coe021_vandermeer.mp3

Speaker1: [00:00:25] Welcome everyone back to the Cultures of Energy podcast, we're so glad that you've decided to download us today. My name is Simone Hall and I am sitting here with my astute and talented co-host Dominique Boyer, who's also our sound engineer for the day, got his headphones on and everything.

Speaker2: [00:00:47] I'm a man of many talents.

Speaker1: [00:00:48] Yes, indeed. And we have a really spunky and brilliant conversation to share with you today with Jeff VanderMeer. He is a very well-known novelist, especially well known for his best selling New York Times bestseller list. Series of books on the Southern Reach called the Southern Reach Trilogy. So the first book is Annihilation, the second authority and the Third Acceptance. And I just realized that one thing I love about Jeff VanderMeer beyond the fact that he's written these brilliant books is that they all have alliteration going on. My favorite thing

Speaker2: [00:01:29] Ever. It's like candy for you.

Speaker1: [00:01:31] Yes, it is. It really is. The the thing I love about Jeff and Mary is that just before beginning the conversation with him, which we also share this conversation with Roy Scranton Scranton. Ah, who was a post-doc here in the Center Center Center for Energy and Environmental Research and the Human Sciences here at Rice University, which is also a sponsor of our podcast and who's written the book Learning to Die in the Anthropocene. But right before we began this conversation with the two of them we discovered on social media the place where all important things lie. Yes, that Jeff VanderMeer is looking forward to the next season of. Are you ready?

Speaker2: [00:02:20] Oh, no, bloodline. Bloodline. I'm glad we didn't get into that. That, you know, dirty controversy with him because it would have brought down what was otherwise a rather raucous and fun conversation, right?

Speaker1: [00:02:34] You might have gotten mean spirited, but the fact that he's on my side of this debate really brings some credibility to to both him and I.

Speaker2: [00:02:45] Yeah, sort of, I don't know, get. Can I have 30 seconds to explain what what I didn't like about season one of Bloodline? Ok, I just I

Speaker1: [00:02:54] Mean, I know this. Go ahead. It's the flash.

Speaker2: [00:02:56] This is this is dam stealing my thunder woman. Yeah. I mean, good acting. Probably not enough of a budget to do much more than that. But yeah, like really, really slow plot. And I just found myself falling asleep a lot during it. I don't know.

Speaker1: [00:03:14] So do you think they really blew their whole budget on Sissy Spacek? I think she's going for cheap these days.

Speaker2: [00:03:20] No. Sissy Spacek makes a mint, I'm sure in these. You think

Speaker1: [00:03:23] So? Well, she's I mean, they're all good. They were

Speaker2: [00:03:24] Good actors. And like Linda Cardellini, I love her. I mean, there's great actors. And in this, I just think that, you know, you know, Netflix is starting. It's really cool what they're doing at becoming a content producer. I just think they're still finding their way a little bit. Some of the projects are better than others and bloodline, I think, well, maybe it's going to evolve more. Maybe he's seeing the second season and it's gotten so much better. But you're not. You loved the first season.

Speaker1: [00:03:51] Well, I did, I did like it. It's it's got a kind of melodrama to it, and it's definitely like a kinship kind of story. And I think you just have to spend a little more time and like hot and soggy places to understand the pacing of the plot.

Speaker2: [00:04:03] But Jeff and Simone, one point Dominic zero points. All right.

Speaker1: [00:04:07] Well, it's not that anyone's keeping track, but one of the things that we get to hear about in our conversation with Jeff actually is a brilliant idea he has for a new invention. Yes. Which is kind of a it's like an Oculus Rift or a virtual reality headset that not only gives your ears the sensation of sound that VR would do and your eyeballs right, but also pulls in your your total Kemo sphere, your chemical sphere showing you all of the kind of microbes and different elements that are circulating in the air around you. You know, pointing out to you all of the all of your sort of microscopic or electron microscopic environs. So you could walk around the world actually seeing all the toxicity that we live in.

Speaker2: [00:05:01] It would be very much like actually being a character in the Southern Reach trilogy, I think, because that's kind of, you know, but this is why he's, you know, a brilliant sci fi and speculative fiction writer. And we're not right that idea wouldn't come, but we said we would try to help make it if if there is a way, because science and engineering would be involved with that right, we should make Rice University do that.

Speaker1: [00:05:23] I also I really like the way he I love his concept of the mulch. He talks about the mulch a couple of times, like the mulch in your brain. Yeah, sort of. It's this generative, you know, mixture of biotic and crumbling life forms that then grow new things that that's if I can steal that I think I'm going to. The other thing I've got to say is that being an academic and sort of needing to do so much reading for research, I rarely rarely rarely hardly ever read a book for pleasure anymore, which is pathetic and sad. But with this series, I actually did. And there's such page turners and you just want to you want to be in them and you want to know what happens. And so they're really pretty exceptional.

Speaker2: [00:06:08] They really are I. And I think actually doing the podcast in some ways has made us read more fiction again, which is actually really nice. Yeah, it's

Speaker1: [00:06:15] Healthy.

Speaker2: [00:06:16] It's probably good. It's a healthy. It's balances us out a bit. But really, one of the reasons why this came together was Roy had mentioned to us when he first came to Rice that this was a really interesting series and a really great author we should check out. And then I can't remember how we got our hands on the book. And, yeah, read one and was like, Oh, I got to read. The other two immediately was so kind of captivated by it and also kind of unsettled and disturbed because it is got a creepy right, you know, kind of eerie side to it, for sure.

Speaker1: [00:06:48] There are some seriously spooky scenes and moments in these books that are there are kind of still haunting me right

Speaker2: [00:06:56] Now, but also just like a thirst to figure out what was going on and the book for reasons we describe or discuss in the conversation. The book in some ways doesn't want to give you that satisfaction of understanding. You know what went on, he says. He said, You know, I could do that. I could write a conventional tie up all the loose ends ending. And this is whodunit and this is how it happened and this is what it meant. But what's actually really powerful about the book is how it suspends you there at the end where it's not going to resolve. But you know, that's a kind of perfect book for talking about climate change in the Anthropocene, which is not going to resolve into like a perfect ending. Precisely. It continues and it goes and it's incremental, and we don't know where it's going. And that's kind of where you're where you're left at the end to.

