Ep. 11. Jeff VanderMeer: Absolution — Return of the Southern Reach

Futureverse

In this episode of Futureverse, Molly Wood and Ramanan Raghavendran sit down with acclaimed author Jeff VanderMeer to discuss, among many things, his latest novel, Absolution, the unexpected fourth installment of the Southern Reach series.

The conversation explores the tangled web of human-environment relationships and how novels can serve as testing grounds for exploring ecological and psychological ideas. VanderMeer also talks about why he challenges the very terminology of “climate fiction” — he’s quite convincing!

Time stamps and the full transcript are below. This episode is also available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

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Show Notes

(01:10) The Mysteries of Area X

(03:02) Writing Absolution: A Journey

(09:14) Interrogating Solutions in Climate Fiction

(14:13) Hyperobjects and Their Impact

(20:06) The Role of Non-Human Perspectives

(24:38) Frustrations with Bureaucracy

(33:12) Future Works and Adaptations

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Jeff (00:00): And I just think of novels as laboratories. They're not solutions. They're laboratories where you try out experiments.

Ramanan (00:09): Welcome back to Futureverse, a podcast centered on climate fiction, a nomenclature that our guest today is going to piss all over, and how it helps us imagine our way forward through climate uncertainty. I'm Ramanan Raghavendran.

Molly (00:23): I'm Molly Wood. As the climate and biodiversity crisis gathers momentum, thinking about and preparing for possible futures involves not just clever computer models, but also a heavy dose of imagination. Today, we turn to among the heaviest. We're thrilled to be joined by Jeff VanderMeer, one of the most radically imaginative minds out there. His works delve into reality-bending explorations of ecology, climate change, and what it means to be human.

Ramanan (00:49): Jeff is a prolific writer of novels, short stories, nonfiction, and a seasoned editor of definitive anthologies of science fiction, fantasy, and so-called weird fiction. Today we're talking with him about his new novel, Absolution, the surprise fourth edition to his Southern Reach trilogy, which was first published in 2014.

Molly (01:10): The original three novels, which are titled Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance, explore the mysteries of Area X, a remote area of coastline where bizarre and troubling occurrences have been underway for several decades.

Expeditions into the area typically end in disaster, encountering ecological oddities, creatures beyond rational exploration, and profound changes to the psyche and identity of the explorers themselves.

You may actually, even if you haven't read the books, have come across the movie adaptation of Annihilation, starring Natalie Portman. Absolution returns to Area X 10 years later exploring its origins and unraveling more of its profound mysteries. Jeff has described writing it as one of the most immersive, obsessive writing experiences of his life so far.

Ramanan (01:57): Jeff, it's an absolute pleasure to have you here.

Jeff (01:59): I am really happy to be here.

Ramanan (02:03): Okay, let's try and put our serious game face on. Jeff, we're going to start with Area X. What led you to return to Area X after a decade? Can you tell us what Area X is?

Jeff (02:14): Yeah, it's a mysterious area with an invisible border that forms on the forgotten coast which is a real place, but kind of transformed and never named as Florida in the books. And then for 30 years, this secret agency, the Southern Reach, tries to figure out what's going on beyond the border. With increasing urgency as it feels like the border is advancing and that there may be a larger issue.

Molly (02:38): Very large. A very large issue, in fact.

Ramanan (02:43): So this was a trilogy. It came out rapid fire, which is unusual for those of us who spent all our time reading trilogies. And then 10 years later you went back.

Jeff (02:55): Yeah.

Ramanan (02:56): What led you there?

Jeff (03:02): Yeah. Well, basically I had an idea in 2017 that was very exciting to me about an expedition of biologists 20 years before Area X forms, that had been kind of like suborned or overtaken by Central, the secret agency in the other three books. And that's where they started their hypnosis experiments, their mind-control experiments. And that in doing so, that inadvertently, when Area X came along, made everything worse.

