 The two people who will be here as part of the discussion probably need no introduction, but I'll give a very brief introduction anyway. And then we're structuring tonight's communications forum slightly differently than we often do. Jeff is going to start out with a very, with a brief reading from Annihilation. No, from Authority, right. In the middle of the three books in the trilogy, then we will have our discussion and then we will open it up for your discussion. There are also books on sale, all three books in the trilogy, as well as the Area X on the bus, all three books combined into one, or on sale from your local independent bookstore or Harvard bookstore right outside. So all the way to my left, Jeff Vandermeer published all three books in the Best Selling Southern Reach trilogy in 2014. He is a widely acclaimed master and proponent of weird fiction and is the author of a frighteningly large number of books. I actually found it depressingly large. It made me feel like I must be doing something wrong, including the best selling City of Saints and Mad Men, which is one of the foundational works for his Amber Gris world, I guess. He's written about many of the issues contained within the Southern Reach trilogy for publications including The New York Times and The Atlantic, and the movie version of the first book in the trilogy, Annihilation, is moving apace with Paramount. Eric Schaller is a professor in biological sciences and the molecular and cellular biology graduate program at Dartmouth. His scientific research focuses on the roles played by plant hormones in their relation to real-world agricultural problems, such as the control of ripening and senescence. He is also an artist and has illustrated several of Jeff's works. Jeff and Eric actually met when Eric submitted a piece to an anthology, is this right? That Jeff rejected. But in rejecting it, sent it back with copious edits, which is either very, very giving or very obnoxious, I'm not sure one or the other, but they have collaborated many times over the years and in addition to collaborating with their artwork and fiction, Eric serves as a sounding board for some of the scientific themes that Jeff writes about. So without further ado, I will hand it over to Jeff. Good afternoon and evening. First of all, thanks to Seth and to Eric and MIT and for you for coming out. Thanks to Harvard Square for selling the books. The slideshow kind of represents what you might call research for the southern reach books. All of the nature slides you're seeing are taken by me and they're places that I'm either very familiar with or I visited several times. And one thing I wanted with these books since they did have nature themes is to not have any secondhand detail in them. So every nature detail in there is something that I've observed firsthand. So for the reading I'm going to do, you can consider what you're seeing to be basically the landscape the two characters are passing through because they're actually like riding in a jeep and I'm sparing you all of the description that would normally be in this section. Some of these might also be considered the thoughts and very weird thoughts or ideas that control the main character I'm going to talk about encounters. Now the southern reach trilogy describes the 30 year effort of a secret government agency to figure out the secrets behind area X which is an odd pristine wilderness hidden behind an invisible border that appeared seemingly overnight. And this gave me, although there's a lot of stuff that kind of came to me, came to my subconscious and it's expressed through the text because of my love of particular types of wilderness, there are also some ideas and themes that I explicitly decided to deal with in the books. And one of those was using the uncanny to address ecological issues. Another was to question the rationality of our systems, having existed under the thumb of some of those systems in working as a contractor for various state and federal organizations, interrogating the relationship between technology and wisdom or thought. Recently there was a high level Silicon Valley executive who said that creating AI was quote infinitely more difficult than something like creating an ecosystem. And it struck me as a really ignorant thing to say given that we've never actually built a truly complex ecosystem from scratch, we're continually propping up preserving or restoring existing ecosystems. And then also to interrogate the scientific imagination in both a positive and negative way. On the negative side, a senior scientist at SETI recently said in an interview, basically the aliens would want to kill us or would want to save us based on his reading of human history. So how do we get beyond the human gaze in useful ways to imagine kind of a new paradigm on some of these issues? And I also wanted to examine the role of animals in fiction and our view of animals because animals still exist as inert objects in our imaginations in the wider world and in fiction. And so in a sense, they're lost narratives in a fictional context. So as I mentioned, strange things are happening in area X. And after a decade of flat out failure in figuring out what's going on, the Southern Reach brings in a new director nicknamed Control to Clean Shop. And as told in the second novel, Authority Control has to first assess morale, especially of the scientists at the agency, and figure out how to proceed. So in the excerpt I'm going to read, he's in a jeep about to go to the invisible border having a conversation with Cheney, the head of the Southern Reach's science division. And as mentioned, I'm sparing you the physical description, and instead you get this lovely overlay in the back. If you quacked like a scientist and waddled like a scientist, soon to non-scientists you became the subject under discussion and not a person at all. Some scientists lived within this role, almost embraced it, transformed into walking theses or textbooks. This couldn't be said about Cheney, though, despite lapses into jargon like quantum entanglements. Cheney talking about 30 years of failure. There's a lot of enabling of each other's dipshittery, that's almost all we've got. Cheney on ignorance. We don't even understand how every organism on our planet works, haven't yet identified them all. What if we don't have the language for it? Are we obsolete? I think not. I think not. But don't ask the army's opinion of that. A circle looks at a square and sees a badly drawn circle. Cheney exasperated. Yeah, it's something we think about. How do you know if something is out of the ordinary when you don't know if your instruments would even register it? I guess it's kind of strange to practically live next to this. I guess I could say that. But then you go home and you're home. Then just the general babble. Do you know any physics? No, of course you don't. How could you? Black holes and waves have a similar structure, you know, very, very similar as it turns out. Who would have expected that? I mean, you'd expect area X to cooperate at least a little bit, right? I'd have staked my reputation on it, cooperating with us enough to get some accurate readings. Later a refinement of the statement. There is some agreement among us now reduced, though we may be, we may be that to analyze certain things, an object must allow itself to be analyzed to agree with it, even if this is just simply by way of some response, some reaction. These last two utterances, jostling elbows, Cheney offered up a bit plaintively because in fact he had staked his reputation to area X in the general sense that the southern reach had become his career. The initial glory of it, of being chosen and then the constriction of it, like a great snake named area X was suffocating him. It was suffocating control too, especially after the briefing that morning. An ice pick lodged in a brain already suffused with the corona of a dull but persistent headache that radiated forward from a throbbing bolus at the back of his skull, a