Speaker1: [00:07:41] And we do get to talk to him a little bit, too about the film version, yes, of the of the trilogy. So it's being produced

Speaker2: [00:07:50] And directed by Alex Garland, starring Natalie Portman and Oscar Isaac, among others.

Speaker1: [00:07:55] So exciting. So great, director. It'll be neat to see the reception that that gets. And as one final note, the these books are so well-crafted and brilliantly thought through in terms of the plot and the staging and the characterization. The only thing that Jeff did wrong, OK is that he killed off the anthropologist really early on.

Speaker2: [00:08:20] Right. And the other thing is one of the the worst characters in the whole trilogy. Lowery was the anthropologist from the very first expedition. So in a way, anthropologists aren't coming out ahead. And again, I'm not going to. I'm not going to tie that back to this whole bloodline thing. But I'm saying maybe he has some judgment problems in there somewhere. Oh, you think so? Maybe there's just like a little fracture in his soul where anthropology and bloodline are not getting evaluated correctly?

Speaker1: [00:08:48] Well. To find some anthropological Culkin agent to fill in those those fissures and crevasses because two dead anthropologists is too many dead

Speaker2: [00:08:59] Anthropology like identify with that as being too anthropologists, like that's a little personal, it's just a little a little close to

Speaker1: [00:09:05] Home. It's OK, Jeff, we forgive you, Jeff. Everything else was

Speaker2: [00:09:08] Perfect. Jeff, you're awesome. You were a gentleman and obviously a brilliant writer, and it was great to talk with you. And we'll turn to that now. No.

Speaker1: [00:09:15] Yes.

Speaker2: [00:09:25] All right, folks, welcome back to the Cultures of Energy podcast, we are so pleased, delighted to have two special guests with us today calling in from Tallahassee, Florida. The wonderful award winning novelist Jeff van der Meer, who blew our minds collectively with the Southern Reach trilogy, is on the line from an outstation probably somewhere near Area X out there in the swamplands of Florida. And then from farther north, we have Roy Scranton, our very own Roy Scranton, who is on his way. He's in Brooklyn now, but he's on his way to Notre Dame, where he's starting a professorship. Congratulations, Roy. We're going to really find it difficult to lose you here. But if the Southern Reach trilogy has taught us anything, it's acceptance, right? Acceptance of radical transformation. So here we are. I'm going to turn it over to Roy to start to start the conversation.

Speaker3: [00:10:20] Great. Well, thanks for that, Dominic, and I'm really excited to be able to ask you some to interrogate you, Jeff,

Speaker4: [00:10:29] About a doppelganger,

Speaker3: [00:10:32] Right? Your your digital double about this incredible trilogy of books. And I want to start in with the the writerly question, because with this, the many things I admire about this trilogy, I think the thing I admire most is the craft and also the way that the book is, the way that the trilogy is about language. Like you could say, it's about aliens or it's about nature, it's about mystery or whatever terror. What I think a certain way for me. Anyway, it seems to be about language and the failure of language to actually be able to. To account for reality or something like that, I'm not entirely sure I want to ask you so in, you know, when we when we first encounter sort of Area X language appears as this sort of fungal lure. And then and then there's this whole trope of hypnosis. And then, of course, the light keeper Saul is a preacher who a former preacher who realized he lost his calling when he when he realizes that he loves the sound of the words more than than what they're saying. And then there's the whole. Then there's the whole issue of the linguists and what they're doing and why they keep failing and dropping out of the whole program. And so I wondered, I wanted to ask you, how does how does your the way that you're singing and writing about in this in this trilogy? You know, how does that reflect on what you think of how you think of yourself as a novelist or the role of fiction in the Anthropocene? Or, you know, and just sort of the broader question of like how how fiction or how narrative or how language might be able to help us interface with reality or fail. And also, I guess the little line up on that is a, you know, as a novelist than, are you the crop? Are you the voice? Are you Area X?

Speaker1: [00:12:46] That's right, that is not a

Speaker4: [00:12:48] Journalist reporting on certain events. I think it starts out with something that in a different context would be meta fiction, which is that the writer is always aware of the medium of words not quite conveying the perfect vision in your head. And you can use that irritant in very interesting ways that are not fictional. I didn't mean for that. It'd be kind of a meta fictional or or extra literary quality to the southern reach. I wanted it to be very much real in a sense, but you can use that irritation. And so, you know, as a novelist, as a writer, you're always struggling with that to begin with. It's like because no two words do mean the same thing. And then when you add in when you study animal behavior, science and things like that, you look at dolphins who have a different relationship to the world then than we do. You think about what their their language comprises of and how different it is in terms of what it conveys and what the signal to noise ratio is. You think of something like an octopus that has part of its brain and its tentacles and and you know, if you're if you're a speculative writer, if you're interested in kind of pushing beyond the human gaze, then you have to start thinking about what that all means and then kind of put that in the context of what are failures of human communication.

Speaker4: [00:14:08] I think in in a lot of. Ordinary conversations, there are a lot of absurdities and miscommunications and ways in which the same words mean different things. And so there were ways in which I wanted to explore that in a mundane level and then ways I wanted to explore how that might lead to disconnects. When you're trying to study something that's already kind of beyond human imagination or our ability to know through our five senses. And then the five senses themselves, because that's a form of language in a in a way, the tactile experience. So so it's hard for me to say that there's there's some overriding purpose. It's more that there are all these different interesting ways to kind of explore language. And I did very, very specifically study linguistics and study certain things about how people put together metaphors in different languages and and how that leads to communication flaws between human languages. Most of that being then mulch that, you know, I studied it long enough before I was doing these books that I didn't have to think about it when I was writing it. So it's kind of hard to kind of separate out some of it. That makes sense.

Speaker3: [00:15:26] Yeah. And so I would. That makes a lot of sense, and I also wanted to I guess the follow up would be to ask if you could maybe expand on on that a little bit, I guess in the sort of the way that you see this, what you were doing here, operating within the within the weird tradition, within the sort of, you know, because if you go back and you read, you read Lovecraft or whatever, and it's all this, it's this question of of. Not just language, but even our our ability, the failure of rationality, the failure of our capacity to understand reality.

