Early in Jeff VanderMeer’s 2014 novel Annihilation, we meet a biologist, one of the four unnamed female characters on an expedition into the mysterious Area X, the setting of the novel: “My lodestone, the place I always thought of when people asked me why I became a biologist, was the overgrown swimming pool in the backyard of the rented house where I grew up.” The biologist remembers how quickly that overgrown pool became the center of a blooming ecosystem. “Moss grew in the cracks in the tile path that circled it. The water level slowly rose, fed by the rain, and the surface became more and more brackish with algae. Dragonflies continually scouted the area. Bullfrogs moved in, the wriggling malformed dots of their tadpoles always present,” VanderMeer writes. “Inside the house, my parents did whatever banal, messy things people in the human world usually did, some of it loudly. But I could easily lose myself in the microworld of the pool.”
Jeff VanderMeer, author of Absolution. (Credit: Azhar Khan)
There are countless microworlds in which readers of Jeff VanderMeer’s more than two dozen books, including novels, story collections, and nonfiction works, can lose themselves. Among the most popular has been the universe inhabited in the novels Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance, all published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2014 and set in a world that encompasses Area X, now closed to human habitation, situated in a part of Florida called the Forgotten Coast. The three books, known as the Southern Reach trilogy, for the name of the government agency tasked with exploring and documenting the many mysteries of Area X, were an instant sensation, earning raves from both critics and literary icons; Stephen King called the trilogy “creepy and fascinating.” The books have sold more than a million copies. They’ve been translated into thirty-seven languages and counting.
This summer Picador published a tenth-anniversary edition of the trilogy, featuring new, delightfully freaky cover art and introductions by a dream team of authors: Karen Joy Fowler for Annihilation, N. K. Jemisin for Authority, and Helen Macdonald for Acceptance. And in October, the FSG imprint MCD published Absolution, a surprise fourth volume in the series. At 464 pages it’s the longest of the Southern Reach novels. In its structure, which comprises three more-or-less stand-alone novellas, it mimics the trilogy that precedes it. And in its content—no spoilers here—the new book provides some answers to the nagging questions left unresolved by the end of Acceptance.
In typical VanderMeer fashion, however, new mysteries arise. In its first section we learn—via archives examined by a washed-up operative named Old Jim—about a team of biologists whose work on the Forgotten Coast predated Area X by twenty years. The book’s central and longest story pairs Old Jim with a young spy as they try to figure out what the Science and Seance Brigade are up to, eighteen months before the event that led to Area X. And, finally, the last novella brings readers into the mind of a character named James Lowry, back when he was the young hotshot on the first expedition Southern Reach ever sent to explore the eerie landscape, just one year after the border was established. Three fantastically unique sections make up the new book, putting an exclamation point on three haunting and haunted novels. It seems appropriate, then, that my interview with Jeff VanderMeer took place in three parts, each with its own specific sights and sounds and conversational flavor.
We met first on Little Island, an artificial landscape just off the west side of Manhattan, floating over the Hudson River. The park, which opened in 2021, is both delightful and uncanny, a whimsical invention designed to provide a pleasurable simulacrum of unspoiled wilderness in the nation’s busiest city. It was a hot day at the end of May, just a couple of weeks after VanderMeer turned in the final edits for Absolution. After about fifteen minutes wandering Little Island’s pathways, we both felt a sunburn coming on and retreated across the West Side Highway to a bar attached to a swanky hotel. Over a Negroni for me and a double espresso for him, we talked for another hour in the air conditioning, sometimes fighting to be heard above a doggedly thumping bass line.
A couple of months later, just when the advance reading copies of Absolution were sent out to reviewers, we spoke again. This time we Zoomed from our respective studies, mine in New Jersey and his in Florida, the state he has lived in longer than anywhere else and the place most directly responsible for the physical setting of the Southern Reach novels. This is clearly the most comfortable environment for VanderMeer, who despite his chatty ease in conversation says he’s an introvert. Sitting at his laptop, surrounded by books and art, he opens up about his writing process and how Area X came to be.
