The Hegemony of What Was Real

Frank Falisi interviews Jeff VanderMeer about his new novel “Absolution.”

By Frank FalisiNovember 9, 2024

• Fiction

• SF

• Environment

TO READ Jeff VanderMeer’s writing is to constantly encounter the generative possibilities of the speculative world amid the natural surrealities of our own. His Southern Reach books—Annihilation, Acceptance, Authority (all published in 2014), and now, Absolution (2024)—are a trailhead from which an ecological fiction departs and the speculative atmosphere by which nonhuman, extra-real forces regain narrative agency in an age of multiplying, bottom-lining, capitalist-realist arcs.

In anticipation of Absolution, VanderMeer and I planned to hike around St. Marks National Wildlife Refuge, the terrain that initially inspired Annihilation. Our late summer plans were scuttled two times over by two separate hurricanes, the second of which led to both another essential VanderMeer essay and a lightly surreal video chat: him in a South Carolina hotel waiting out Helene, me in New Jersey, conjuring the St. Marks Lighthouse from memory. We talked about eco-narratology, preconceptions concerning Florida fiction, and the eternal merits of getting lost.

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FRANK FALISI: I loved your piece in The Atlantic in which you describe writing fiction as a process of inventing worlds. I especially appreciate how few of the titles you mention there are strictly “speculative” fiction.

JEFF VANDERMEER: Thanks. The editor was great, but they always try to pin me down as a science fiction writer. I have nothing against science fiction writers, but if you go in expecting that, I don’t think you really get what you want. The premise—which fits with Absolution—is that books can be fantastical without being fantasy. Other states of mind are fantastical. What’s the difference between something that’s surreal but set in the real world and something surreal set in another world? The style is what determines the difference. It’s the writer’s view of the world more than the subject matter, to some degree.

Thinking about that view: Annihilation feels to me like it’s a little about narrative itself, about what is and isn’t narratable. Especially when the biologist encounters the Crawler, she (and thus the reader) confronts the possibility that certain views of the world may be inefficient for describing certain scenes and senses.

That makes sense to me. I try to perceive the human-built world as the result of hundreds of different imaginations deciding what our reality is going to look like. We think it’s impermeable, that this is the way it was always going to be. But actually, there were all these decisions made by people with different ideas about structures and services. And the world we live in is the confluence of all that. It’s not inevitable; there could have been better or worse imaginations involved. I see everything around us as being narratives.

For Absolution, I wanted to know sociopolitical information about every setting. My research assistant, Andy Marlowe, and I mapped settings along the Forgotten Coast back to colonial times: environmental concerns, African American grave sites, plantations, etc. Because a lot of this information doesn’t exist together. Getting it all in one place gives a sense of all the collective imaginations, including the way the environment there has been perceived. This process is really about all the human perceptions, including the Indigenous perception of a place, its use. And even if it doesn’t wind up in the scene, the fact that I know it sometimes creates a haunting, an echo.

Like, if buildings emanated a perceivable force as a result of the imaginations that created them, we would have a better idea of what a permeable world we live in. Add in the natural world itself and you have all these other layers. Even just lichen and mold, which I find fascinating. In the South, mailboxes will be covered in lichen to the point of it looking disgusting. And you edit that out. You don’t literally scrape it off, you just forget it’s there. You go through a reality where your imagination is editing things out of the built and nonhuman environment because you’re so used to it. During the filming of the Annihilation movie, we disagreed about how weird the fake lichens were. They didn’t seem weird to me, being from North Florida. When I showed Alex Garland our mailbox, he just recoiled in disgust.

Maybe we engage with a similar process of self-editing or selective editing when we read fiction? Rereading the first three Southern Reach books recently, I tried not to read any of the “surrealistic” passages as anything but what is literally happening.

Yeah, with regards to the Crawler—growing up, I was drawn to Salvador Dalí. He studied the old masters and acquired techniques so that he could render reality as reality. And then he chose not to. Even when he didn’t, there are still certain elements of the paintings that display the skill of someone who can do mimetic reality, just applied to this larger canvas with a different purpose.