And I love the idea of going back beyond the beginning of the trilogy, but then also ending up in a place where I was sneakily able to also kind of write a sequel to the first three books.

(03:40): And so that was really energizing for me. And then I just let it basically steep in the back of my brain like I always do. And then on July 31st of last year, after a series of, I would say personal setbacks, professional things that were weird, not having written a novel in two or three years, this kind of ecstatic vision came to me of the rest of that first part and the full shape of the book. And I just started writing morning, noon, and night, and I did not stop until I had a final draft, December 31st. It was probably the most exhausting but most fulfilling writing experience of my life. And I don't remember large parts of it, so...

Ramanan (04:20): All right. Well, why don't we skip over that gracefully?

Jeff (04:23): Are you feeling uncomfortable with the idea of ecstatic visions? Am I bringing up the idea of saints and relics and medieval visions?

Molly (04:35): I feel deeply relieved having described, no, I described this book to somebody at some point as sort of like a fever dream, and so I'm happy to hear that it sounds like it was.

Jeff (04:46): It was. I mean, there's a logic to it and an underlying series of answers. But I expect with a lot of my books, it'll take rereads for that logic to always be apparent because the urgency of the vision, so to speak, I think overtakes readers on a first read. But it is sneakily very heavily plotted at the same time.

Ramanan (05:07): One quickie. Half our audience is failed authors of various kinds. Are there other books in your history that you might revisit in this fashion?

Jeff (05:21): You mean other kind of universes or-

Ramanan (05:25): No, no. Something you've written many years ago that you'll come back to with a sequel just because it's been gnawing at you.

Jeff (05:32): I kind of did with Borne. There's two books that occurred after, a few years after. I think here it's just simply that it took a long time, first of all for Annihilation to be written, even though I wrote it very quickly. Because for years in the back of my head, I want to write about Florida, I want to write about the environment, I want to write about the wilderness.

And it took a good decade for that to actually come out of me. So sometimes there's just a long gestation period. And here I think there were things that I also liked in the conflict between the idea of science and the idea of this kind of exploration of paranormal phenomenon that occurs in the book, and kind of the rituals that are associated with both.

Ramanan (06:20): Just one quick comment, this audience is likely to be here for Southern Reach and Area X and Annihilation and Absolution. The world should know my first Jeff Vandermeer book was Borne, and it blew my little mind, so thank you for that.

Jeff (06:40): Oh. Well, thank you. Thanks.

Molly (06:42): This is an exciting day. So I want to address the kind of small elephant in the room, which is that you have kindly appeared to appear on our podcast, where we talk to authors who primarily write what we call “climate fiction”, and yet you have pretty arguably kind of rejected the idea of “Cli-Fi”, or at least the idea that it should be viewed as part of the kind of solution stack to the climate crisis. And yet the Southern Reach Trilogy is very much about ecological and climate themes.

Jeff (07:11): I'm personally just about accuracy. So I think that what I try to do is not really speculative so much as trying to make the reader feel a situation in their body, so to speak. And so that's the psychological reality of a situation that is not trying to provide solutions necessarily. But I think that's also very useful. That's something that fiction can do because it's so immersive.

And you mentioned Borne earlier. Born's a good example of that. It's supposedly fantastical with this flying bear. But in actual fact, the situation of day-to-day scavenging and re-use of things is something that a lot of people have to do today. And we may be spared it right now ourselves, but that's a very realistic scenario and one where there's an extractive entity that's created a situation where this city is on its last legs.

And I think the same thing applies to the Southern Reach, but more in this idea of how we grapple with something as enormous as climate crisis, and what it does to us in terms of paralysis or being frozen or having the wrong solutions. And so I guess my beef, and I did have a whole Esquire essay about it.

Ramanan (08:26): Yes, you did.

Jeff (08:28): Where I tore a lot of people a new one, and also probably in some ways maybe unfairly. But I also feel like sometimes when things go unexamined for so long, it's necessary to be decisive in how you talk about them. So you're kind of over-emphasizing things to make your point.