kind of pulsating satellite defense shield. He thought of the theories presented to him as slow death by, given in the context, slow death by aliens, slow death by parallel universe, slow death by malign unknown time traveling force, slow death by invasion from an alternate earth, slow death by wildly divergent technology or the shadow biosphere or symbiosis or iconography or etymology, death by this and by that, death by indifference and inference, his favorite. Surface dwelling terrestrial organism previously unknown. Hiding where all of these years in a lake on a farm at slots in a casino. But he recognized his bottled up laughter during the briefing for the onset of hysteria and his cynicism for what it was, a defense mechanism so he wouldn't have to think about any of it. Death too by arched eyebrow, a fair amount of implied or outright, your theory is ridiculous unwarranted, useless. Some of the ghosts of old interdepartmental rivalries resurrected and coming through in odd ways across sentences. He wondered how much fraternization had taken place over the years. If an archeologist written wince at an environmental scientist seemingly reasonable assertion represented a fair opinion or meant he was seeing an end game playing out the final consequence of an affair that had occurred 20 years before. So by the time Cheney was throwing words at control, the rumors about area X had come to seem like schools of the most deadly and yet voluminous jellyfish at the aquarium. As you watch them in their undulating progress, they seem both real and unreal framed against the stark blue of the water. How do you feel about all the misinformation given to the expeditions, control asked Cheney, if only to push back against the flood of Cheney-isms. Cheney's frown made it seem as if control's question were akin to criticizing the paint job on a car that had been involved in a terrible accident. Was control a killjoy to want to snuff out Cheney's can-do, his can't-help-it brand of the Jowly Javiol? But Javiol graded on control most of the time. It had always been a pretext from the high school football team's locker room on the kind of hearty banter that covered up greater and lesser crimes. It wasn't, isn't really misinformation, Cheney said. And then went dark for a moment, searching for words. Possibly he thought it was a test of loyalty or attitude or moral rigor, but he found words soon enough. It's more like creating a story or a narrative to guide them through the narrows and anchor, a scientific fairy tale. Like a genial lighthouse that distracted them from the horrors of topographical anomalies, a lighthouse that seemed by its very function to provide safety. Maybe Cheney told himself that particular story about the tale or tale about the story, but control doubted the director had seen it that way. Jesus, this is a long drive, Cheney said into the silence. And Jesus Christ it was, and rising up through sedimentary levels and controls mine like a ghostly cola canth, a former boss asking, is your house in order? Is your house in order? Tell me please, is your house in order? Was his house in order? Not until he cornered Cheney. He asked Cheney point blank if he'd ever seen anything unusual lurking in the southern reach. But Cheney flunked the question, replied in a stilted hurt tone. Well, it's the high ceilings, isn't it? Makes you see things, aren't there? Makes the things you do see look like other things. A bird can be a bat, a bat can be a piece of floating plastic bag, way of the world to see things as other things. Birdleafs, bat birds, shadows made of lights, sounds that are incidental but seem more significant. It's never going to seem any different wherever you go. A bird can be a bat. A bat can be a piece of floating plastic bag, but could it? Thank you. Thank you. Having gotten to the end of the trilogy, those high ceilings seem much more ominous than they might in that section initially. I thought it was interesting that you chose that section. And it's one of the places where you talk about the reality of life as a scientist and how they oftentimes need to deal with forces that might be in conflict with their actually doing their science, whether it's bureaucracies or job constraints or personal issues. And I was wondering where you got that sense, how you decided that you were going to give the scientist that you write about that reality to deal with. Well, I'm very cognizant, of course, about the cliches about scientists. And I didn't want to buy into them. At the same time, I was envisioning an agency that had basically failed at its task and been kind of consigned to a backwater. And having worked for companies or gone into agencies like that, I know what the feeling is and how it actually affects the research, how it affects the attitude, the morale, and everything else. And also, having seen my father, who's an entomologist and research chemist, pursue in a very methodical and wonderfully methodical way his research, but then also have all these impediments, all of these cliques around him and everything else that he has to deal with, it struck me that if you want to talk about scientists and science, you have to talk about the constraints as well as the research. And so when you say you've dealt with agencies you've worked at and come across agencies like that, and what are some examples of that? Well, I mean, they would fall into the same category as the reports you've heard about the IRS or the Veterans Administration. I really can't talk about specifics, but you go into a place where there are sedimentary layers of technology. There are clear battle lines drawn between different groups and subgroups within an agency. And you begin to wonder about the whole idea of best practices. And you begin to wonder about the rationality of our systems, which is something that fascinated me in creating this trilogy, because in addition to wanting to make some commentary on the slow apocalypse we're in, I wanted to examine the foundations of our thinking about just how rational we are as human beings. And to me, the irrationality comes through most often when you enter a dysfunctional agency. And that made me think, well, what is actually the baseline of rationality for a well-functioning agency? Because we also codify a lot of practices even in places where they're successful that are not really part of that success. And we don't always recognize that. So the two of you have collaborated. And we can show some examples of the artwork that has illustrated some of Jeff's work in a bit. But you've collaborated not only in that sense, but with behind the scenes conversations as part of the publication process, or the writing process, I guess. What happens there? What's that like? Well, I wouldn't call it collaboration as such. Sometimes it's more of a sounding board for various elements. I'd say Southern Reach. Jeff talked, sent me an email initially and was sort of giving me, without any text really surrounding of the actual story, but just the situation of a scientist being presented with this basically force-fielded, contained area. And how would I, as a scientist, want to approach studying this or investigating it? Yeah, and I actually sent the basic parameters of the situation in, that is area X in the Southern Reach to four or five scientists. Eric's actually the only one who gave me the most feedback, to be honest, from a lot of different perspectives. And the reason that I wanted that, I wanted, first of all, a scientist to encounter it without any additional context, because I thought that was the purest way. And then, Do you mean without any additional context about the book, about the work itself? About the book or anything else, just like what would happen if you encountered this circumstance and you had to test what this meant? And I thought additional context would actually kind of ruin the experiment, so to speak. But then what I had from Eric was a baseline of what you would reasonably expect, a scientific investigation of