The Crawler is composed of all these incredibly minute, specific details of texture and appearance. They’re kaleidoscoping—some readers use the word “abstract.” But in actual fact, it is what the biologist is seeing and experiencing. If she has any failing, it’s because she’s trying to convey the tactile experience of constant morphing. That’s a challenge for the novelist: you have to have readers experience it viscerally. You cheat because you can never really be in a character’s head. The biologist, left to her own devices and not required to be the protagonist of my novel, would be doing field notes. But a character is an artificial construct. You’re not including all of them, just trying to get as close as you can so that you’re still creating narrative as opposed to moments.

[James Joyce’s] Ulysses probably gets closest to recording moments. I admire it, but it’s also hard to read because you don’t know what has importance and what doesn’t. To some degree, Ulysses abdicates the novelist’s responsibility to actually choose the elements that are in the novel in favor of some other idea of what a novel is. I admire that as well. Novels are made of approximations—that includes the description of the Crawler. In theory, the biologist might have later done field notes that were more clinical, not this “in the moment.” But for purposes of a novel, which has to have scenes, you get panoply, montage.

Thinking about Dalí—that’s where style comes in, right? Since the first three Southern Reach books, you’ve experimented with different styles. How has it been to return to Area X, having experienced that interplay?

I wrote my most formally experimental novel, Dead Astronauts (2019), after the Annihilation movie came out. I feared that my imagination was being colonized by the commercialism around the movie. I really wrote Dead Astronauts for myself, and didn’t even know if it would be published. But when you do formally experimental stuff, it still requires a lot of the technique and craft—even if it’s repurposed—that you use in traditional fiction. It’s just disguised. It’s inverted.

Doing Hummingbird Salamander (2021)—a noir with very little speculative fiction—before Absolution gave me even more tools. Each new context transforms the techniques you’ve learned. The more different novels you can write in different styles and modes, the more you pick up technique. The more you pick up technique, the more things you can do. I think that’s why Absolution is in three totally different styles. The three different styles complement the three parts and how they interact. There’s some element in the Lowry section of the terminal narratological velocity of Dead Astronauts but repurposed in a more playful way.

For Absolution, I didn’t dither about the approach. Everything came up organically. I started this novel on July 31, and when I woke up from the ecstatic visions, it was December 31 and I had a 150,000-word, completely finished final-draft novel. Hopefully, writing becomes like muscle memory. So when you’re gripped by a vision, what comes out is housed by a structure that gives it form and allows it to be comprehensible as a novel. I consider myself a surrealist and absurdist. Structure is important because I’m always concerned about the visions encapsulated within characters and situations becoming too floaty.

You’ve described breaking into your own house so you could then draw on that experience firsthand during writing. Did Absolution present any of those method-driven situations?

Early in the writing, I recognized it was going to be more fully situated in real-world locations, on Florida’s Forgotten Coast. And so, early on, I took a driving tour of the coast, thought, Cass and Old Jim are going to have a conversation on this beach. So what were the details about this beach that Cass might not know? And: How am I different from this character? Because there’s an element of imagination that goes into the characters. There’s an element of other people. Sometimes there’s literary influence. And then there’s what you bring from your personal experience that you can recontextualize, which is another way of acting.

Going to these places helped because I was writing the novel so fast that, after a certain point, I absolutely just had to let it pour out. It’s also why I hired a research assistant. If I stopped at any point, I realized I was going to lose the thread, lose the musical composition. It comes to me in a series of beats and progressions—there’s music to it. And I can tell when the music is off; I know when I’ve missed a step. In this particular case, even when the middle was baggy, the music was clear to me.

Andy Marlowe saved me. They really became a collaborator. There were images I needed for the divisions between parts, and they’re a photographer and artist. Then I needed translations of these Schubert lyrics. I wanted new translations that actually rhymed (it rhymes in the original German, but most translations don’t), and I wanted it more sentimental, like songs you would hear in a music hall, a local bar. And they were able to do that as well.

Have you worked that closely with a collaborator in the past?