Speaker4: [00:16:07] But I think that we think because we have language to some degree, that that's an expression of a rational thing, whereas I find it to be kind of irrational thing, which is kind of where some of its beauty comes from. I I, you know. Even with regard to the southern reach and communication with and it it's it's uncannily like real places I worked where all kinds of protocols of communication that were meant for clarity were causing just the opposite. And so you come to a realization if you work, I guess, in the wrong or the right places for too long that most communication is miscommunication, right? And so in the context of a series where you're really talking about characters who have trouble connecting to begin with and then are having trouble connecting with this, this area X, then then that creates all this kind of laboratory for talking about that. So especially like an authority, you have people talking over each other. You have actually have layered in talking about the language of it in authority. There are embedded, I don't know, fifty to one hundred lines of dialogue from annihilation repurposed. Yeah. So there's all kinds of other things going on in the language. The problem is, there's so much there that it's hard again for me to to to parse it out. What I think it's useful in terms of the Anthropocene is that this is the situation we find ourselves and it may not be necessarily always about language, but it's about something that is making us act in irrational ways for whatever reason, either because we lack clarity. We're in denial. Whatever or the thing we're looking at is too complex for us to really break it down with the usual, the usual kind of approaches that we take.

Speaker1: [00:17:58] Yeah. I'm really glad that you this is Simone. Jeff, I'm really I'm really glad that you brought. I'm glad that you brought up this question about language in the context of Roy's question, because this is one of the human conceits that we have right is that it's only human beings who have quote unquote language as as we ourselves define it right. And so other creatures and other beings have communicative systems, but they don't count as language in human terms. And it really is a kind of a a self-indulgent or species indulgent kind of way of seeing things. And so I love that you're pointing out the the inherent sloppiness of language and all the missed signals that happen in it, because I think that is really important in terms of what we're seeing in our relationship with the rest of the planet and creatures on it. I wanted to kind of go back to something that Roy gestured to, and that was the spores that are these mushroom kinds of creatures that are literally the writing on the wall. I mean, talk about metaphors. And so the very early on in the in the first book, the biologist inhales these spores and she becomes inoculated against hypnosis, which is fascinating, too.

Speaker1: [00:19:11] And I was wondering part of me once I ask the question like what's going on with hypnosis and what does it mean to avoid it? But then the other part of me wants to ask the question about mushrooms. So and in in the social sciences right now, there's like a slew of mushroom work going on. People are fascinated with Matsuzaki, which, for example, is this mushroom that grows in these blasted out places where humans have destroyed the natural ecosystems. And yet, you know, this mushroom thrives there probiotics and kombucha and all these gut, you know, digestives. So people are fascinated. And so I was just wondering, is there something about the spore sickness? Is there something about the symbiotic role that that that mushrooms exercise in the places where they live, their kind of loneliness, their feral ness, their I guess in the case of the biologists like they kind of infect her right in a good way. They inoculate her and infect her.

Speaker4: [00:20:09] Well, I think that I've always been fascinated with with mushrooms, in part because they're just endlessly complex and interesting from a biological point of view, but also because of how they're perceived by human beings. Because obviously we eat mushrooms, everything else. But in terms of how we perceive them, obviously they they fall on the end of the things that we tend to find kind of icky, or we're associated with words like moist and

Speaker1: [00:20:39] Earthy, earthy and low.

Speaker4: [00:20:41] And yeah, and I find them to be kind of wondrous things that we've kind of have, even though we get so many things from them, have kind of underestimated in terms of. The idea even of a soft attack that might grow out of mushrooms more than they have already. I mean, you see that and even little things like a mushroom, they're growing to replace Styrofoam that just literally just biodegrade after six months to give just one tiny example. But in the context of the southern reach and the way that I view things, you know, novelists, I think, are always trying to search for a better, more granular truth. There's the challenge of how that comes out in the text, because if you get too granular, then somehow you don't allow enough room for the reader. But what I like about spores and mushrooms is they kind of emphasize or fruiting bodies kind of give you the visual or the signal for the fact that we're all contaminated, that we are not actually these finite boundaries. But we have all these organisms living on us and in us, and we are perhaps a little bit closer to this, this idea of, you know, we're all atoms than we think and in a very tactile, tactile way. And so I've explored that throughout my fiction. In the last series of novels I did before the Southern Reach, it was much more overt because I had all kinds of layers and levels of fungal technologies.

Speaker4: [00:22:11] A lot of things that actually, at the time, sometimes reviewers were like, This is just too out there that are actually things that mushroom researchers now are actually putting into practical use. So this idea of contamination, I think, is very important, and the idea of contamination is not necessarily being a bad thing, but being a way of recognizing a truer reality that we just can't often see. With fruiting bodies being kind of a signifier of that with regard to hypnosis, that's a little more complicated because the hypnosis I saw as being a synthesis of things to do with conspiracy and and and a different kind of contamination and contamination created by the southern reach. But then also to be kind of a stand in for the way that we're colonized and contaminated, sometimes in bad ways by social media. I mean, we've all seen someone who gets the spore of an idea from a link or something and for the next six months, that's all they talk about. Sometimes it's a good thing and sometimes it makes you mute them. But but that, to me, is a form of hypnosis. And so really, what I was trying to do is find ways to make contact with the modern world without using things like social media directly because I find them so boring when they're put into fiction directly.

Speaker1: [00:23:32] That must have been such a joy to leave all the technology behind when you went into the southern reach. That was something that was something I really enjoyed about that. That place.

Speaker4: [00:23:41] Yeah, yeah. I must admit, I mean, there's very practical reasons why they're not allowed to use that stuff because Area X can hack it easier. But I also did it for very literary concern that it's just a pain in the ass. You get bogged down these little details of tact that that are fairly meaningless if you're not careful.

Speaker1: [00:24:02] Right? And then you have to research them and then they become outdated two weeks later.

Speaker4: [00:24:06] Right? Right, exactly. So you lose a certain level of universality if you're not careful, which is another important point.

Speaker1: [00:24:12] Yeah, yeah.