such a phenomena to be. And since I knew I wasn't doing that, that's not what really got into the book, but it gave me an idea of what should happen so I could portray what happens when it doesn't go well. And also to kind of forestall some of those questions. And the part I read was actually kind of a joke about that too, because in so many science fiction books, they kind of withhold the theory until the end. And I thought, well, in the middle of the second book, just put forth every possible theory about what this thing could be and just get it out of the way, because that's not really even that important. And so that's part of what was going on in that section too. It's interesting that in your work, which on many levels is so fantastical. I mean, you have a biologist who transforms into a giant tree. We'll say tree. A non-human, very powerful, multi-eyed something. Tree. Tree. Spoiler alert. This underground tower, depending on how you want to refer to it. It's a tunnel. So there are these elements that are so clearly divorced from what we know as part of the reality of our experience. And so how do you then, and yet at the same time, it seems like accurately representing not only the scientific experience, but within the confines of your world, accurately representing what might be possible there, seems like something that's important to you. And that strikes me as a really interesting kind of line. Well, I mean, it does go back to the rationality thing. I just have much different view than I guess most people do about the rationality of the human world. But even the tunnel tower thing has more of an underpinning in reality, because if you examine transcripts of people under stress in emergency situations, they say really stupid things and they say really bizarre things. And they don't actually say what they say in movies, like, hey, we're gonna get that axe out of there and we're gonna chop this door down. They have tower tunnel discussions, a fair amount of the time, because they're under stress and under extreme conditions. So that's why I say what I do about the rationality because I think we construct these stories or these myths about just how logical everything is that we do. But if we actually were to examine the videotape, so to speak, we might get a different opinion about that. It's interesting. It almost sounds like after we go through something, we rewrite the narrative in our heads so that we're much more heroic. And it sounds like you wanna portray the reality before we rewrite the narrative in our heads. I wanna explore that. And that's why I was actually very nervous when Eric read the books afterwards, because I was like, have I gone too far? Is he going to, you know, I mean, Eric's a huge reader of fiction, including science fiction and fantasy. So he's, he's, he can vet it on that level too. But also Eric's reaction as a scientist meant a lot to me. And so I, for a long time, never didn't even really ask Eric what he thought of various of the books because I was kind of scared. Were you ever tempted to return the favor that he did when you submitted something and just write back and say, this is horrible. Let me show you what you need to do here. Usually we engage in discussions. No, I mean, is usually Jeff querying me about some idea or element? I mean, another phone call, we had a long one about mimicry. Oh, right, I forgot about that, yeah, yeah. Mimicry in the biological world. Yeah, which is also, yeah, which is a huge thing. And there's actually all kinds of Easter eggs about that in the whole series. Now I need to reread the whole, that's great. But what did you think, I mean, what, you know, were there things that jumped out at you as something that was not an acceptable, you know? When I turn to science fiction, I'm usually not, I'm only usually judging science if in some ways the fiction is interrogating the science. So basically if I see they're really misusing science when they want to say something about the science. What's an example of that? I did too. Well, I'll give two areas that I think, well I'll mention Kim Stanley Robinson I think does a terrific job in how he incorporates science into his science fiction. He wrote 2312, which came out. And a whole bunch of California trilogy and he does a very strong ecological basis to his science fiction. The pet peeve I have is, what I boys bring up is Paolo Baccia Gallupi's The Windup Girl which in many ways is about genetics and how potential dangers of genetic engineering. But on the other hand he consistently makes mistakes and sort of his creations. I mean the pet example I use and actually pets a good choice of words is he has what he calls the Cheshires in it. In which he comes up with to my mind a brilliant visual idea is that there's these cats that by genetic engineering can become basically transparent or blended by camouflage like a chameleon into the landscape. But then he, which is serving the idea but won't get all the science how difficult that is. But again it was a brilliant visual idea. But then he says something which doesn't make any sense at all is first he says there's basically about a dozen of these were made by some business executive as party favors for his daughter and some friends. So basically you get a dozen of these genetically modified cats. And then he says within 20 years no real cats existed. That somehow these invisible cats had taken over. They had taken out millions of other cats when there's actually no basis for them even like seeking out other cats to kill them. And even if they were bent on destruction of every other candidate world in one generation you cannot do that. And that's what you couldn't get past. Right. So you were fine with the Cheshire cat as it existed. Well there's other scientific problems with that we won't get into that. No it's what I also talked about with other friends is the idea of coherence of technology. Right. So again if you're thinking of and I think mundane fiction or near future world fiction is some of the hardest to pull off in that respect because you really are bounded by the science of today and extrapolating forward. So in one case say the Cheshires are really a tremendously difficult genetic feat. So once you postulate their existence you have to say the rest of genetic science is at equal caliber. Right. So you can't have that and then have everything else existed today. At a much cheaper level. I mean right now we can sequence the human genome for a couple thousand dollars. Right. So in the near future you're looking at a hundred dollars per genome. So you have to be able to assume at that level of technology. And that's definitely not the level of detail that I was working at in the southern region. Exactly. Right. So although I will say that I'm aware of certain simplifications that could be seen as negative. Like for example, because I was laring in so much other stuff I decided to just totally not deal with the role that corporations have in the environment and everything else. I basically let the government stand in for that and I had to do that because I was juggling too many elements for that to work. But you could say that that means that the Southern Reach is a form of escapism because it's not dealing with that issue. And then there were other ways and I was just reacting. The Cheshire cat thing struck me as funny because a lot of the things in the Southern Reach are reactions to another kind of form of misrepresentation or counterfactual information and that is descriptions of animals. And so in what I read about the bats looking like plastic bags that was kind of also a sarcastic comment on a novel I'd read the year before where someone kept describing vultures as looking like plastic bags as they were flying around which struck me as a really stupid thing to say. And another novel where porcupines basically chase people around which doesn't really happen and things like that. So there's some things pushing back against, you know. I'll interject one thing