Absolution arrived in a rush, VanderMeer says. “The book had a long gestation period but then a really swift period of writing. I mean I’d never written 150,000 words in six months before. I was writing morning, noon, and night. It was like having a series of ecstatic visions and then being compelled to keep writing and writing.”
Dreams and visions have long been a part of his process. Readers who devoured the Southern Reach trilogy will never forget the unsettling fragments of a vaguely Old Testament sermon scrawled on the walls of what some of the expedition members called the tunnel but the biologist called the tower, which the group discovered on the first page of the first book in the series: “Where lies the strangling fruit that came from the hand of the sinner I shall bring forth the seeds of the dead to share with the worms that gather in the darkness…”
When I ask him what inspired that text, VanderMeer chuckles. “That literally came from a dream. I had just had dental surgery. I was on OxyContin, which wasn’t working for me. I just had that dream and woke up and wrote the words on the wall,” he says. “I wrote it down, I went back to sleep, and when I woke up again, I had the first ten pages of the novel in my head.” VanderMeer says much of his writing comes to him as inspiration from whatever he’s obsessed with at the moment, whether it’s books or movies or music or travel or ancient history or conversations with his wife, Ann VanderMeer, a notable editor and author in her own right. His novel Borne (MCD/FSG, 2017), for example, is heavily influenced by anime and manga. “So it has a giant flying bear and a postapocalyptic city. But it’s very centered on family dynamics and relationships, and that’s really the core of it,” he says. “I often write fantasy and other things where there are imaginary cities and stuff, but there’s no actual fantasy going on. It’s just based on reading Byzantine history and stuff like that. I tend to be somebody who just mines out subjects.”
At the hotel bar, having escaped the heat, I start to bring up science fiction and other questions of literary genres, but I can see VanderMeer’s not a huge fan of the conversation. “Well, it’s always an interesting question for me because I started out as a poet editing literary magazines and reading a combination of mainstream lit and science fiction,” he says. “I tend to be pretty slippery on the issue of labeling, just because I’m taking influences from a lot of different places. That’s kind of why FSG is perfect for me: to find the maximum number of readers for every book. There are going to be some genre readers that slide right off my stuff, some general readers, too. A combination of both has made the Southern Reach very successful.”
When he was a boy VanderMeer wanted to be a marine biologist. This makes a lot of sense considering he spent much of his childhood in the South Pacific island nation of Fiji. His parents were there serving in the Peace Corps. Jeff and his sister tagged along, attending local schools and roaming the coastal landscape. Some of that made it into the Southern Reach trilogy. “The whole thing where the biologist encounters the starfish is literally something that happened to me in Fiji,” VanderMeer says of the inspiration for a scene in the fifth chapter of Annihilation. “It was very dark, and I got separated from my father. All I remember is this huge glowing starfish.” Standing in the shallow water, he showed his father the beautiful sea creature. “It’s actually a kind of starfish that’s extremely invasive. The next day my dad had to come back and find it and kill it,” he says.
After Fiji the family returned to the United States. VanderMeer’s father took a job at Cornell, the Ivy League university in Ithaca, New York, but found it “too much of a transition, climate-wise.” The author adds: “Race relations were entirely different. I was shocked at the Ithaca public school; it was de facto segregated—who hung out with who. It was very difficult to navigate that.” The family soon decamped to Gainesville, Florida, where VanderMeer attended middle school, high school, and college.
There was some culture shock, to put it mildly, but Gainesville was warmer, and wilder, and it provided another of the biologist’s touchstones: “The swimming pool was actually in Gainesville when I was a teenager,” says VanderMeer. “An overgrown pool that we just let be overgrown—there were herons and all kinds of things.”