Speaker2: [00:24:13] So Jeff, this is Dominic and I. There's so much about these series that I love, and I just wanted to single out one thing just following up on the point about conspiracy you just raised. I think one of the really brilliant aspects of of how you designed the at least how I think you design the work is that, you know, following up on what Roy was saying about language, I feel like also there's this kind of failure of knowledge to this attempt to understand what's going on and why it's going on that that really, you know, completely subsumes the attention of most of the characters for most of the for most of the series. And you keep as an author kind of hinting at the possibility that we're going to get like a resolution, right? We're going to understand why this happened. And you know, what was the catalyst that set these, you know, events into motion? And then there's this kind of the scene and at the end of acceptance between Henry and Saul, where you've sort of not to give away any spoilers, but you feel like, OK, like that was like an event that mattered in terms of the formation of Area X. But then at the end, really at the end, you know, it's sort of. It deflates a little bit, only because you realize that even if we were to understand what the catalyst was, it still wouldn't matter. We still wouldn't understand what this transformation is. And I really feel like you really skillfully put the reader in the position of kind of doing the same thing that people like control are doing. Or maybe, you know, the director of trying to use this sort of scientific technical rationality to figure something out. But then at the end, you know, even if like it was a conspiracy of some kind, right? It doesn't kind of matter for what happens next.

Speaker4: [00:25:58] Yeah, it's it's um, I was really happy that readers were trusting me enough to to go through the three books and and understand that they were not going to get a traditional resolution. And for my part, you know, I had to resist the idea of a traditional resolution, which I'm fully capable of delivering because it wasn't right for the characters of the books or for the idea. And so there's a very delicate balance. I was trying very carefully to not allow any particular character to find out something that it wouldn't make sense for them to find out or understand something that they wouldn't understand and trust the reader to piece together enough to, you know, have some sense of satisfaction. And hopefully, when they go back and reread see enough of the hidden stuff because there is a crap load of of hidden stuff, so to speak. Oh boy, that's meant to kind of resonate more like when you read Annihilation again after reading acceptance. But, you know, also this kind of ties in with, you know, if you're if you're tied in in a character point of view, you're kind of tied in in their own ideology, right? And you know, I wanted to explore the fact that we live in a world right now where it seems like the most basic facts are up for dispute and seems like we exist in a more subjective universe than ever before.

Speaker4: [00:27:38] In some ways, that's good. In some ways not so good, especially not so good when it comes to global warming. But to to put these kinds of different religions, in a sense into into opposition with one another. And one reason I don't refer to religion that much, except to have Saul's background the way it is, is because it felt too overt. So what I was doing because control has really its own religion, which which boils down to an operating system, right? And and they all do to some extent. They whether they they they think of something as a form of religion or not. And so, you know, they're self defeated where it's almost paralyzing. Why we're self-defeating on global warming is right. We we simply our brains were just not meant for this right. At least not yet.

Speaker2: [00:28:29] And I guess that that would be my follow up, Jeff, in a way of kind of hooking it also back to Roy's work and learning how to die in the Anthropocene. I mean, to what extent do you think that struggle for meaning and understanding is still something really important to do in the Anthropocene? And to what extent do you think that that acceptance of this radically transformed condition and what that means, say, for the future of our species, as it iterates forward that that's actually the more important message to be taking away from this? Hmm.

Speaker4: [00:28:57] Well, in a way, Roy, this book is kind of the manual that control needed and authority. Guess it doesn't doesn't really have the right information for the particular struggle that he was facing. But but he could probably extract the right command and control out of it. So I have to be honest, when I read Roy's book, I really felt like it was saying in essay form a lot of the things that I was trying to get across in the novels. And that goes back to the novel before the Southern Reach Finch, which I think would, I don't know if writes read that or not. But anyway, so, so, so so it was very um, especially after existing in such a subjective space for so long to the point where I was beginning to have to disengage from my characters because I was becoming as paranoid as like control by kind of mood acting. I was method acting him a lot. So, you know, it was like I was falling into that space. It was a bracing and useful thing to come across Roy's book stating this stuff, and I think what Roy says in that book is absolutely right there. For one thing, there is a lot more comfort in at least the control of knowing what you're facing, understanding the complexity, not shying away from what it is.

Speaker4: [00:30:19] And so for me personally, in terms of how I cope and how I move forward, you know, there are times when you have to disengage from this stuff and you have to find something escapist and get out of your head. But most of the time, engaging with the facts, having a real sense of where we are, what we need to do and and doing your best to contribute to a lack of bullshit for less, for lack of a better term. Sure about this stuff. It seems incredibly important. You know, we we exist in a series. We exist long term, we think long term, but we also exist in the moment. And it's very important in the moment that we keep our shit together and that we we do the things we need to do no matter what may happen in the future. And maybe that's a very human idea of what's honorable or ethical. And maybe that's too human, I don't know, but that's how I feel about it. And it's to me, it's a I'd rather go down with the ship fighting in the right way, then turn away from this. This and kind of like just, you know, saying Yes, so that's where I come down on it.

Speaker1: [00:31:31] Yeah, no, that that's going straight in the liner notes.

Speaker2: [00:31:34] Yeah, that's right. And Roy, are you keeping your shit together now in Brooklyn?

Speaker3: [00:31:38] Oh, well, yeah, it's been driving for the last few days, so I don't know about that. But yeah, well, thanks for those things you said and. I haven't read French yet, but it's on my reading list for the summer. I'm really looking forward to it and I'm really the the Southern Reach trilogy or area. It's it. It struck me like just as this amazing metaphor for climate change, but in the best way in. It's a metaphor that escapes. It's not an allegory. It's not like this is that, but it's like it's the space for thinking about all these issues. That's not that it doesn't map exactly on reality, so it gives me that little bit of distance, right, so that I can approach it without just going, having to wade through the despair and the terror again. I can. I mean, that seems like one of the one of the great things that sort of fiction can do is it's this space for processing emotions and thoughts about things that are too freaky to deal with directly. Yeah. Let's see. Yeah, go ahead.

Speaker4: [00:32:54] I was just going to say that the distance thing is something that I've been. Uh, working on a different novels over and over again, because Finch is meant to be about an occupied city but not having actually been over in Iraq, for example, it would have been both irresponsible and a total catastrophe to write a novel about Iraq. And so sometimes the fantastical and the speculative can give you enough distance that it's almost the same as when you have something. Personally, what I write about, but you need years to to kind of process it. Sometimes the speculative element gives you that distance, and I feel like on Area X, it really it really did. I could have said it in clearly. I could have said it was Florida. I could have said this, that or the other, but I needed to have a little bit more distance from it, and I needed to make sure that it was not didactic about global change. Global warming for the same reason that some of the points in Finch had to be different because you immediately get a knee jerk reaction from some readers. And I wanted readers to kind of feel this kind of deeply in their bodies, if possible, and if something else comes out of it, great. But, you know, I'm not really fond of of novels that that lecture you. You know what I'm saying? So so I felt like I had to find some way to sublimate this in a very tactile way. And the weird helps to the uncanny element.