I do think that it's wrong when novels purport to have solutions, but when you look at them closely, and authors go on and talk about this issue as if they have the solutions. And then you look at their book and it's like, "Oh, there's Bitcoin in here as a solution. Great." Or "AI, wonderful." Okay, what about water? Is that important to you? So those are the kinds of things that bother me.

Jeff (09:14): And then novelists are supposed to interrogate even the foundation of ideas that they agree with.

So I think it's important to interrogate whether the word "solar" is always benign when you look at the loss of biodiversity because of giant utilities companies having this view that we can't have rooftop solar. We have to only have these huge things out west that may actually have a huge impact on biodiversity. And that's on our health and our security in other ways.

So nothing should go uninterrogated and nothing should be simplified. And that includes from my own books. People should interrogate the science in them, should wrestle with the things in them that they disagree with. And I just think of novels as laboratories. They're not solutions. They're laboratories where you try out experiments

Ramanan (10:11): Along those lines. And I know Molly has a question I should note here that we had Omar El Akkad on the show.

Jeff (10:17): Oh, I love him.

Ramanan (10:19): And nobody would categorize his work as climate fiction.

Jeff (10:24): I would.

Ramanan (10:25): But it was a pervasive theme, right? And there's accuracy as you put it.

Jeff (10:30): There's psychological accuracy. When the book came out, the first one, American War, I believe is the title. It was less accurate than it is now given the way that we've become more factionalized. So it's fascinating to me that it's become more accurate in the details that matter. And the details that don't matter, that he's maybe less accurate in terms of prediction on what decade things are going to happen in don't seem important because he got the rest of that right. Right? He got the political equation right. He got what that does to policy correct. What that does to people and communities. And that's really the important thing in that book, I think.

Molly (10:58): One of the things actually on that note that I'm sort of struck by, by the ecology of Area X, is the inevitability, right? This sense of inevitability that it is its own kind of thing that humans keep throwing themselves against.

Whether with their egos or their dysfunction or just their solutions and imagined solutions and technology. And yet there is sort of this pervasive sense through all of the books that it will win. Barring maybe an authority, some ultimate sacrifice. And it feels like a climate allegory even though that's kind of a bummer.

Jeff (11:38): Yeah, I agree. I think though, that in keeping with what's practical, what's accurate as opposed to what's pessimistic versus optimistic because those things are sliding scales depending on where you are in this equation. Absolution does provide some window of a future because it does extrapolate a sense in which people have adapted to Area X. And that's the sneaky part of the sequel, because the information is kind of delivered to you in a way where you don't know whether to trust it or not.

But in actual fact, what I'm describing in parts of the book through dream or seeming dream and through the visions of certain characters, is a future in which some human beings have adapted to the situation and have adapted to Area X.

And I think it's similar in a way to how you would adapt to climate crisis in an ultimate way, where you're not bound by systems of extraction and capitalism. Which is where you would basically be finding ways to merge with your environment and be more complimentary to your landscape.

Well beyond the ways that we think of now, because we're so compromised already that our solutions have to take into account what has been compromised.

We're not starting from a situation where we're fresh in terms of policy or anything else. So we're dismantling stuff that doesn't work. We're trying to get stuff in place that does work, and it's this kind of Frankenstein monster of solution and two steps forward, one step back that... In Absolution, I get to imagine a situation where we just fluidly kind of learn to adapt to this thing. Does that make sense or am I babbling at this point?

Ramanan (13:23): No, no, it makes a ton of sense. I mean, we are given the hand, so to speak, we're playing the hand we've been dealt.

Jeff (13:30): Yeah.

Ramanan (13:30): And there's only so much we can unwind. Much of it we cannot.