The biologist, our eyes and ears as we first encounter Area X in Annihilation, is one of the series’ indelible characters. Her powers of observation, moral clarity, and refusal to indulge in anyone else’s euphemisms draw us in, but she can also be frustratingly cryptic, emotionally disconnected at times, a person so hard to pin down that she seems likely to fly away at any moment. “There are aspects of the biologist that are definitely aspects of my personality,” VanderMeer says. “I’m a big believer in inhabiting a scene autobiographically from an emotional sense. There’s a lot of hidden autobiography in the big emotional moments of the books. But it’s completely disguised.” Still, there are echoes, from the recurrence of art and artists in his books—VanderMeer’s mother was an artist and, after studying Asian art, became a Buddhist—to the care and respect with which VanderMeer writes his diverse cast of characters.
One way VanderMeer distinguishes himself from so many of the white male authors in science fiction—or speculative fiction or whatever you want to call it—as well as in literary fiction, actually, is in his ability to write full, well-rounded characters who come from backgrounds different from his own. There are strong and strange women in the Southern Reach novels, including the biologist and various other scientists and spies who walk into and out of bureaucratic offices and backwoods, half-hidden bars. Characters aren’t all white, and their racial identities resist tokenizing tropes. “I think it is important first to be very specific to the character,” he says. “Really what you’re trying to do is inhabit a particular person—whose identity and experience may be different than your own—with whom you may have common touchpoints.”
Some characters may or may not be all that human, but that’s another story. If VanderMeer the writer eschews genre labels, the organisms he writes about sometimes slide from one category to another too. When I ask him if he has a favorite animal, he responds instantly. “For a long time, it was bears. And I wrote about bears so much that it kind of became an intellectual property issue. When AMC optioned Borne, they had to specify only flying bears with this name are being optioned.” VanderMeer is a great talker, I notice, when you aren’t trying to pin him down about boring stuff like literary genres and he can let his guard down. “I was obsessed with meerkats at one point. Capybaras. Squid,” he goes on. “At one point, mushrooms.” Hold up—mushrooms aren’t an animal. Well, he admits, maybe something like half-plant, half-animal, and goes on to cite the intelligence of fungi. Then he tells me about a pair of capybaras that “got loose from a county fair in Gainesville, and now a small colony of about twelve live in Paynes Prairie,” a state park. “They just kind of let them live there,” he says, smiling.
Although he never became a biologist, VanderMeer’s thirst for nature remains unquenched. One of the major inspirations for the Southern Reach books is St. Marks National Wildlife Refuge, on Florida’s Forgotten Coast, where he has hiked regularly for decades. “It’s absolutely primordial,” he says. “It’s just like in Annihilation. You get far enough out and you really feel like you’ve also gone back in time. And it also is changeless. I’ve hiked it since ’92, and for the most part it looks exactly the same. It’s pretty timeless.” VanderMeer points out the importance of the coastline being federally protected. “That area of coast would have been developed if [those protections] weren’t there. It’s a huge deal for North Florida.”
For a writer who focuses on worlds and microworlds that may not be real, he is extremely precise when it comes to describing the natural world. “I’m a big believer in the physical details of settings being things I’ve experienced,” he says. “I have to have the texture, the feel, the sense of the place for it to work in the fiction.” For the Southern Reach books, the physical reality of the coastal areas—its marshes and tidal creeks—reflects the author’s deep, enduring love for that landscape.
Just after the biologist reminisces about the swimming pool in Annihilation, she tells us this: “I liked most of all pretending to be a biologist, and pretending often leads to becoming a reasonable facsimile of what you mimic, even if only from a distance. I wrote down my pool observations in several journals. I knew each individual frog from the next….” When I asked VanderMeer about his earliest experiences writing, he also returns to childhood. “I kept a birding notebook. And then for some reason I started retelling Aesop’s fables. I would read them and try to write them from memory. And then I would compare them against the original.”
