Oct 30

Oct 30 Jeff VanderMeer's ABSOLUTION

Jeff VanderMeer is the author of Hummingbird Salamander; the Borne novels (Borne, The Strange Bird, and Dead Astronauts); and the 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 others. VanderMeer founded the Sunshine State Biodiversity Group nonprofit in 2023. His new book, Absolution, is the fourth Southern Reach novel.

Interview by Nirica Srinivasan

Absolution is the fourth installation of the Southern Reach series, which consists of Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance, all released in 2014. At what point did you realize that you wanted to revisit the setting of Area X? What was the starting point for Absolution?

I’ve always been interested in how unresolved things in history or in a country’s personal DNA wind up coming to the surface again, because they’re not resolved. I started having this idea for an expedition of biologists twenty years before Area X forms, and thinking about this expedition actually having an impact on how Area X manifests — in part because of the secret agency, Central, that features in the first three books, manipulating the expedition, and it having unintended consequences later. I thought that that would be interesting, layering that in.

Then, once I had this idea that Old Jim, an operative from Central, was mediating your experience of that expedition and layering in his own thoughts, that added some additional depth, and that began to suggest that I had a novel. It was natural for Parts Two and Three to accrue the way they did, even though they’re very different stylistically, because they continue that story from different perspectives or different foci.

How long did it take you to write Absolution?

It’s kind of strange. I started it in 2017 and let it sit. And then last year, on July 31st, I woke up with the entire structure in my head and all the situations, and I just started writing. I usually write in the mornings, but for Absolution, I wrote in the morning, the afternoon and at night, sometimes late at night, sometimes right before I went to sleep. On a notepad, I would write longhand. And by the end of the year, December 31st, I had a complete final draft, which meant that I had all these rough drafts I’d gone through of a 150,000 word novel. And that was pretty unprecedented for me.

But I had thought about it for a long time before, so my subconscious had clearly been working on it. I was basically receiving a bunch of ecstatic visions. But it is still a very sneakily plotted book, and I think having the three sections to work on simultaneously was helpful, because they’re so different stylistically. So it could feel like I was getting relief from one section, if I was working on it too long, I could move to the other.

I actually find that so interesting, because it really is such an intricately plotted book — I read it through twice within the same week! I feel like this is true of the first three books as well, where situations or even just specific phrases in one book or one part bleed into the others, and that happens so much in Absolution. I was wondering what it was like to plot the book, and plan where this fits in with the others?

Because it’s sneakily a sequel as well as a prequel, and because I have a habit of giving plot reveals into the point of view of characters you don’t trust, it’s interesting to me to see some of the early reviews. I think this is really the way my books work. There’s a strong uncanny or weird element that manifests, especially in this book, in a lot of scenes, and I think that that’s the kind of impression it leaves. Like the other books, it’s meant to be reread, so I think a lot of the intricate plot points reveal themselves, perhaps, on a reread. It’s not an impressionistic novel; it’s a novel that has surreal and uncanny elements. But as you said, it’s very layered, where [in] your experience of reading it, you get all these micro revelations page to page, and then when you reread it, those hopefully become even more intense.

Writing it was actually very satisfying, because, on the one hand, I had this forward momentum of really being driven to write, which is a nice thing to have. It’s exhausting, and it hollows you out over time, but I was really driven to write it. Part of that is that I hadn’t written a novel for a while during the pandemic, and so I was ready to write. Then, there’s always a secret autobiography to my books that readers don’t recognize because I recontextualize it. I just use the emotions from it. And so I was really driven, for personal reasons, to finish the book by the end of the year. Something about it was really imperative to me.

Then there was also the literal layering in of strands of these Schubert songs that I thought were important to Old Jim’s character and to the plot, which created a musical composition. It was not a mathematical equation, but like composing some kind of very layered music with an orchestra, and making sure that all the instruments are in the right places, and that the rising tension of it is correct, and that it’s unexpected and surprising in some places, but it still has the right rhythm. I don’t know how to describe that, except to say that when it’s right, it’s extremely satisfying. It makes the writing fun, pleasurable. And I think that’s one thing I would say about writing this book — it’s dark and serious in places, but it was fun to write. That’s not always the case. There’s a kinetic energy there that I think that readers will find as well.

What was really striking for me is how many connections there are from the previous books in Absolution, but not all of them are obvious. You know, there are Reddit threads that are diving deep into what these books mean and trying to solve all the mysteries of Area X. And as a reader you don’t have to engage with them, but it’s also so rewarding if you want to. There’s so many different approaches to reading the same book.

