, you’re reading a ton of fiction to get there. And a lot of that’s very good, but for various reasons, is not right for what you’re doing. Or there’s a story that’s better representative of an impulse in the genre. But what that means is that, for me, at least, especially with the Weird anthology, you get a complete Crash Course. And you read it so quickly. I don’t mean carelessly, but you have a limited time to read it. So it forms this kind of sedimentary layer in the back of your head. and that’s very useful. It’s like doing research that you immediately assimilate very organically, and then it comes out. So I can’t tell you precisely how things have come, but it’s definitely been a huge help thinking about fiction, and then probably in my subconscious, things coming out at very organic ways.

You also wrote the Wonderbook, which is a very left field writer’s guide. What was the impulse behind its creation?

With Wonderbook, I just noticed, as a beginning writer, I was a poet. I was publishing literary magazines as well as speculative but what was frustrating to me is all the general writing books only used contemporary literary fiction as their examples. And so with Wonderbook, there were two things. One was, Okay, I’m going to do a general writing guide that just happens to mostly use non-realistic fiction as examples and talk about that. But then also Abrams, after the success of The Steampunk Bible, were the ones who approached me. And that made it be possible for it to be the first Illustrated Guide to creative writing. And even better, they just handed me a bunch of money to hire the artists to get a layout and present it to the camera ready. So that actually was key, because in doing a book that had never been done before, if it had been an in-house designer, there have been no ways to experiment to the point where you get to the right place in terms of the image versus text. So those are the impulses. And what’s gratifying is musicians use the book, non-fiction writers use it, all kinds of creatives find different parts of it. Teachers in middle and high school use parts of it. MFA programs use parts of it. So really unexpected results. I just have these impulses. I wanted to create something playful, and it’s been more widely successful than I could have possibly imagined.

What are you working on at the moment?

So I’m not working on it now because I’m on the tour, but I’m thinking about the Strange Architect Series. Which is in either three or four novels, about this architect who has in this initial house, this kind of strange symbol embedded in the landing between two levels, and then is obsessed with it. It’s meaningful to him. And when his daughter disappears, it becomes even more meaningful. And across these four books with different characters, you encounter different houses that the architect has created for different purposes, and each tells a different story that ties back into what happened to him and what happened to his daughter. It’s very uncanny, and I’m kind of cackling because there’s a lot of misdirection in it. So I’m very happy about it.

Do you have an estimate of when it will come out?

They’re in various stages of completion. I think I’ll have the first one completed, I would imagine, by 2026 And I’m also working on the follow up to A Peculiar Peril, A Terrible Trouble, which I know a lot of readers feel like maybe I was never going to do. But it was just mainly that it was due during COVID, and it just felt like a weird novel with all the manic energy in it and humour in it to try to write during the middle of a pandemic. So now I’m going back to that. 

It was a very strange time for everyone, but I think particularly for those of us who read and think about science fiction. You had what is still a science fiction trope happening around us, and there were the ways we reacted that we recognised from books but also the things that no one ever anticipated, like the rush on toilet paper at the stores…. 

Exactly, all the little details that we got wrong. Well, that’s why I like to think about the novels more in terms of showing the psychological reality of living through something rather than being predictive, because predictive gets you out of fashion very quickly. 

Thank you, Jeff VanderMeer, for talking to us!

Absolution is available now, you can order your copy on Bookshop.org