Jeff (13:38): Yeah. And I mean, that's the question, right? That's even the question in Omar's book, which is to say to unravel a lot of it, you will unravel society to the point of a lot of civil unrest. Do you get to a point where you can even enact the environmental regulation and climate crisis policy if there is so much instability? So it's a catch-22. The things we need to do are we need totally new ways of thought. But to implement them on a policy or political level in a fraught situation with very little time, it's hard to know exactly how to do that sometimes. That's what freezes me up a bit.

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Ramanan (14:13): It freezes all of us. I'm going to switch gears a little bit and ask you about hyper-objects. So climate change and Area X have been described by you and others as things that are so big, so complex and intangible and that relates to what we just talked about a little bit. It's impossible to properly perceive them. Can you speak more about this idea? And how much did that play a role as you were writing all of the Southern Reach books?

Jeff (14:41): Yeah. Well, I heard about this from Tim Morton who I think wrote about the books or tweeted about them. And that's the first time I heard the term "hyper-object." And I latched onto it rather eagerly because it did fit the situation. And sometimes you just happen to write something that fits the moment or someone gives you a term that's useful in interpreting your own work. So yeah, I was like, "Wow, yeah. This actually does make sense in the way that Area X manifests."

And so I don't think it affected... It may have affected Acceptance, because I may have still been editing Acceptance at that point. But I don't think it affected the first two books. It definitely has influenced Absolution and other novels maybe in more subtle ways, even Hummingbird Salamander and Dead Astronauts. But yeah, I find it a very compelling way... It allowed me to interpret certain books in a certain way like Imperial by Vollmann, which is about the Salton Sea and the history of the Salton Sea.

(15:41): And I was wondering why in that environmentally devastated climate, the book was repetitious and it was also him coming back to certain things and being agitated by them. And I realized, "Oh, it's because this is a manifestation of climate crisis as a hyper-object." Even the Salton Sea, Vollmann can't quite get his head around exactly what's happening and it agitates him on a subconscious level.

And so the book keeps in a very useful way, but also again, it's repetitious, coming back to the same things and trying to attack them from different angles. He can't quite grasp all of it in his head. And it's not his failing, it's a human failing in the face of such immensity. But that's just one example of how that term affected how I even interpret texts.

Ramanan (16:30): And for the audience that's Imperial by William Vollmann, which Molly and I are now going to spend the next week reading.

Jeff (16:38): It's a fascinating book, for sure. Psychologically, in every other way.

Molly (16:40): I did several reporting trips to the Salton Sea, and it is as close to Area X as I have ever been to. I mean, it just sort of haunts you. You can't get out of your head. And actually this is related, I want to come back to this idea of adaptation and what has to change in us. Because it feels like a big theme in the Southern Reach books is this casting off of human individualism and ego, and the sense of humanity's pedestal above the natural world. Talk a little bit more about that, if you would. Is that accurate? Is that an accurate reading into your mind?

Jeff (17:18): I think it's accurate, and some people have interpreted the books as meaning that I want people to go away. And that's not accurate at all. It's just simply that our relationship to the world is so flawed because in general, in modern times, in a modern vernacular in the monoculture, we have failed to factually interpret our relationship to that world.

So I give one small example. The recent study about how in areas with habitat loss that has led to bats being pretty much not prevalent, you have increased infant mortality rates because of increased use of pesticides. These are the kinds of things that we do not think about when we think about biodiversity loss or our relationship to the world, the planet. We think of it as being this thing that's separate from us, and yet it's always affecting us. We just never, economically even, factor in for the most part the cost of it.

(18:20): You see the beginnings of that in... For example, Florida has two categories of invasive species like plants and things. And they categorize, they actually have what the economic cost to agriculture and stuff is. And if we did that more accurately across the board with regard to biodiversity, we would begin to be horrified and shocked and maybe change some of our policies as a result. And sometimes biodiversity and climate crisis are not linked. A lot of times they are, I think. More so than we would want to believe. But that's just one example, I think, of what you're kind of getting at with the question.