I think what was very liberating about writing Absolution, and maybe more liberating than if I’d been writing a standalone novel in a totally different setting that I hadn’t written before, is that readers have been so generous with their imaginations in the way that you’re talking about. It gave me the liberty to just go for it in this novel. And I read those Reddit threads, and I feel very lucky.

As a young writer, I don’t think I left as much room for the reader’s imagination. I didn’t really understand that relationship. Later on, I started leaving more room, leaving things out so the reader could do that themselves because I think that’s pleasurable if you give them the right framework. The relationship I have with my readers is really wonderful, because I can trust them to engage with these sometimes surreal stories and to really engage with me in the story, almost like a collaborator sometimes. When I read those Reddits, that’s how I feel — that they’re being kind enough and also getting satisfaction out of it to do that. And that’s really, really energizing.

I was thinking about collaboration as well, because I noticed that in your acknowledgments, you mention the paper “Second Skins: A Body-Ecology of Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy” by Dr. Ali Sperling, and that it actually impacted how you approached something in Lowry’s section [in Part Three of Absolution].

I have engaged in Reddit threads about books and TV shows, but I assume it’s not often a mutual process. I thought it was so interesting that someone else’s thoughts about your work actually impacted your work. I was wondering if these interactions make you think of your own books or ideas differently?

I think the answer is yes, certainly. In that case, it’s interesting, because Ali Sperling was an academic in Chicago at the time when she wrote that paper, and she actually now teaches at Florida State University here in Tallahassee, and we’re friends, in part over corresponding about that paper. In fact, she’s the Vice President of the environmental nonprofit that I run.

That was a very influential paper. Sometimes, you have things in your books that, thematically, if you’re lucky as a writer, just come out. You don’t have to work at them, and you don’t consciously think of them. On some level, you understand they’re there, and you pull them out. But then when academics come by and analyze [your work], it’s actually useful because you’re like, “I agree with that reading, I agree with that interpretation, that’s definitely something that’s there.” But what that means then is that you internalize it differently, and it comes out differently in another novel.

And that’s so useful to my continuing education as a writer. So I read that paper, and I put it in the back of my head, and down the line, I hope this influences me. It can’t be right away, because then it’s not organic. It has to just come out. And sometimes, it comes out in such a way you don’t recognize that it does. I read all those papers — I mean a portion; I think there’s 17,000 on Annihilation, and I don’t think I’ve read all 17,000 — but I read them also because they cite other texts that I may not have read. Part of my continuing education is I read a lot of nonfiction. So it was like, if I ever write about the Southern Reach again, or about these kinds of themes, it’s useful to read this.

When it came time to write Lowry's point of view on the first expedition, this was literally the thought process. I was thinking of that paper. I was like, “Oh, he’s claustrophobic about the suit. He has issues of contamination and permeability, and because of that, he has to be on experimental anti-anxiety drugs. And because of that, there’s a side effect where he curses all the time when he’s on them. Because of that, you know he’s in an altered state when he’s cursing more, and when he’s cursing less, you can probably trust him more in terms of what he’s seeing in Area X.” It was the whole key to his character, all of his anxieties.

And that was really important because I thought of the young Lowry as being like a dysfunctional tech-bro — that kind of mindset, a little bit of that internalized societal toxic masculinity. But if you’re going to write a character, you have to find the thing about them that [makes it clear] that they’re more than one thing. And so the vulnerability that [the anxieties] expressed, counterbalanced with the fact that he at least always takes action, even if it’s laughably the wrong action — I thought that was an interesting mix for a character, and made him more three-dimensional. So that was really my thought process, coming from that paper.

Across the Southern Reach series, there’s such a focus on the failure of language to describe certain things. At one point, a scientist says something about how we “lack the analogies” to describe something in Area X. I was wondering how you approach that idea.

There are actually whole sections in Authority where they’re having conversations about linguistics. That was something I’d always intended once the linguist doesn’t make it onto the expedition in Annihilation, because I was anticipating that we would actually be talking about linguistics in Book Two. I think it’s part and parcel of my day job experience, where I was a contractor for state and government agencies, and I often was the one jotting down the minutes from these meetings on million-dollar projects.