Speaker3: [00:34:21] Yeah. Ok. And I'm glad you mentioned readers because I wanted to ask you about that, this is what what sort of responses have you gotten from readers? And I also also, I mean, you've been writing for a long time and you've been very successful, but these books seems to have gone to a to another level. And why do you if you could speculate, why do you think it's they've I don't know. They've resonated so much or they've connected with people so much, aside from the fact that they're just constantly written.

Speaker4: [00:34:55] Well, there's always incidents and accidents in publishing that can be of use or not be of use and with your books are successful or not. So there's an element of luck and chance and all that I do. I did know when I was writing the earlier books, which are set in an imaginary city, that there would be much less of a threshold for readers. If I set something in a semblance of a real world, and I'd wanted to write about Florida in some way for a long time. So I just put that in the back of my head and was like, Jeff, someday you're going to write a novel about Florida. I didn't expect it to come out this way, but but I was absolutely right about that. I mean, I literally had the same experience twice once with the previous series of novels where I was in an airport in Arkansas, talking to an elderly woman who mostly read Tom Clancy, asking me what my books are about, and I said, I guess there's an unguarded moment. I said they're setting an imaginary city that includes these giant intelligent mushrooms who control things through a databank of spores. And you can imagine what the reaction was, right? And then in 2014, I was in the same airport in Arkansas. I swear to God and this elderly man who reads, You know, Tom Clancy, there's nothing wrong with that. But but it's a little different what I do. And he asks what I what I had written? I said, Well, it's a strange expedition by this secret government agency into a seemingly pristine wilderness, and it's like, Oh, that sounds cool right now.

Speaker4: [00:36:25] He may have picked it up and not found it cool, but so there is that there is, then I think also the fact that the series does repurpose a ton of known science fiction and weird tropes. Yeah. And what I wanted to do with that, as much as much as it was conscious was to layer them so thick that they became repurposed for that that way. So even in annihilation, you could probably make a list of like 30 or 40 science fiction weird tropes that are embedded in it. But they're because they come so fast and furious and the way they're combined, they may hopefully seem, seem fresh. And so you've got something that's unfamiliar, but you've also got something that is it still, you know, still has some kind of framework that readers are like, Oh, I, this is familiar to me. And then the other thing is, I just I just I relaxed into this setting so much because like, there's not a single detail of the real world in these books that second hand, every single thing is something I have seen or experienced. Even the weirder stuff in the workplace, I think that can resonate and come through. And and and that kind of like sense of it being really real, even with the weird stuff, can can also help with with readers and then FSG. I've never really worked with anyone that was like genius level publishing before. I mean, I've worked with a lot of great publishers, but they they they are the best I've ever worked with.

Speaker1: [00:37:56] Good. That's a nice shout out to FSG, for sure. I have a question that's probably either the most beloved or the most hated question asked of every single novelist, I'm imagining. And it has to do with where your material comes from, and especially when we're thinking about the kind of the surreal and the sublime and the unconscious and the weird. And, you know, before I became a fully brainwashed academic and fully immersed into the life of the academy when I was in high school and college, I used to dream books and in, you know, sleeping I would I would see myself typing out the words and there would be an entire story unfolding on the page, you know, like a novel or a novella, like a a full on story. And then of course, upon waking, it would all just kind of crumble away and be gone. And now that I'm writing books for real now that I have the credentials to do so and actually do sit at my computer and write books. Guess what? I don't write them in my dreams anymore. So I wanted to ask you, do you dream your books or your stories? And if so, tell us about that. And if not, how do you how do you dream up all these kind of wondrous, magical, trippy places?

Speaker4: [00:39:13] Well, it's kind of a threefold process. I I do. Now, I feel like dreams are just one other form of inspiration, the same as if I looked at a newspaper article and got an idea. But it is true that most of my, my major novels have come to me in dreams first. The beginning of the last series of three novels came to me in a dream where I woke up and I just typed the first 10 or 15 pages and kind of an auto hypnosis kind of state, you know, out of deep sleep. And those pages wound up not changing at all. And the same thing happened with the southern reach. The first ten pages are pretty much the first ten pages I typed when I got up in the morning after having had that night dream of being down in a tower tunnel with something writing living words on the wall, and it's slowly getting fresher and fresher and realize, you know, it's going to turn a corner and and see this thing. And so, you know, sometimes that happens and you wake up in the morning and you don't have a story at all. But in the morning, when I woke up, I not only had by my bedside all the words on the wall written down, Oh, and they didn't change those sentences, which is really creepy. But but I had the character, the biologist in my head, and she was so strong that everything fell into place. And if I hadn't had her, I wouldn't have had a story. I would have just had some kind of surreal Rambo esque prose poem. But I actually had a plot and everything else. And so that's the distinction. And then for me, because things tend to be surreal, I just have to be very careful about modulating levels of reality so that it so that when I do do something really surreal, it stands out.

Speaker4: [00:40:51] In contrast, rather than everything seeming surreal and dreamlike, which is which is a huge, huge, huge problem otherwise. So, yeah, so so most of my stuff comes to me in dream in some way. But then it also is then I can always see where it came from. In reality, like the Tower Tunnel, basically the Gulf oil spill kind of the swirl that was in my brain while that was going on because you can never kind of get away from it while it's going on. The Tower Tunnel with Sintra this place in Portugal, where there is a literal tower tunnel, looks a little different than in the book. But but at the time I didn't piece that together. I pieced it together later, so it might be inaccurate. But my feeling is that these were elements that had come together and they came together, in part because I'm a big believer in telling my conscious brain, I want to write about this or that or the other, and letting my subconscious stew on it. So like I said, I said I wanted to write about Florida. You know, six months later, I write about Florida. I'd wanted to do something more environmentally conscious. That's what came out when I went to Sintra. I blocked it and I took details and wrote notes until myself. I want to write about this place. Again, it came out totally different. I didn't recognize it right away, but I very much trust my subconscious to give me the raw material. I need to then put together a story.