here. So my wife, Paulette and I, when we drive along, we tend to count hawks. We also count what we call roosting bags and trees. Okay. But you do differentiate between them. You do find bags and trees all the time. But so the idea that a porcupine would chase a human bothers you but the idea that you could run into an invisible force field and then disappear instantaneously is acceptable. They bother me in different ways. Right. Right. All right. You said that because you don't deal with corporations and one could accuse Southern reaches being a form of escapism which struck me as an interesting choice of words because in some ways that's a very fundamental function that fiction serves. That literature and art serve as both as a way for us to interrogate the world around us, interrogate our own relationship but also to escape from the world around us. Well, I'm kind of a grumpy Kermudge on this subject. I'm afraid because I'm really sick of near future novels set like 30 years from now where all but 2% of the population is gone and there's like some weird cloud formations but otherwise everything's fine in terms of global warming. And I find, I just feel like this is the kind of fiction that's gonna go extinct whether you like escapism or not literally in the next 15 years because there's something about, I just rebelled against escapism about a subject that we're in the middle of and that is so important. And it's not that I think that it can only be dealt with in a serious way but I do think that if you do have at this point a responsibility even if you're writing something surreal have some kind of logic and some kind of level of detail that's real, some form of realism. So if you're writing a space opera, that's one thing but if you're writing about an earth and the way that it's been affected by forces that are in play now, global warming, extinction events, et cetera, there's a different obligation. I think so and I'm perfectly fine with someone saying that they think that I'm a little bit too much, just being too, I don't know what the word is about that evangelical about it which is a word I hate but I think it's just that I don't see certain novels as displaying any thought about the issue. If they thought about it and their stance was to not deal with it but in fact it just seems like it's not being thought of at all. And then you look to books like Submergence by J.G. I can't remember his first name but Ledgerd which is not a science fiction book but has a lot of science in it, deep sea science and whatnot that to me feels more like a book of the times than some science fiction I've read on the subject. On what subject? On the subject of global warming and the slow apocalypse. So you're both readers, avid readers of fiction, of science fiction and of fantasy. And the issue of near future fiction has come up a lot. And one thing that seems like it's going on in the larger fiction world is that these events and discussions that had been the realm of science fiction sort of exclusively have now entered into or have left that ghetto to the extent that they were ghettoized there. Is that something that you have found to be true and if so how does that affect the whole notion of genres and the whole notion of science fiction as something that's distinct from non-science fiction? Well I think because we're in the middle of global warming it means that any fiction writer can deal with the subject. And it's kind of telling that I was at the Sonic Acts Geologic Imagination Festival in Amsterdam in February and there were a lot of philosophers and scientists there and there are only touchstones in science fiction where Kim Stanley Robinson and Margaret Atwood and J.G. Ballard. So I think that there is stuff that's being written but the question of whether it's actually getting into the popular imagination or into the technical imagination, I don't know because the Ballard stuff that they were referencing of course was from the 70s. So that's a long time ago. But I was just also at the University of Buffalo and there that's all they were talking about. All of the writers who were there were not science fiction writers. They're all writing contemporary literature and pretty much all they were focusing on was that. And so I kind of feel like it's beginning to kind of leak into everything we write to some extent. Although I don't think there's an obligation that it has to. That it has to leak into all this. Yeah, like Elena Ferrante. I don't expect her to start writing about global warming. Right, right. You know, it's like, and I love those books. And what about, we talked about Roberto Bellagno and we're both fans of his and some of his work is also near future work that does not deal with some of these big questions. In the same way that Eric, it offends you and it seems like Jeff, it also bothers you when writers write about a world and they posit some changes and then they're not consistent with that. After we were talking about Bellagno, I was thinking, well, what about the fact that he's writing about a near future world that is not affected by global warming in any appreciable way? In what work? Utter silence. So in the same way that you seem to feel that there's an obligation if you're dealing with the near future and with global warming, you need to deal with it consistently. Is there an obligation if you're dealing with the near future at all to deal with the realities of our world? To deal with the fact that we're gonna be living in a different world? I don't know if there's an obligation. I think that more and more people, readers are going to feel that certain novels more or less may have needed to have thought about the issue. I don't think that it's something that's a cut and dried thing. I just think more and more you're gonna see it in the backdrop of more contemporary fiction because it's creeping up on us in a way that you can't really get away from anymore. Right, right. But part of the idea, I think, even the idea of a slow apocalypse is often it's so gradual that while you're in it, you're only sort of blinded on both sides by the sort of memory where you went back a little ways. You don't have enough of a perspective while you're in it often to recognize that there has been a significant change over time. Is that the frog in the pot of water? Yeah, exactly. Well, I mean, that's a good example. I mean, I look at Terrence Malick's New World movie. If that was an accurate movie, it would just be teeming with wildlife. But we pretend that it's an accurate movie because it reflects the landscape that, you know, he shot it now. He couldn't go back in time and fill the entire shots with a lot more wildlife. But in actual fact, if you look at any first, actual eyewitness accounts from back then, it would have been a different landscape you would have been looking at. And so we kind of trick ourselves, like you were saying, into the idea that it was always like this. I do want to get into your artwork in a second. So, but before we do that, one thing that I felt like came up in the trilogy was a sort of attack on this notion that we've discovered what there is to discover about our world, that we have sort of mastered at least in knowledge, the world in which we live in. And when we were talking before this, you said that one of the reasons why you were attacking that was because it gives people the idea that we have more control over our environment than we do. That struck me as very interesting because your fiction, you know, talking about this, talking about the Ambergris books, you actually do have total control over your worlds. You create, it's not, you don't, that's what you think. You don't do, well, you don't do one-offs. You, you know, create worlds where then the two of you have created a chapbook under assumed names of people who visited Ambergris and or visited that world and you, you know, you sell them with mushrooms. And so, it just struck me as interesting that you were pushing back against that notion in your