First of all, the places that I was going into were extremely eccentric places, where the work culture didn’t realize it had gone terribly wrong. The baseline reality, like if you were to walk into someone’s house and realize they’re a hoarder, and they don’t realize it, but [that’s happening] governmentally. And when you look at transcripts of these meetings that I was taking, ostensibly about logical subjects, the amount of illogic that crept into the conversations, the amount of decision-making that seemed like it was not predicated on best practices but on some other arcane ritualistic experience of the world, it made me realize that what was being brought into these meetings were foundational assumptions about how things work that were twenty years out of date. What I’m getting at there linguistically is that it was expressed through wording phrases and clichés, which was the transmission process for these outdated ideas that did not allow for things to be seen clearly.

Part of the linguistics of Area X or the novels is simply parsing what language means when it’s the transmission of ideas, in addition to trying to interpret or explain Area X. What gets transmitted and what is the subtext of it. And really, it’s like the past communicating with the present. Sometimes, it’s the future communicating with the present. I think reducing things down to an abstract and then building them up in a novel so that they’re fully clothed with concrete stuff is really quite useful. So, I do think about linguistics. I read a lot of linguistics books that I don’t have the underpinnings educationally to always understand, but I find that interesting too, because then I have to make my own interpretations. That’s useful, because of the novels sometimes being about miscommunication. So then I just plug that miscommunication I’ve had into the novels as part of the experience.

Something I think you mention in your piece “Hauntings in the Anthropocene,” and I think it’s mentioned in “Second Skins” as well, is this idea of climate change being a kind of “slow haunting” — something that we don’t realize until it’s too late. Absolution is releasing ten years after the first three books, and the world has changed so much in the last ten years, in drastic ways but also in these very slow, creeping ways. How has that impacted how you approached writing this book?

That’s a really good question. Well, one thing that’s happened is that we’re in this situation where we’re basically trying to outrun the climate crisis with technological solutions. We’re in part having to do this because to do the harder work of dismantling our institutions and putting them back together with a different ideology is difficult, if not problematic, because the chaos in the interim would mean it would be impossible to meet any climate crisis goals. So there’s this conundrum. We’re working with imperfect systems, systems that have become more damaged intentionally by politicians and policymakers, unfortunately, over time. We are making strides when it comes to things like solar and wind, even as we apply the same extractive ideology to how we sometimes implement them, so that they’re not as useful as they could be. I’m very much a proponent of solar, but the way some of this stuff is rolled out has actually been harmful, at least in the US. For example, in Massachusetts, you might have a solar site that’s chosen because other companies can harvest the timber first, and then they can mine all the sand off of it, and then they’ll put in the solar panels. It’s not like they chose it because it’s the best spot for solar panels. And that’s the old world, fossil fuel thinking, right? So that’s the conundrum—we’re trying to outpace the disaster that’s looming, by doing good policy, and implementing good tech, but with ideologies that still hamstring us to some degree, out of necessity, because we have so little time.

That’s something that has struck me as another absurd conundrum of the age, along with the fact that our systems have become more deranged and more directly hurtful of communities and individuals. In the US, you have to worry about the government actually being more obstructive to your health and well-being than maybe even in the past. Of course, in some ways, this is just making more widespread what has been apparent to certain segments of the population for decades.

The point being, I think a lot about dysfunctional systems, and I think that comes through in Absolution. I did a lot of research on the CIA in the '70s, and what I found really fascinating was how deranged the experiments got. But throughout all of that, their financials were pristine. I could see them complimenting themselves on how [clean] the ledgers were. There was no waste, or there was no embezzlement, and yet the things they were doing were absolutely batshit. I find that interesting, how organizations don’t think of themselves as deranged or dysfunctional, of course. And that has gotten worse.

I think the purest expression of that, to some degree, is this demented, deranged court jester look on Elon Musk’s face as he genuflects before Trump, like it’s a production of Titus Andronicus. And it’s like, where is the bottom? So, you know, some of the stuff that Central does in Absolution is completely deranged. And yet that’s where we are, where individuals and institutions can legitimize or, in some ways, either look the other way or somehow find some justification for things that, if you really look at them, are really illogical. I think that’s fertile territory for a novelist to explore.

That goes back to what you said about language as well, which is that they’re using this archaic, outdated language. A lot of thinking around this is based on systems that already exist but are completely useless, like in the example you mentioned about solar.