John Platt edits The Revelator at the Center for Biological Diversity. With Hummingbird Salamander, I tossed the book over to him to see if he had any complaints about how animal traffickers were depicted. That’s the standard way you would do that kind of collaboration. But I also had a biologist create the fake hummingbird and salamander in the novel. I had to work with the constraints she gave me, even if they affected the narrative. And that was really kind of mind-blowing. She incorporated in-jokes and allusions into those entries that would never have occurred to me as a nonscientist, because she’d already read the parts of the novel that I’d already done, and form-fitted part of it to that. Things that were actually appropriate to the narrative. When that happened, I realized that maybe there’s a collaborative element to novels, there’s a way to get subject-matter experts intimately involved with the narrative in a way that makes it better than just asking them to react to what you’ve already written.

So when I learned that Andy actually had all these talents, I didn’t hesitate. I knew I was going to need lyrics by Schubert distorted as if a genetically modified alligator could have potentially written them. And they didn’t blink. That’s marvelous, finding people who don’t know that something is impossible or strange. And Andy is local to the area and knows the Forgotten Coast well. When I asked for things that were specific to that, they had their personal attachment to these places, which helped imbue the novel with a certain sense of specificity.

“Florida” never appears in the books, but “Forgotten Coast” does.

I think what the phrase “forgotten coast” evokes is very general. A lot of readers don’t even know there’s a Forgotten Coast. And one reason it’s “forgotten coast” is that it literally is mostly state- and federal-protected land—it’s not that it couldn’t have been developed, it’s that it can’t be developed. It’s very sparsely populated, little-known compared to the rest of Florida. So it doesn’t feel like using the term brings in all these associations. When you talk about narrative, narrative can be encapsulated in a single word. If I put the word “Trump” into a novel, it brings a whole other world with it. Every reader will have a world about “Florida,” and it may be jarringly different from what I’m trying to do in these novels. So, early on, I decided I wasn’t going to mention Florida.

There’s a strand of “Florida Novel” that Carl Hiaasen and others write, about the absurdities of state politics, #FloridaMan, things like that. That’s totally different from what I’m doing. I appreciate a lot of those novels, but I’d be horrified if that’s what readers brought into these books. At a certain point, that preconception becomes parody, becomes just a joke people make on social media. And most people think of South Florida when they think of “Florida.” That this richly biodiverse hot spot exists in Florida, and it’s completely different and primordial in ways that people don’t realize and don’t associate with Florida, is something I’m protective of.

Do you remember when you first saw the Forgotten Coast?

The first time I did the 14-mile St. Marks trail was back in 1993 or ’94. I didn’t check the weather and then this intense storm came up around mile seven; I had to just continue the trail. And this was one of the first times I had ventured to the coast. It was an extreme experience: there was no wi-fi out there at that time, and I had a very primitive flip phone anyway. So I got turned around and had no idea where I was. There was such a deluge, I couldn’t see anything. It turned out I was just a mile from the road—in sunlight, you could have seen the road from where I was. There was something about getting lost like that that’s really profoundly important in an age where we’re so geolocated. I think that’s what first got my imagination started about this place. Because it feels so prehistoric out there. It’s timeless. Even today, most of that coastline looks exactly the same. Partly because it can’t be developed. A landscape can be weirdly permanent.

Or permanent while changing, right? Like it has its own weather, but the climate is permanent.

Yeah, some of the trails themselves have changed. One of the hurricanes—maybe Ian?—switched some salinities. Certain freshwater ponds became salt, and vice versa. A ranger told me the ducks were extremely confused. The hurricane changed some stuff for the frosted flatwoods salamander too: not only did it change the pH of the pond, but there were also all these different communities of salamanders. And, in one place, it made like seven ponds into one large pond. So you suddenly had these communities of salamanders, which literally had their own habits based on where they lived, now in conversation with one another. The biologists were profoundly disturbed at the idea of these isolated populations being in contact, because they had no idea what this meant for this endangered species. And all I could think of was, What if there were different human colonies in the solar system that had been in radio silence and were then suddenly in contact? What would that be like? There are all these microworlds changing within this environment that looks very permanent. It’s comforting to think of, right? I’m imposing something on the landscape because it helps me with stress about other things going on in Florida.