fiction. That sounds so disreputable. When you're selling mushrooms and- Pushing mushrooms. And Yelp guides to safe houses. But is that something that you've thought about? Is that, is your sort of desire for that level of control a reaction all to the world that we do live in? It's funny because I think Area X actually came out of some form of that because the Gulf oil spill was something that was very, very personal. Anyone who was living on the Gulf Coast and as the oil was gushing out, it was gushing out in our heads, in our minds, basically. And for a while there, it looked like it wasn't going to actually ever be capped. So there was this nightmare scenario of the idea of just going on for 20 years. And I really do think that on some subconscious level that eventually my mind just decided to put an invisible border around North Florida and start creating a pristine wilderness out of it for that very reason because it becomes this kind of mental anguish that you can't escape from. And it does kind of leave a mark. So in that respect, yeah. In terms of the idea that we don't know as much about the world, it seems to me to be a kind of fundamental fact because we just keep discovering new species. We discover that plants communicate through fungal pathways. We discover all this stuff about the world. You like fungal pathways. Well, I just like that science is really reaffirming everything in my fiction that are very, very great. So soon we'll learn that gray caps are a reality. Right. But my point is that this is why it's so important also not to maintain habitats beyond the obvious because there's so much that is getting extinguished before we actually understand it. And I feel like if we thought of the planet we live on as being more like an alien planet that we're exploring, we might have more of a sense of that. We might understand that on a more mundane daily basis. So I'm gonna call up some of these pictures, but while I'm fumbling around with the computer to distract people from that fumbling, I was wondering if you two could talk about when you do collaborate in terms of art and words, how that comes about and how that happens. Well, I know how it starts. I call up Eric and I say, would you like to do this impossible thing and could I have it by next week? And Eric says, no, and he hangs up the phone. And then I get a call back or an email maybe a week or two later about, well, maybe I could fit that into my schedule. So that's how it starts. And I have to say that's accurate. It's fairly accurate. I've gotten used to it after this. Because I say, I'm not a person who likes to have surprises that much. And I love surprises. And so yeah, typically from Jeff, I'll get something, well, could you do this? And my main reaction, well, I don't even understand this. And I have, and one needs an entry point at almost any project. But then, what's said before, one of the fun things has often really been that Jeff is trying to create worlds that really extend beyond just a printed page. And then he's always coming up with ideas how you incorporate these other objects into his work, which is illustrations. But what I also liked, it wasn't just my illustrations. There was other items that were also appearing. So it really became multiple creators then becoming enveloped by a world. And I must say that on the latest projects, they've been ones with many moving pieces where I realized later I didn't really give Eric any context at all. There was probably like 10 pages of context that should have been given. So this is the exchange, the chat book I was talking about where you were pushing mushrooms. And I'm curious about how this came about. And then we can look at some of the images if you wanted to talk at all about what this story actually is. Well, basically there's a festival in the fantastical city of Ambergris that I created. And this festival is kind of like an outlet for violence and whatnot because there's not a lot of civil authority. And so this is like a way to kind of like get it all out at once. Like it's like the Purge before the Purge movies. Yes. Maybe you should consider a policy. Kind of like that. No, or renaming it entirely. But anyway, so I had the idea to create a festival object that you would get while you're staying at a safe house. And it would include this little kind of book which is supposed to be kind of educational and yet totally isn't and has advertising in the back for various businesses in the city. And comes with a capsule, a little metal capsule with which you're supposed to write your name on and other information just in case you get the crap beaten out of you or you lose your memory from various bore-related incidents. And there's also two mushrooms. One of which is a poison so you can kill yourself if things get too bad during the festival. Presumably not actually poison. And no, and the other, they're both cooking mushrooms and the other is the antidote. And thoughtfully in this box it doesn't tell you which is which. So, and a funny thing about that, I sent the package to Michael Morkock, the writer, and I got it in a bag full of mushrooms because I figured it'd be good packing material. And she called me up and she said, Jeff, are these the cooking mushrooms or are these the hallucinogenic ones? Because I have dinner to cook and I want to cook the right ones. So, and I'm like, did you get a package with that? Yeah, we got your thing. It's very, it's quite difficult to get a copy of this these days. That's not what her voice sounds like by the way. I'll also interject a bit here. In terms of this project, so initially it was just to do a chat book, but then Jeff again sort of wants to build the world bigger and bigger around the piece. So then it was then actually creating this whole body of effects that come with it and then basically creating an artifact of this fictional world or theoretically fictional. And is this illustration, I don't know if you can see that. Is that from the exchange or is that from city of St. St. St. Madden? And what is that that we're seeing there? Yes, why don't you explain yourself Eric because I don't even know what that is. Birdmask figuring a lot of the festival things of Jeff's. And at one point he did say, enough with the birdmask illustrations. So those are humans during the festival of the squid. Yeah, right. And what are they, they're juggling fireworks. Say they have fireworks and one's about to fall off the roof. Yes, yeah. And is this also, this is also from city of St. St. Madden? Yes. Yes. That is a comic strip. You can fill us in if you want. Yeah, in the local paper, they have a comic that runs and it's about Helitos and Bobble, this talking squid and his friend. And it's a series of various things. And for a while on Facebook, we were basically trying to pretend it was a real comic and all kinds of things like that. So. Also, if you read, it's absolutely hilarious in terms of the interactions between Helitos and Bobble. Well. At least to my mind. Yeah. We can also if you back up. I'll write the play sometime. It's, again, the level of sort of background that fits into this too, is the MCodd fan was that who's the artist is a pseudonym for another character in Jeff's novel. Who wrote a squid monograph, yeah. Yes, who is actually obsessed with squid. And. So it's a pseudonym for you as a, it's a pseudonym for another character, which is a pseudonym for you. And the actual squid monograph is an actual scientific monograph about this imaginary squid that is also hiding a murder plot or a murder story that the scientist is trying to confess to something. And the weirdest thing is, I sent this story around to various magazines and they all rejected it saying they already had something just like it. Refuse to believe that that was true. The scientific monograph on squid with a murder hidden in between it is a trope that's been done so many times. It's almost not. My list of SF tropes. Yeah, right, right. And this may all seem to those of you who have read The