Speaker1: [00:42:03] Yeah, but that is a great insight, though, that you can. You can give it a little coaxing and coaching along the way, right? Kind of. It's almost like you're hypnotizing your your unconscious mind in a way with little directions.

Speaker4: [00:42:17] Yeah. Or it could be there could be a fungus in my head. I don't know. It's entirely possible,

Speaker3: [00:42:22] Which

Speaker2: [00:42:23] If which makes me want to ask, this is one of the things I found both creepy, but also, you know, one of the more exciting, exhilarating parts of the book too, was just all the stuff about the copies of people and the brightness and the transformation of people from within. I mean, you know, because that is such a, you know, it's one of the strongest, most eerie tropes right in science fiction is just the idea of like the pod people, right or the replicants like Blade Runner. And just, you know, every this idea that the closer you get to human, you know, the scarier it is, the the kind of this automated or sort of non-human being masquerading as real. But this book, I felt like in your books, he really treated this in a different way and that you it it was still eerie. But somehow, you know, it felt as though, you know, like Ghost Bird was actually kind of doing better than the biologist was in a way in terms of adapting to this new set of circumstances. Unexpected and unintelligible as they are. And I'm wondering whether that is that I mean, again, not to sort of ask for allegory here, but just to ask whether that is a sense of a kind of, I don't know, accelerated mutation or even evolution. That is something we kind of have to undergo if we want to survive in a world that's changing in ways we just can't really comprehend.

Speaker4: [00:43:43] Well, I definitely wanted to treat doppelgangers in a different way than just threatening right, or at least have the threatening aspect be part of the normal human response of the people who are encountering them, but not the reality of what's going on. I did have a basic thing set out just in terms of like the stage business of it as to when Area X creates a doppelganger as opposed to some other kind of transformation. And why the biologist situation might be different. And then there's other things in there, like the brightness that I realize now. The brightness was just the bronchitis I had when I was writing. That just kind of came out and got channeled and becoming more and more a believer in in method acting when it comes to fiction. Having also broken into my own house for this book, but but the the yeah, the doppelgangers, you know, the other thing of it is that I read six million words of weird fiction about a year and a half before I wrote Annihilation for this weird anthology we did, and that kind of just became a mulch in the back of my head. So there are a lot of doppelganger themes in those stories. But what happens when you have like a layer of that and it comes out is there's a certain logic to it, but you don't always yourself understand that logic beyond, like I said, the stage business of why they're there. Although I definitely wanted to explore the idea of of what a copy really means.

Speaker4: [00:45:16] And is it a copy or an improvement? You know, I see Ghost Bird is definitely being kind of, you know, post-human, right? Right. Yeah. And and in a way, a gift from Eric's in a sense of of a correction that or contamination that that may lead to something positive. I don't know what that means, literally in our world. You know, I feel like it's probably more of a mental thing, a mental transformation in the real world with regard to global warming. And oddly, clichés come to mind with regard to that, like just being more in the moment walking down the damn street and actually seeing. Everything that's in the environment around you. You know, I mean, I've said this before in some lectures, but I really do think that some kind of virtual reality thing that was programmed by chemists, research entomologists and and, you know, all kinds of other scientists that showed you the actual, you know, try to get beyond your five senses to show you what's going on from pheromone trails to, you know, toxicities in the air from from human behavior would go a long way. You know, someone just walking down the street in their neighborhood to getting a handle on what what is actually going on? Because sometimes I feel like it's just because we can't see it. We simply don't believe it on some visceral level. All right.

Speaker2: [00:46:43] That is a great idea, Jeff. We're going to build that here at Rice. Will you come help us?

Speaker3: [00:46:48] We're going to get

Speaker2: [00:46:49] Our hands on some Oculus Rift gear and we're going to we're going to build the hell out of that. That sounds

Speaker1: [00:46:53] Like

Speaker4: [00:46:54] A billion dollars per square inch.

Speaker1: [00:46:56] But then, you know, the bummer is going to the bummer at the end is that no one's going to want to wear that fucking thing because it's going to be so horrifying.

Speaker4: [00:47:05] Overwhelming. You're automatically a doppelganger or a fungus.

Speaker3: [00:47:09] Yeah. I wanted to ask a question if I if I might step in here about about the biologists and and you know, so this goes back to the you mentioned the dialogue that that is repurposed and authority from annihilation. And there are these there are these repetitions like, is there something in the corner of your eye? And I think but but a couple that really caught my ear or my eye was were pristine wilderness, which I loved how often that was repeated in relation to Area X. And then then the phrase variations on the phrase, I think maybe you like it better here. And and especially how that resonated with when the biologist is talking to herself in annihilation, that she could be persuaded, right, that she could be persuaded that it was that it's better, that Area X is better. And there's this sense again, in the way these certain moments characters erupt with ecstasy in response to the mind bending reality or whatever their encounter with Area X. And I wonder, you know, and especially this idea of the post-human, right? Are you like? Are you on the. Are you on the side of Area X? Um, some part of you?

Speaker4: [00:48:37] Sure. It's within the context of a fiction. The the thing is, it's a tough question because, you know, as a novelist, I want to set up any number of different scenario situations and questions where I don't necessarily agree with the answer or the answers given right. I'm not trying to control the experiment in that way. But, you know, pristine wilderness, I thought, was interesting because there is no such thing as a pristine wilderness, so to speak. But but but also because there's the argument made that because there is no pristine wilderness, it's OK to just go ahead and mess with everything, which I also don't agree with. But I also saw that biologist is a very specific character. And it's quite funny to me how some people see her as being damaged, whereas I see her as just different. And I've known people like this, and in fact, I've had biologists come up to me at readings and say, OK, look, this this biologist you describe is not the norm, but I recognize this person, this person out in the field. There are people like this. And so I wanted to explore a different social interaction. I mean, but the point is that, you know, just because she has this, this uneasy relationship with the human world doesn't make her in some way, quote unquote dysfunctional or different beyond whatever we consider normal. It's a valid way of looking at the world, you know, ostensibly I would say her way of looking at the world is more valid in the current context.