Molly (18:58): And I guess maybe then inevitability is a little too... Because you do see, to your point, especially in Absolution, this evolution of behavior. We go from sort of blunt force, the blunt force approach. "We know how to do this. We're an all-powerful government agency," to, "We have to really adapt ourselves, to coexist."

Jeff (19:18): I mean, individual agents from Central, without giving too much away, basically learn how to adapt and to also kind of subvert to some degree. So I think that that's one way of thinking about it. And also just on the individual level, the more that we can adapt our imaginations, kind of see what we often think of as invisible in the world.

I think even recognizing that there's less distance between us and the outside world in terms of our actual bodies, that our bodies are more in communication with the world, with microbes and everything. If we physically saw how connected we are to the world, that would be a really powerful thing just if we were walking through our every day. It would be much harder to turn away and to make decisions that are counterproductive to that.

Molly (20:06): That is also another theme or has at least been identified a theme is, to put a finer point on it, this idea of the human versus non-human experience, and trying to have that kind of empathy. How much of that is informed by... I mean, you spent time in Fiji and then in Florida, which is just this kind of bonkers ecological ecosystem. How much of that is informed by living in, I don't know a better way to put this, aggressively natural places?

Jeff (20:32): Yeah, I've lived in biodiverse places my entire life.

Molly (20:35): That's a way better word.

Jeff (20:38): And I mean that includes the West Coast. So I spent a lot of time on the Oregon Coast and British Columbia as well. And they all seem similar to me, because the sheer riots and complexity of ecosystems and the sheer number of organisms, and the rate of decay and rebirth is very energizing to me and normal to me. And, one challenge in the books is to convey this to those who may not have experienced it before and convey the meaning and importance of it.

(21:10): It's also kind of sheltered in a way. It's sheltered that I get to live in this place, even this ravine beyond my house. Even degraded by the houses around it, it has a firefly that is found only a few other places in Florida or on Earth. It constitutes a kind of natural history zone that hasn't been mapped by biologists. In the middle of Tallahassee. And there's tons of these places, these ravines in Tallahassee. So I've been very lucky in that regard.

(21:45): But yeah, it is making the link, the usefulness of things. I find that trying to write from non-human perspectives is very useful because it gives you a different set of values. It gives you a different perspective that may make you understand the world in a better way. Because a lot of times what we're doing is destroying habitat because we think that what's within it is completely worthless.

We don't consider that it has an intrinsic value in addition to its value to us. And so if we could make that link more clearly, we would at least have one thing off the ledger because even without climate crisis, we would have a huge problem with all kinds of other things related to the...

Ramanan (22:28): I mean, there's a line from that way of thinking and looking, which leads to this notion of Area X as a pristine wilderness. Contamination, pollution from human activities is more or less nonexistent. Was this the model? Was this the plan? Area X was going to be that place?

Jeff (22:52): Yeah. I mean, I think that my subconscious was basically protecting it from the Gulf oil spill, to be honest. I mean, I don't know if you remember, but for a lot of us in Florida, that thing was never going to be capped. At a certain point, there were people saying it might not be capped for 20 years. And it might be a situation like you find in other parts of the world where literally there's oil wells that are uncapped and they continue to spill pollution out into the water.

So I think that had a huge psychological effect. It was like in the back of our minds for months, like a spiral. And so I think that that was a useful thing to create this conundrum among those people researching it to say, "Oh. Well, it has these negative effects. It's distorting all this stuff. It's affecting our minds, but it's also doing this thing that we can't seem to do ourselves in terms of restoring the environment."

(23:42): And that's just what it does. There's no value judgment on that. And there's a lot of contrast. The biologist is very much attuned to this empty lot in her former life back in a city. Which I think is also very powerful too, and something I explore in Borne. How the places we think of as broken or the places we think of as having no biodiversity may be incredibly important too in the future to restoring it.