Southern Reach and nothing else, like what does this have to do with it? But in actual fact, a lot of these were kind of the early tryouts for some of the themes about animals and ecology and whatnot. Just in a totally different way. The theme of fungal human interaction is one obviously that comes up in Southern Reach that dominates the ambergris, all of those books. Well, probably the funniest thing about that, funny ha-ha, I guess, is that I actually found out later that I had a fungal infection while I was writing those books. That may have actually been influenced. While you were writing the ambergris books? Yes. That's, wow. So you were, it's like, it's like a toxoplasmosis when it takes up, it takes over. But the other thing about it is that after The Southern Reach books, we discovered we had to take part of our house apart and out because they found some form of black mold, not that exact thing, but something like it not quite as virulent in the walls. So you begin to wonder exactly how much your environment is influencing. This is getting into legati territory. Yeah, it's getting into like too much information. No, no, or just blaming or attributing your creativity to different things. Now, is this is from The Secret Life? Is that right? Yeah, the other one was The Cover, which is actually kind of a proto Southern Reach thing too. Yeah, that one. And what is, what's this from? That was one where Eric just gave me, I think you gave me this and I made a story out of it. Right, actually you set the, because he has kept demanding illustrations for me for his stories, he said, well it should be turned about as fair play, just give me a couple illustration pieces you've done and I'll make a piece out of them. Yeah, and so I did the, and then of course he gave me this. It's like, that looks like the end of something for sure. And then are these, I think, let's see, is that was an ad in? That's a beer label for Ambergris beer, which was actually bottled and sold. And we'd like to replicate the things that are successful, so we tried to do a Southern Reach beer and not to keep going back to this theme, but the brewer in Tallahassee who brewed it, a strange fungus got into the barrels and turned it sour, I'm not kidding. So look, it's not me, it's that, it's everywhere, okay? It's not that everything you touch. Yes, I want to make that quite clear. And then what are these? Yeah, what are those? That was, part of the background was a T-shirt of related to Ambergris, because there's squid tentacles in there, and then the other was part of a project that sort of was a side project. The rule seems to be that you do more product placement for your obscure cult projects than you do for your commercial success. I was gonna ask about that actually, but and so this is a hint to fans that if they're true, if they're true fans of your art and your fiction. This is a fan of the books who got Eric's art. Tattooed on them. And what's funny is the first collaboration we ever did, Eric said to me, you know, I'll know I've been successful if someone tattoos this art. There you go. On their leg or arm or whatever that is. Well, even near where I was in Portsmouth, there was a tattoo artist and he said, oh, you're self would make great tattoos. And it's copyright free. You can do it with impunity without feeling you have that tradition. It's a creative common license. So I'll turn back on the Southern Reach slide show, but one thing that I was curious about is the fact that that level of multilayered involvement is absent from the Southern Reach trilogy. You know, if you pick up City of Saints in Mad Men and it's impossible to, it starts again at zero, you know, a dozen times. There are different types of texts within there. There are all of these extra textual things. And the Southern Reach trilogy exists as a text, essentially. That's a young man's game. And I was so scarred working with Eric, that's kidding. Well, actually it was a very deliberate decision because I had that decision to make at the beginning. There's all kinds of found objects you could create for the Southern Reach. And the problem was that in doing these texts, what I wanted to do was create novels where the experimentation is largely invisible. And so I felt like creating, you know, like found objects, like a picture of a lighthouse and everything, actually in with the novel, embedding them, would be a bad idea. And as you can see, we did a lot of stuff outside of that. But what I mean by invisible experimentation, if you've read Annihilation, the dialogue from Annihilation occurs again in authority. There's several times where the main character is walking through hallways and there's incidental dialogue. And another time he's in a bar. All the incidental dialogue is repurposed from Annihilation. And so the idea is that you get this sense of deja vu, potentially, but you don't know where it's coming from. And it's kind of a hint that things are not going very well in the Southern Reach. And so there's a lot of hidden things in there that are supposed to kind of push your buttons and make you feel a certain way that you could call kind of experimental. Like control in the second book is continually walking down hallways and you get that scene, but then you don't get the scene where he actually goes into the room. You get it when he recaps it later for his superior. So there's ways in which the scenes are structured and piled on top of each other that is fairly experimental, but again meant to be invisible. And on the subject of control, I assume that that's a reference to Jean Le Carré's to control in the smiling novels. Actually control is like a term of art in secret agencies, but yeah, that would be the most famous example. And did you want readers to draw because the control that is in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and this control are sort of polar opposites in a lot of ways in terms of the amount of control they have, the extent to which they're in control of their emotions. What were you trying to do? I wanted them, and I went back and forth on whether to use that. And then finally the character just basically told me that that's what he was gonna do. He was gonna be controlled. So I seated control to control. But basically I did want readers to read that book that way. I wanted them to read it like a slow burn espionage novel except with the bureaucracy replacing some of the espionage parts. The authority. Yes, authority, right. And the only thing I regret about authority is that the publisher didn't put on the outside something about absurdist dark humor because for readers who are coming from annihilation, a certain portion of them maybe didn't see the dark humor of some of the stuff because they weren't looking for it. They weren't expecting it. Right, right. Before I open it up, there are a couple of things I wanna touch on. These out here are, this is Finch, one of the books in your Ambergris series. But then this is Wonder Book. The subtitle is An Illustrated Guide to Creating Imaginative Fiction. And this is the Steampunk User's Manual. And when one looks at the totality of what you've published, you seem to have a deep engagement with nurturing creativity and other writers. And I was wondering if you could talk about that and whether you view that as an essential part of the writer's role in society? Well, I must say also, I've become, not just because Eric's a great artist, but also superstitious about not having him in projects. So he's in all of those projects as well. Which I did not even know. But, but... So what does that say? He's not in the Southern Reach. His art is... What he is? Because I consulted him. Right, right, right, okay, right. Our Cheney, I was named after our good friend, Matt Cheney. I think he probably hopes not, but... I actually debated not using that name because I knew... Because I'm mad or because I'm dead? Because I'm mad, right. I don't think about the other one. No, but getting back to the idea of collaboration. Growing