On Zoom I again make the mistake of asking about a label—ecofiction, or cli-fi—and get a similar response. “I guess any time there’s a category it becomes a marketing term, to some degree, and then you wind up talking about things other than the art or even the particular issue, and, weirdly enough, it becomes commodified.” But, he adds, if it helps readers find him, or find other books to understand more about our climate crisis, that’s fine by him. “It feels like a broader question about the literary community to me,” he says. “Growing up I always thought of writers as people who were part of a community. So you were participating in something greater than yourself, sometimes lesser than yourself, depending on the literary community.”
He continues: “And as such you had certain responsibilities, and one of those responsibilities is that you try to give back as much as possible. And you try to give back in the way in which you were given. In my case, Annihilation and the other books gave me the ability to talk about the environment, climate crisis, and everything else. The books heightened people’s environmental awareness in various ways. To have the ability—without taking the space someone who’s an actual scientist might take—to talk about these issues, raise money for these issues. There are all these other effects that are outside of the novels but are directly because of the novels.”
In the series’ second book, Authority, VanderMeer introduces readers to the Southern Reach headquarters, a generic bureaucratic setting complete with fluorescent lighting and the strange-smelling residue of cleaning supplies. The book’s absurdism and office politics came from his own work history, which began early, as did his literary work. He was already writing a lot of poetry in high school, then turned to short stories, novellas, and novels. “I got my creative writing education from a teacher in high school, Denise Standiford, who was great because she recognized what I was trying to write, so she would give me books by Kafka and Angela Carter and say, ‘This is what you need to read.’” There was also Meredith Ann Pierce, a fantasy novelist who worked at the Gainesville Public Library. “As a high school student I would bike down there. And she was kind enough; I would hand her a manuscript, I would bike there the next week, and she would hand it back, all marked up.”
At the University of Florida he avoided creative writing because the department at that time was led by Harry Crews, the hard-living author of so-called Grit Lit whose misogyny was well-known and communicated to VanderMeer by his female friends who were already in the program. Instead, other women like Standiford and Pierce were influential and helpful. “In college I had an amazing teacher, Jane Stuart, who was the daughter of Jesse Stuart, a really well-known regional Appalachian writer, and she had five or six novels out at that point herself,” he says. “She was kind enough to critique a lot of my fiction and give me feedback on it.”
VanderMeer dropped out of college after his junior year. “I realized I wanted to be writing fiction,” he says. “So I went and got a series of technical writing jobs. And that turned out to be really good for me to have a steady, pretty well-paying day job and write on the side.” His gigs during these years varied; one included writing passages for the reading comprehension portions of the standardized tests for the state of Florida. “I wrote a lot of things that were basically research for books that I was excited about, so the passages were hopefully exciting for the kids who were being tested,” he says. He wrote user manuals and did tech support “for something called Easy Bank,” where “it turned out that most of the people who were calling in just wanted to talk with somebody,” he says. “People would call every week just to say hi. That was kind of an interesting human-condition experience.” The job most like the ones depicted in Authority involved “codifying city and county ordinances,” and VanderMeer describes the workplace as “like Lord of the Flies with middle management. I once had a coworker throw a very sharp decorative tile at my neck in a dispute over comma usage!”
VanderMeer’s sense of humor comes through even in his fiction’s eeriest moments, and I sense it’s been a great lifelong survival tool, though the days of tech writing jobs have given way to best-selling novels and film projects. (Annihilation was made into a 2018 movie starring Natalie Portman and Jennifer Jason Leigh, directed by Alex Garland.) But the books demonstrate another emotional register, especially in the middle part of Absolution, which ponders aging and loss.
“At the end of the day, people focus on the weird elements or the speculative elements, but a lot of [my books] are dealing with connection and disconnection and with love and friendship,” he says. “How we conduct ourselves, I guess, is the larger thing: how we conduct ourselves in our relationships, how we conduct ourselves in our wider imagination. And I guess maybe it’s the Buddhist upbringing or whatever, but that doesn’t feel ephemeral to me; that feels like something permanent that, in the moment, counts.”
A former president of the National Book Critics Circle, Kate Tuttle is a freelance writer and editor.