Even looking at abandoned mine sites that we may now turn into solar farms without realizing that some of them probably need to be preserved for the biodiversity that has accumulated there in the meantime. It's these tough equations of looking at every individual situation for the specifics of what it is and not imposing some generalization on the landscape, I guess is what I would say.

Ramanan (24:38): That is super, super interesting and brain-opening. Speaking of brain opening, here's a brain closing. Which is look, I mean throughout the books, but in Authority in particular is just the frustrations with bureaucracy. Is that your generalized view of governments and their responses to the climate crisis?

Jeff (25:00): Well. I mean, I think to some degree. Because we see patches, we see things where we're like, we're allowing extractive things here and then we're saying, "Oh, they'll be taken care of by planting trees over there." And other things that are just like, political patches. I think it's also my definite specific experience dealing with bureaucracies.

I don't think I ever signed an NDA. So I can say that I had one project as a contractor with Florida Department of Environmental Protection over a decade ago, where they were trying to figure out how to make their databases speak to each other. Because they had separate databases for air pollution, ground pollution, and water pollution. And in order to cross-reference the same patch of land, they had to pull physical reports and then look at the line items.

(25:58): So things like that make you a little jaded about government response to environmental issues. And so a lot of what's in Authority is direct experience, including coming in on a job and inheriting a desk with a dead mouse and a plant in it. And someone coming to me the second day on a job and saying, "Hey, do you want to see a strange room?" And me going, "No. No, I don't, sir. I don't even know you."

Molly (26:25): Did that happen? Is that drawn from real experience?

Jeff (26:28): That happened. That's drawn from real experience. So a lot of the uncanny stuff in the books is direct experience of government bureaucracy and strangeness.

Molly (26:38): Okay, yes. Do you want to see a strange room? Friends, the answer is always "no." It is always "no."

Jeff (26:44): Unless it's the last day on the job and you're really feeling adventurous.

Molly (26:47): No, that's when they kill you. Yeah, they take you-

Jeff (26:49): That's true, too.

Molly (26:51): It's the Old Yeller walk. Like, don't do that.

Jeff (26:53): You never leave. You never leave.

Molly (26:59): It's a no. It's a no. You mentioned the Esquire article earlier. In that article, you mentioned The Lathe of Heaven by Octavia Butler. And I'm kind of getting the sense I just sort of want to, like Ramanan and I work as investors in primarily technology. And it does feel that there is a rejection of technocracy and it feels like it's useful to put a fine point on that or ask you about that. That this coexistence is the way forward, not necessarily more invention. Throw some more of that at us.

Jeff (27:22): I think we need both. The problem is how stuff gets suborned, how things are viewed. I mean, even if you look at Musk and Mars colonies and all this stuff that kind of distracts from it. So I don't think I'm really attacking that. I'm attacking more, even in the third part of Absolution, where I attach a kind of “tech bro” mentality to a member of the expedition. I'm talking about derangements. I'm talking about-

Molly (27:46): We know him. We recognized him.

Jeff (27:50): Yeah. So I'm not talking about... I know somebody who for the longest time was trying to do a better battery, a better renewable battery. And was thwarted a lot by Musk, by the process of having to commodify everything to the point of making maximum profit. And so I'm not against technological solutions, I just worry about the policies that get implemented around them and to what degree they're actually accurate as solutions.

And I would also just say that the reason I don't tackle that directly is because I'm not an expert in that area. What I can do is say, getting closer to... Making nature versus culture, have the distance be a little less than it is is very helpful to us. That's really kind of the argument I'm making. And I'm not trying to focus on also saying, "Oh yeah, and this stuff is all bad." I just haven't tackled it because I'm not an expert in that area.

(28:50): Again, it can seem like an overemphasis. It's just the things that I know about, the things that I'm passionate about. I also was once offered to go to a scientific conference and my payment was going to be a half-hour lunch with Musk.

Ramanan (29:04): Whoa.