up, for some reason, I always had the idea that a writer was a person of letters, somebody who did all kinds of things and all kinds of projects. And I started out writing poetry. I started out editing literary magazines before I moved on to fiction. And it's always just seemed kind of natural to operate as kind of a part of a community and to express that through these books. And two of the other guiding principles that me and my wife have had, like in editing anthologies and working on these books, is to kind of heal that divide between genre and mainstream. Because there's tons of fantastical literature on the mainstream side. And there's tons of stuff that's more realistic on the genre side. And there's often very arbitrary reasons why these things are separated. And so in all of our projects, it's not just community. It's also bringing together and kind of repatriating things that belong together. Even in Wonderbook, even in the Steampunk users manual, although that's a more specific topic. But all of these things feed back in to my own projects. I got so much out of working with people on Wonderbook that wound up leading to other projects, informing my own fiction. I must admit while I was working on authority and on acceptance, there were parts of Wonderbook that I had forgotten that I went back and reread some of the guest essays and stuff to get myself out of some jams. So it's kind of, it's a two-way street. I see it as if you don't bring that in, you don't, you suffer yourself as well. So it's not that it's necessarily selfish, but there is a component where it's also continued education. And in terms of that aspect of your work and editing and apologizing, I don't know if you're comfortable talking about the project you're working on now. I can. And I've shared a little bit of it with Eric, just to get a reaction and also because he has to be involved with every project. Right. But yeah, so it's a big book of science fiction. It's 100 years of science fiction from around 1900 to 2000. And it's a much more fraught project than some of our previous ones because most of the editors who have done this kind of project before have been from within the science fiction field, whereas doing an anthology like we did with the weird, there are people like Alberto Manguel and others who came from outside of genre. And so the selections they made were much more outside of genre. So what we've come down to in looking at basically a final table of contents for this book is something that's much more radical than we thought it would be. You know, we were going after very deep rich veins of Latin American science fiction, Russian science fiction and things like that. And in doing so, that means there's a fair amount of what you might call classic American science fiction that may not be in the book or that doesn't stack up as well. And when you actually look at the totality, when you have access to translators and translations, other things become apparent. There are many writers, and this kind of changed my view of what you can write about to some degree. I would still feel like anybody can write about anything from if they have the right perspective and the right skill set and everything else. But if you have Latin American writers writing things set in Latin American countries from their point of view and then you have American writers who are writing their version of Latin American countries that they've never been to, it becomes pretty obvious which story you're gonna include. So there's that aspect of it. But it's kind of weird to me that we have five or six translations of stories that have never been translated into English before that stack up favorably to the best of the English language stuff that we have in there. Five or six different stories. Yeah, different stories, and it's weird. I mean, obviously we did some research and cross triangulated, so to cut down the odds of what we were getting translated, not turning out to be good. But it leads me to believe because there's so many authors we didn't have time to investigate that there's a vast wealth of other material out there for us English language readers. I really wish I read another languages that hasn't been part of the discussion, hasn't been repatriated into the kind of tradition of the fantastic or science fiction. And so I'm kind of excited about that and also kind of dismayed by it. Do you think that's different in science fiction than either in other genres of fiction or just fiction generally? I do think it's a little different because you mentioned sci-fi being a ghetto to some extent that's not true anymore, but it definitely has hampered, you're not gonna find a lot of science, you're gonna find much more fantasy outside of genre imprints and whatnot. And you're gonna find people who consider themselves conversant in world literature who know the fantastical side of things as well as the mainstream literary, but maybe don't know the sci-fi side. Would like Borges, would he be someone on the fantastical side or on the? Both, I see him as a precursor to Ballard in some ways because he manipulates time and space in the same kind of way. You can almost see Ballard taking notes on Borges and then applying it to his own genius. So we will hopefully have a Borges story in there. We'll hopefully have a Sylvina Ocampo story and several Soviet-era writers. So that was the most fascinating thing. We were reading one story that I liked a lot and I thought was very serious. And Anne said, I don't know that this is a serious story. And being your wife and co-editor. I don't know that this is a serious story, but she still liked it. And I was like, well, why don't we check? Why don't we get a retranslation of it? And it turned out that it was an absurdist story about an encounter with aliens that had been rendered as a serious story by the translator who apparently had not done fiction before. And so then you realize there's another barrier. You're reading a lot of stuff, a lot of Soviet science fiction translated by McMillan in the 80s and they did a really good job of getting a lot of it into print, but you then have to backtrack and you have to research and actually see if you're even reading a version of the story that's accurate in terms of tone and everything. So I think we'll open it up to the audience. We have two microphones. If you have a question, come up with a microphone. Please introduce yourself because we are recording this and then we'll know who you are so we can come after you later. Oh wait, you're recording this? Yeah. But yeah, make your way up to one of the microphones. Shy audience, all right, there we go. My name is Dan Schmidt and I've been a fan of Jeff's work for a while and I was very ambivalent reading the Southern Reach books because I both desperately wanted all these mysteries to be explained and I also really liked them being mysteries and one of them to stay mysteries and I was wondering how you chose how much to reveal and were there things that you vacillated about whether they should be explained in the end or not? Well, I mean, there's two things I knew. One that I hate the ends of trilogies where your main character suddenly stumbles upon some information or has a eureka moment and they solve the whole thing. I think that's kind of a cop-out and then when you're dealing with something where you're trying to describe an encounter with something unknowable, it seems like a cop-out to give a full answer. So the first thing I thought of is what can I do in terms of the character arcs? And so what I try to do is make the character arcs as complete as possible for each book. Basically, the biologist's story kind of ends with the first book. Control's story, even though he's in the third book, kind of ends with the second book. And so you get a sense of closure, I hope, from that. But I did go back and forth on it. I had several different layers of reveal and I just trusted my editor at FSG to tell me what made the most sense. And the thing