Speaker4: [00:50:29] You know, we spend a lot of time trying to support ideas of hard tech and Silicon Valley tech that are really bad for us and very inefficient and have nothing to do with like good business practice or any crap like that. Whereas, you know, there's all kinds of things that are associated with like tree huggers and and a view of the world that's too much aligned with nature that if we actually just adopted that in the right ways and in complex smart ways, we would not be where we are today. And we would also have a much better world, much better quality of life for ourselves and the animals that we share this world with. So. So I see her as without getting into what I would call like a dark mountain space. Yeah, because I find that I have to be honest, I'm kind of trepidatious about extremes and and things like that. I'm just not sure how I feel about that yet. You know, as like a third way. Right? Whether she's always consistent or not. And of course, she has a lot of things visited upon her. So it's not like she gets to go out there and create her own laboratory and perfect ideal life and and all of that. So.

Speaker1: [00:51:39] Yeah, I mean, we definitely get the sense that she is happier among the tide pools, right, and the tide pool creatures. The other thing that was really striking to me about her and maybe I don't know, maybe I tuned into this being a female person, is that how fearless she was? She's really brave. Like, she'll just kind of go for it. It's that to me, that was the most sort of shocking, but also inspiring part of her character in a lot of ways.

Speaker4: [00:52:05] Well, I wanted to push back against this kind of horror movie cliche, right? Which is that each time you turn around in a dark corner and you see something, everybody starts screaming. And, you know, trained professionals in different areas don't react the same in different situations. Same applies to emergency situations. They have some kind of weird conversations in emergency situations and in annihilation. And I basically studied, you know, transcripts of people in these kinds of situations, and it's not at all like Hollywood movies. So I was trying very hard in both those cases to to to move away. And of course, for some readers buying into the science fiction tropes, then they're also bringing in movie tropes. They were distressed that she wasn't more afraid. Right? But then there's also the layering that she's writing this after, and she has a very different kind of personality than a lot of people. So all those three things combined meant that, first of all, she wouldn't be conveying to us necessarily the immediate shock of something in this account. She's writing later. And also, she wouldn't be as shocked as some people. And of course, she's also been infected.

Speaker1: [00:53:11] Right, right. I kind of wanted to ask you, this is maybe a little non sequitur kind of genre question, but a couple of weeks ago, I was in a dissertation defense in the English department for a a dissertation that was based on novels that are in the category of what they call southern literature. And, you know, usually dissertation defenses are pretty formulaic events and kind of dull overall. Sorry, kids, but it this actually ended up being kind of stimulating because we had this really interesting conversation about what constitutes southern literature and the present. And I'm not a literature expert, but my sense was, is that there's some ambivalence about calling anything now southern literature. And so then then the conversation was sort of like, you know, if the author is born in the south and lives in the south, then it's southern literature or if they're born in the south, but then they spend a lot of time in the north. I can still be southern literature. Or then there was another kind of version of it where it was like, You know, if it takes place there, it counts. And finally, you know, if it's sort of predicated on the stereotypes we have about the South, then then it qualifies as southern literature. So. And of course, you know, your your trilogy is is the Southern Reach trilogy. So and it takes place in Florida. Well, yeah, it takes place in the south. So I just wanted to ask, is there anything southern about the Southern Reach trilogy?

Speaker4: [00:54:40] Yeah. Well, I mean, it's quite interesting because, you know, I've been writing stuff set in the South, you know, in short story form before this. And my perception has been that unless you write like Southern Gothic, if you write something too speculative, it's never going to be southern literature or, you know, which I find a little bit disheartening because as an author, you kind of find it interesting to see your stuff examine through different prisms that are that are relevant. But yeah, I definitely thought especially authority authority is definitely supposed to be like a southern lit novel in some ways. I mean, all that small town stuff, you know, the the anonymity of it not saying some particular state allowed me to basically use my experiences across the south to to create even the southern reach facility, the town that control lives in, you know, all of that stuff. And. And so I don't have an objection to it being called southern lit necessarily. Mm hmm. If that's the prison people want to view it through, I mean, the thing that's quite hilarious to me is that if you actually look at the number of scenes in these books that are speculative as opposed to, it's just reality, right? It's actually fairly small. Yeah, yeah. There's a lot of long stretches where, you know, it's just odd people and slightly absurd things happening, especially at authority. So, you know, so so I think that, you know, I personally don't don't mind that. And I do think that that there are writers like Kelly Link and Karen Russell who it benefits to, to think in some ways of them coming out of a southern lit tradition in addition to everything else that kind of flows into their work.

Speaker1: [00:56:26] Cool. Great.

Speaker2: [00:56:27] So, Jeff, looking ahead now, and I know this is not big news because it's on the Wikipedia page, but actually there is going to be a Hollywood film version of this series. And you were just talking about. The some of the struggle with Hollywood cliche, so I kind of want to follow up and ask you, you know, obviously we are going to be, you know, camping out overnight to get in first day and we can't wait to see the Pig Man cephalopod cross three CGI thing. I mean, we're dying to see that. But I mean, do you have any concerns or anything you can talk about about sort of how not to let this become Hollywood formula?

Speaker4: [00:57:06] Well. It's the way it's worked out is that Alex Garland, who's the director and the writer, he may say he's not on a tour, but he really kind of is has his own kind of idea of what he wants to pull out of the novel and use for his and has used for his screenplay. And I think that like, you know, things like the doppelgangers really fascinate him. Those human elements, I think, fascinate him, perhaps a little more than the nature elements. But on the other hand, you know, he's been kind enough to show me pre-production stills and in kind of the texture and tone through different images of what he wants to accomplish. And I would say in terms of texture and tone, it should be pretty much like the novel, which is kind of astonishing. In fact, if he actually accomplishes what he's setting out to do, it may be one of the the most interesting films I've seen in a long time in terms of cinematography. Like, for example, one idea that he's told me I don't know if it's still true is to start with very normal looking vegetation, then very, very slowly make it weirder and weirder in such a way that he's hoping viewers don't necessarily notice right away that they become so acclimated to it.