Jeff (29:05): That was what they were going to pay me with. And I laughed them off the phone. Because it was like, "You trying to dissuade me from coming to this thing?" And seeing the latest photo of him looking like a deranged court jester from the set of a Titus Andronicus film. On the stage with Trump is enough to... But I mean, I guess what I'm saying is that there's an image issue. There's an image issue with the technology that feels to me it needs to be maybe an educational one. Because of the overarching PR of someone like a Musk.

Ramanan (29:41): You could have asked them to improve the offer by making it 10 minutes with Musk.

Jeff (29:44): 10 minutes... Five... Two minutes... A high five where I wear a glove...

Molly (29:51): Negotiate down. By the way, you definitely won the caption contest for that photo. I've seen a lot of attempts and yours, not surprisingly, is the best description of what happened there.

Ramanan (30:02): Look, the history of technology is also the history of unintended consequences, right? And so we see that.

All right. After Absolution, what lies ahead? What should we look out for? Are you going to come back to Area X? What's in the pipeline?

Molly (30:19): No pressure.

Jeff (30:21): I feel like with the Southern Reach books and then also Hummingbird Salamander and Dead Astronauts, I've temporarily said everything I want to about the environment. The next books are... Well, I mean... One of them is actually about the environment. One's called Drone Love, and it's set after the seas are basically just seas of plastic and organisms have adapted to that. And set on an island in the middle of the sea of plastic and features a monster that's an escapee from these biotech operas because before the fall of civilization, things got very baroque and Last Days of Rome, and we created biotech just to sing arias and this monster roams this island. And if you hear the aria, you're already dead because it's so deadly. But you're entranced by the beauty of the music that you're hearing, so you don't care quite as much.

And then also this strange architect series, which I think is much more about, each book takes on a different element of society and creativity in telling the tale of this architect and the houses that he built and what happened there. And I'm really excited about that one because it expands outward to what I think is kind of a mind-blowing conclusion. And I'm kind of cackling. It plays on reader expectations in very interesting ways.

Molly (31:34): What is your process like? What is your research process like? I mean, this is, it's deeply researched. It's ecologically accurate, and yet you're sort of cackling at your exciting conclusion. What are you like when you're writing these?

Jeff (31:50): Well, I'm in an altered state, basically. Naturally, I can't actually write if I drink alcohol or anything, so I don't. I mean, I don't anyway, but it is like being in an ecstatic, different state, so much so on Absolution that my process changed. And I had a research assistant who did a lot of the research and mapped environmental sites. Even translated Schubert lyrics from the German over again for me for various parts of the thing. I was very lucky. It turned out that they, Andy Marlo, was actually an artist and knew German and a writer. I had no idea when I hired them.

(32:30): But anyway, so more and more there's that. There's also the fact that in Hummingbird Salamander, a biologist actually created the imaginary hummingbird and salamander. So sometimes I'm literally collaborating or outsourcing the research to the expert. And the great part about that is with the fake hummingbird, she included all these in-jokes and allusions and other things in the entry and the descriptions that I never would've thought of as a non-scientist.

Things that really made it come to life. And then having to react to that as if it was real rather than change it or make it myself really made a huge difference. So accuracy comes from me actually turning over parts of the novel sometimes to the expert.

Molly (33:12): And then finally, before we really do let you go, and maybe speaking of accuracy, we have heard that a number of your works are being developed for the screen. What can you tell us about that and how do you feel about that process generally?

Jeff (33:24): Well, with Absolution where the director basically worked out a bunch of things about depression and replaced the environmental themes with that, I didn't feel that great about it. Even though I think those are worthy themes.

Molly (33:38): With, I'm sorry, with Annihilation, do you mean? I think you said "Absolution." With Annihilation?

Jeff (33:42): Sorry. With Annihilation. But at least I wasn't involved with it at all. And I think that the last act of that film is absolutely spectacular. But Borne is being adapted by AMC, which poses real questions like, will the bear fly or not? I can make the bear fly in the novel. I can make the bear fly in the novel and make it seem plausible. Can that be true on the screen?