That makes you think about the real human issue of institutions, which is that individuals have a stake in the success of the projects that they oversee, which may seem really boring, but it’s why you see the doubling-down on things. It’s why, in the CIA, you actually saw them giving serious credence to psychics, telling them that alligator-like beings from the future were beaming thoughts about the future into their heads. You get to a point where you’ve internalized the illogic and also the stakes of a project, to the point where you can’t disengage — you’re too far in it. And I find that interesting too.

You’ve mentioned a lot of research into the CIA. What other research did Absolution take? You worked with a researcher, Andy Marlowe, who also did these amazing photographs which are inserted in the book as well.

I have a huge section of acknowledgement to Andy Marlowe in the back — when I say the CIA research, I mean Andy was doing that — so thank you for bringing that up, I was trying to figure out how to say that! What happened with the book is that the inspiration outstripped my ability to research because if I stopped to do research, I would lose the music in my head. I just had to keep writing the rough draft. And I lucked out. Andy Marlowe was recommended to me, and I thought they were in their thirties and a professor, but it turned out they were just the most decorated undergrad at FSU ever in English and Art. Also they knew German, so they could translate the Schubert stuff.

So they started out as a research assistant, and then when I learned all their capabilities, and I had all these needs for things, including the images in the in the book, it was amazing that the same person could do all this stuff — including going down to the Forgotten Coast to collect more tactile details about some of the places that are directly in the book. There’s a scene with Cass and Old Jim on a beach that is literally a specific beach in North Florida, and I wanted to have all the details correct, and I hadn’t visited in a while. So that allowed me to relax into writing the novel and have basically a collaborator — even just doing the Schubert translations myself would have been very difficult and would have taken a long time.

For Hummingbird Salamander, my last adult novel, I had a biologist create the fake hummingbird and salamander, and that created so much for me, more than if I had done it myself. Having to react to and be bound by what they gave me was so much better for the narrative than if I’d come up with myself. So Andy doing all this stuff was so, so helpful. It changed the novel in a lot of ways. If I had done that research — and there was a lot more, too — it would not have had the same effect. So I’m really grateful for that more and more. It’s one thing to have a subject matter expert read your novel after you finish it, but sometimes it makes sense to approach someone while you’re writing it, if you have enough confidence in what you’re writing. It was just extraordinary that I lucked out in this way.

It’s amazing all the different ways in which Absolution is a collaborative book, where so many other people’s creative processes came into your work.

I guess there’s something about the muscle memory of writing a novel now and knowing that I’ve done it so many times that allows me to relax enough to let other people be involved, even when I'm wrestling with something. Because it is personal, right? Everything I write is very personal to me on some level, and there is a danger that if you allow someone else in while you’re writing, you can potentially damage the process. But it’s worked out really well for me and it’s given these novels, especially recently, more of a richness and complexity.

Is there anything you want to recommend that you felt, or you feel, have some kind of companionship with the Southern Reach series as a whole?

That’s kind of a tough one, because I think sometimes where my mind goes is to write the thing that I don’t think exists. But I would say that when it comes to similar topics, there are books that I like because they give a unique perspective. I love Michelle Tea’s Black Wave because it’s a street-level view of living through the climate crisis with some surreal touches. It spotlights the queer community on the West Coast, and that combination of things gives it a unique perspective, which is something that I value, because it makes me see climate crisis differently. I don’t want a novel just to reinforce what I already know. And I’ve jokingly said, and I’m probably being too much of a curmudgeon, that there’s a brand of novel that I call “novelist discovers trees” that I don’t appreciate personally, because it doesn’t give me very much.

A good example of something that’s aged very well, unfortunately, is Omar El Akkad’s American War. When I reviewed it for the LA Times, I had mixed feelings about it as a climate crisis novel. And over time, I feel like it’s gotten more accurate. At the time, I thought that the way that it was talking about things in this country was a little too alt-history, but it’s actually, sadly, a prescient novel in some very depressing ways. But I love the fact that that novel has, in my mind, become more relevant, and in a weird way, more compassionate and urgent, and that I’ve had to reevaluate it. I’ve had to sit there and go, “What was it that made me [think that way?] Was it something in my own foundational view of the world that didn’t allow me to see that to begin with?” I really love novels that do that, where maybe I have an uncomfortable relationship with them, to begin with, but there’s a reason for that that has nothing to do with the novel or the novelist in question. I think that that’s a really interesting thing.

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Nirica Srinivasan is a writer and illustrator from India. She likes stories with ambiguous endings and unreliable narrators.

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