During Hurricane Sandy, a scientist on a local broadcast up here said that these storms register as violent because they break the things we put in these environments. But fundamentally, they’re natural events.

It’s true. It was something I couldn’t put in the Times editorial, because they didn’t want me to talk about rebuilding and how ridiculously counterproductive it is. I had a paragraph about how DeSantis is encouraging this rebuilding on the barrier islands around Fort Myers, as if it’s an opportunity when, in actual fact, it’s going to make evacuation really difficult, and people are going to suffer. We have the ability to renegotiate our relationship with the environment here, to let barrier islands be barrier islands.

When Helene came barreling towards St. Marks, I was concerned for the town, not for the refuge. These ecosystems have evolved over time for these kinds of events. These storms may be stronger now because of warmer waters due to climate change, but they’re still not so vastly out of range of what the landscape was built by nature for.

What’s something that gets lost in the PR of how we talk about these books?

These books are essentially about the characters. Because of the weirdnesses that accrue around them, I think there’s the mistaken perception that their popularity is due to their uncanny elements. But it’s about the characters and their struggles against or for this thing called Area X. Readers get attached to the characters because of a noble, admirable quality in how they conduct themselves with regard to the impossible task of interpreting Area X, which breaks so many people.

These books are about the unknowability of the universe, the fact that religion, philosophy, and science can only give us so much—they only give us a piece of everything. The universe is just too vast for that. What I’ve found really humbling and oddly sweet is that readers have been so invested that they don’t mind completing the story arc in their heads. There are discussions online about “solutions” to Area X, people putting forth theories of what happens, even what happens to some of the characters after Acceptance. I find that incredibly reassuring about the future of literature and the imagination. It’s given me permission in this fourth book to just go for it. Having that readership has actually allowed me to do something that’s not necessarily “uncommercial” or less satisfying from a narrative point of view, but it has allowed me to be more transgressive in the book. I didn’t know that there was such a thing as passive-aggressive cannibalism, let alone that it was going to be in this book. There are all kinds of juxtapositions of dark humor and terror in the book that I hope work for people. They’re also me saying, I trust you because you trusted me. I really do appreciate it. It helps me and my subconscious to not have to worry about these kinds of things.

It goes back to something you said: it is really productive—not in a capitalist way but in an emotional, reaction-producing way—to feel yourself getting lost. Here, we encounter characters who are constantly getting lost. But they keep going.

And I think there’s something compelling about that. I think one thing that fiction writers do—must do, because of the idea of narrative and what the structure of a novel is—is to give their characters more agency than we have in our real lives. But we’re often overwhelmed by the systems in our lives, at the mercy of those systems and other individuals in our lives. That’s difficult to convey. The themes of these books allowed me to be more realistic about agency, which is really what you’re talking about.

And that there’s no one kind of “lack of agency” too. Sometimes it’s not a question of yes or no; it’s that the paradigm is inadequate.

That’s also where narrative lives for me, in different interpretations of the same event based on where you are in terms of your expertise, your agency, everything in your background. I like to locate the truth of events in different accounts from different people because that’s what happens on a daily basis, in terms of how we gather information about the world. It’s something that I think has been laid bare by social media, by the siloing of things. The extremity of positions has laid bare the essential fact that we live in all these alternate realities in the same reality. And “the truth” is something you have to be very careful about parsing. Even in science, there’s inherent bias. It’s important to test the foundations of everything we think. I try to do that in my daily life, and I try to do that in novels.

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Jeff VanderMeer is the author of Hummingbird Salamander (2021), the Borne novels (Borne [2017], The Strange Bird [2017], and Dead Astronauts [2019]), and 2014’s Southern Reach series (Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance), the first volume of which won the Nebula Award and Shirley Jackson Award and was adapted into a movie by Paramount. He has spoken at MIT, Columbia, Yale, and Vanderbilt, and gave the 2024 John Hersey Memorial Address at the Key West Literary Seminar. Environmental nonfiction by VanderMeer has appeared in Time, The Nation, Current Affairs, and Esquire, among other outlets. VanderMeer founded the Sunshine State Biodiversity Group nonprofit in 2023. Absolution, the fourth Southern Reach novel, was published in October 2024.