Ramanan (34:05): So can you tell us the answer? Or it's still unknown?

Jeff (34:09): I think it's still up in the air. I mean, it may depend on budget, too. It takes a lot to get a bear up in the air and then make it look graceful. Right? It's got to look like My Neighbor Totoro, not like a boulder falling in a Wile E. Coyote cartoon. Oh, man.

Molly (34:28): Oh, my God. It's up in the air.

Ramanan (34:32): I got one final question. I feel like we'll just keep doing one final question.

Jeff (34:36): Can I ask a question for y'all? Have I been too contrary? I feel like I came in and you're like, you know...

Molly (34:48): No.

Jeff (34:50): Okay, good.

Ramanan (34:51): No, no, no, no. Oh, no. You should go back and listen to a couple of the episodes. We have the most ridiculous conversations and this is not a ridiculous conversation.

Jeff (35:00): Good. Okay, good.

Molly (35:01): We're spicy people.

Ramanan (35:07): Who are authors you admire? Contemporary authors that you think we should either read or maybe have on our show?

Jeff (35:12): It's funny. Because I get so burnt out on climate issues and also science fiction and fantasy from doing anthologies that I usually just read contemporary fiction. Like I'm reading the Ellen Kushner Creation Lake right now. But I would say that I really do admire Omar for American War. And there's others listed in that climate piece for Esquire that I really admire and I'm blanking out on right now.

I think there's one that's also known as a lesbian masterpiece. Black... I can't remember the title now. But it's amazing for how it has a lived-in quality of dealing with climate crisis. Michelle Tea is the author. And I thought that was a pretty amazing book because it's really difficult to do the day-to-day street level of living with something like that. And to also do it, in the novel at least, as a counter-culture kind of thing as well.

So I admire things like that that are not from the mainstream of society, at least at the time it was written. And that have a unique viewpoint and give you something that you might not have been given about this period.

Molly (36:13): Jeff, thank you so much. I know people are just overjoyed that there's more Southern Reach content. And it is a nice beefy book and we just could not be more appreciative for you enduring another conversation about climate.

Jeff (36:27): No, this was great. This was very individualistic and different. I really appreciated it.

Molly (36:30): Okay, good. I'm so glad. I'm so glad. We did our job. Absolution will be on shelves October 22nd.

Ramanan (36:34): Now, are you in Florida? We did not ask you that question.

Jeff (36:39): I'm in Florida. I am in Florida with a sort of Damocles over my head because a tree fell on our house, on the carport. A huge pine while we had fled from the last hurricane. It did so very gently, and so it's resting on the carport and then over our roof. And because of so much stuff having to be cleared in Tallahassee from the last storm, they can't get it done until next week. So our hope that there aren't any high winds, because right now there's no damage to our house. But it's literally over our house and there's nothing we can do about it until they take it away, which I think sums up the situation in Florida very succinctly right now. And I'm laughing about it, but not laughing because it's funny. It's just absurd. It's absurdist. It's farce. Yeah.

Molly (37:27): Wow. Yeah. Speaking of adaptation, are you going to be able to stay there? In Florida?

Jeff (37:31): I have been spending a fair amount of time in Portland, Oregon too, which of course is a place that's subject to wildfires. So I don't know. But yeah, I am still here in Florida in some sense.

Ramanan (37:44): So that brings us to the end of this episode. Jeff, a famous Florida man. His works are available online and in bookstores worldwide. You can find out more about Jeff and updates about his publications on his website, which is Jeffvandermeer.com, and you can also find him for the moment on X. Thank you all.

Jeff (38:03): Thanks.

Molly (38:06): Thanks, everyone.

Ramanan (38:09): Thank you for listening. Please email us at [e-mail] with any suggestions or ideas. And visit Futureverse.earth for the full transcript of this podcast and other information.

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