Speaker4: [00:58:16] So some interesting things he's doing. I'm not sure that he shares the same views of of nature that I do, and I just, you know, I'm OK with that, you know, I mean, the fact of the matter is the movie coming out. It's going to help the books, the books being, you know, again, prominent. Help me. There's a lot of science departments that are actually teaching the southern reach, able to do outreach with them. I'm able to actually sometimes contribute nonfiction in ways that you know, may be of some small service. I find some science departments are curious about storytelling. How do they get across the story of what their findings are to the public, which seems to be a big deal in terms of how people view global warming and how they respond to calls for action? So I think overall, it's great. I think it's great that he has a unique vision. So, you know, no matter how it deviates from the books, is definitely going to be a point of view, and it's definitely going to be an interesting movie to watch.

Speaker2: [00:59:17] I'm truly excited to see it, and we were talking a bit before somebody. And I just about there really is a space for kind of auteur driven, you know, blockbuster Hollywood films still. I mean, they're not, you know, all of them. But you look back at The Matrix or some of Chris Nolan's films that are definitely not wrapping up to a tidy ending. Mm hmm. And I think, yeah, it seems like just imagining what they could do with visually, you know, in terms of the cinematography for southern region, I think it could be really awesome and the cast looks great, too. So not only do you have an excellent director, but you've got a really strong cast who?

Speaker4: [00:59:50] Yeah, I'm hopeful that it'll it'll it'll turn out well, and the changes in the script are not so severe that they couldn't do authority more or less the way it is in the book, although there'd be some condensing and some foregrounding of things because I'm not sure the middle of that book, which is a bureaucratic nightmare and which is kind of darkly humorous, is necessarily dramatic. You know, control sitting at his desk, shuffling papers, finding clues. Not sure about

Speaker2: [01:00:17] That. But you also you also have the thousands of rabbits, too that's going to be out.

Speaker4: [01:00:22] That scene has to be done.

Speaker2: [01:00:23] That's going to be a high level epic scene, I think,

Speaker4: [01:00:27] Without hurting any rabbits.

Speaker2: [01:00:28] No, no, no. That's right.

Speaker4: [01:00:29] That's right. I'm going to be out there with I'm going to be out there saying, Please don't hurt the rabbits.

Speaker2: [01:00:36] So, Roy, do you have any final questions for Jeff?

Speaker1: [01:00:40] Yeah, it doesn't have to be a tidy Hollywood ending, by the way. You can. You can. You can outro as however you want. Yeah.

Speaker3: [01:00:47] Well, I wanted to ask about the so you mentioned the non-fiction and and scientists and climate change, and I know you have been working on or your your. I know it's in some some part of the production process you've been working on a book about climate change and fiction. And I wonder if you could say something about that or about what you're what you're saying in that? Sure. And and that sort of thing.

Speaker4: [01:01:18] Well, the I have a some context. I have a prior book called Wonder Book, which is the world's sounds like a really hackneyed advertising slogan, but the world's first fully illustrated creative writing book. And what that did that's unique is that it it replaces text about complex, creative writing concepts with actual illustrations, some of them influenced by Manga and and. And I found a way to visualize things that hadn't been visualized in quite that way before. And so the idea here is the same it's a coffee table type book full color with kind of a history of of where we've been up to this point with regard to how we view the environment, how we view animals and all of that. And then a where are we now and then where could we be in that speculative part deals a lot with different kinds of narratives. And of course, the the challenge here is that I want to talk about both how we tell stories about these things, about global warming and the environment in a nonfiction and fictional context. Because I find there's a lot of non-fictional context that it's damn fictional, right? And so and so I feel like there's there's a profitable way to kind of like thread the needle on that and have a book that talks about all of that at once because I think they are connected.

Speaker4: [01:02:38] You know, you see that even in fiction today, you see a lot of fantasy fiction that's that's very outdated in terms of how it deals with animals because it's it's stealing. It's dealing with views of animals from like fairy tales. So things like that, I think it's very interesting to look at and then look at where could we go from here and do a lot of that visually have a lot of things in there that that you haven't seen portrayed visually before. And it's one of those things like wonder book, where thankfully I have the time and the collaborators artistically to to organically get to to the right place. I don't have to be perfect right off the bat. In fact, you know, there's going to be probably a lot of drafts of the art and images and things that don't go anywhere. And luckily, I have the ability to to do that.

Speaker3: [01:03:26] So it sounds really exciting.

Speaker4: [01:03:30] So we'll see. Or it'll just be the mad scientist end of my career. We'll see.

Speaker1: [01:03:36] It's not. It's not a bad way to go out.

Speaker4: [01:03:38] I'm sure you go down in a blaze of glory. Here's this incomprehensible mess. You're welcome.

Speaker1: [01:03:45] Bye bye.

Speaker3: [01:03:48] Well, you have this other rampaging bear book, right?

Speaker4: [01:03:51] Yeah. Do you have a novel out next year that features a giant like Godzilla sized, psychotic, flying, intelligent bear? That rules are ruined? Kind of post-collapse post scarcity city. Wow. What's that one? Oh, yeah.

Speaker2: [01:04:04] Maybe what's that one called?

Speaker4: [01:04:08] It's called born. I'm too old to do titles that are longer than one where at this point

Speaker2: [01:04:13] I just can't be economical.

Speaker4: [01:04:16] All right, I'm on. I'm on the BS now. Yeah, which is actually true. The novel after that's called Bliss. What's going on?

Speaker1: [01:04:24] Well, to both of you, we wanted to to thank you for taking time, Roy. And Jeff, there's a really fun, fantastic conversation, so we really appreciate you making the time and and responding to the questions and everything. And Jeff, if you need any companions at the opening night party for the films. Yeah. You know, you can always send the tickets over here and we'll find a way to to to meander over to Hollywood and in our best duds.

Speaker2: [01:04:51] And also, congratulations to both of you on all the exciting good things that are happening to you. And thanks to both of you for all the really important work you're doing in very different ways to call attention to and help us come to terms with the Anthropocene.

Speaker4: [01:05:08] Well, thanks for having me on the show and I'm looking forward to Roy's novel in what is it, August or September?

Speaker3: [01:05:13] Yeah, it comes out August.

Speaker4: [01:05:15] Cool. Plug it, plug it for a blurb.

Speaker3: [01:05:17] Oh, sure. Yeah. And thank you for for talking with us and opening up about the The Area X trilogy, and everything is really great to get into it.

Speaker4: [01:05:29] Well, thanks for some great questions.

Speaker1: [01:05:31] Cool. Sure. All right, Peter. Peace out.

Speaker4: [01:05:34] Ok, bye bye.