that's really funny is that I do actually think there are a fair number of answers in the third book, but some readers tell me that they have been made so paranoid by authority that they don't actually believe the answers that they read in the third book. You mean, so even though the third book is not written from within Southern Reach and does not have the same paranoid tone, they assume that you're misleading them because of what came before? Yeah, I've had that reaction. It's like literally it's kind of colonized them in terms of the paranoia. And I mean, I kind of understand that there is a deep paranoia in it that comes from the method acting that I did, I think, because I tried to be controlled for a long time. I broke into my own house to create one scene. That must have been so much fun for your wife. Well, she wasn't home at the time. I waited until she wasn't there. Though it was kind of weird because the neighbor kid saw me and go in the back door and I was actually kind of creeping, like in a cartoon, which I don't know why I was doing that. So I look over and there's the neighbor kid and I had to just kind of go, hi, hi, and then smash. But it saved me a whole week, breaking into my own house as opposed to trying to imagine breaking into someone's house. What did that insurance claim look like? But yeah, so that's, yeah. I'll also add, the way answers are given in the third book is not a traditional science fiction method. It's not like an info dump. It's basically coming almost tangential that you actually get this information. Right, it's not the main point of a lot of the scenes. It's like in the margins of them, which is a risk, but it does also mean that I really trust the reader to put it together. So what would you say is the, what's the traditional scientific, science fiction way of revealing that you were referring to? It tends to be the quote unquote reveal at the very end. Close, well, you'll have a Daniel Ma or something after that, but you have a very defined understanding arising. Right. It's almost oddly like a traditional mystery where they all go into the parlor and the detective solves the case, or you know, it's weirdly like that. Not quite as formally put that way, though sometimes I wish there are some science fiction writers where I wish they would just do that. But the frustration here is that I'm actually working on a novel now with very traditional structure and traditional closure. I can do it. I can do it. I just didn't fit these books. So you claim. Well, I'll believe it when I see it. So they'll be a, there's no evidence of that. Yes. Yes. Hi, I'm Josh Goldman. First I want to say three things I liked about your books. One, I liked the way the characters got revisited. You know, where you had a negative view of like the director and the lighthouse keeper and then they came back. And my favorite from I think it's Saints and Mad Men is where you reveal sort of like the plot ending in the bibliography. Oh, thank you. The question I have is from the beginning you were talking about views of science. How do the, I mean, we never see what's going on for the SNS brigade from their point of view. And are they as, you know, are they actually doing some science there or are they just totally cookie? Right. The Sants and Science Brigade is this group that's using both science and paranormal like recording of activity to try to figure something out on the Forgotten Coast while all this other stuff is beginning to happen. And it's never totally revealed what they're trying to figure out. Right. It's never totally revealed. I got the idea from this stone garden built by this mad man in Miami, this Lithuanian guy who did it as a memorial to this girlfriend who had kicked him out and that's why he left Lithuania. But anyway, it has some very interesting aspects of like during eclipses and stuff, the way that the thing is set up, it kind of shows some kind of knowledge of like constellations and all kinds of things. But anyway, when I went there, there was one group of physicists taking readings and there was one group of psychics taking readings. And I thought that was so interesting that I would file that away. And like where do those two things meet? And that I thought would be an interesting way to also talk about pseudoscience. But it's true that I didn't quite tell you what they were doing. I'm working on, and I think that's probably because I'm working on a novella right now that's set like a day or two before Area X gets created and really totally involves the SNS Brigade. Not only that, but I could totally see doing a separate longer piece just on them. Just on the SNS Brigade, yeah. Right. Yeah. Very much enjoyed the Southern Reach. Marvelously creepy. My question is a third book called Acceptance. It seems to be so much thematically with all the characters about, not exactly grief, but regrets, things they would have done differently, wished had turned out differently, didn't, changes that are out of their control. I'm wondering if you were going through any kind of either personal or societal level grieving process during writing the novel. Well, I have to say there was one emotional thing in that I thought it might be the last time in a major way that I wrote about the landscape of wilderness in North Florida. And so I wanted, I really felt that deeply and then that kind of came out, I think, through the characters. So in a weird way, the landscape was fused with emotion in my mind and then it came out through the characters. By that time though, I was very invested in these characters. I was invested in the psychologist, perhaps most of all, who I thought I just, I don't know why, but I just identified with aspects of her life. And I had a hard time stopping writing about her. And so as these characters were coming towards the end of the cycle of the books, it was this kind of, I was also writing them during the winter and there was a clarity to the winter that year that kind of added an emotional thing to it as well. So there were kind of all these environmental things that were kind of kind of collating in my mind and then just kind of coming out in the prose. It's interesting that you say the psychologist was the character that you associated with because certainly in Annihilation, I didn't view her as a very sympathetic character to say the least. She was probably in some ways the villain of Annihilation. Yeah, no, I always planned that your view of most of these characters would change to some degree and I didn't realize how much the psychologist would change. The biologist was the weirdest one because I could write in that voice forever. I could write reams and I could write novels and novels and novels, but she only had so much story, if that makes any sense. Yeah, yeah. But you know, in terms of like personal stuff, there's stuff in her background in Annihilation that comes out of my own life. Like we had an overgrown swimming pool in the back of our yard and I wanted to be a biologist growing up and kind of use that overgrown pool as kind of like a little ecosystem I could research and whatnot. Great. Yeah, either side. Yeah. So, who are you? Oh, my name is Adam Conway. So a lot of the second novel seemed to be concerned with language and sort of people's inability to name things properly and ending up in kind of a logical cul-de-sac because of that. And there was also sort of a theme of names and people taking out multiple names and the psychologist having multiple names and over the course of the novels, I felt more sympathetic with that character depending on how she was named in the chapter breaks. And I thought that was a really interesting sort of the inability of language to encapsulate something was something, an interesting topic for a writer to take on when that's sort of kind of undermining the whole idea of writing in a way. And I was curious where that came from. You know, so much of that kind of thing just came through the characters. I mean, there are scenes though like the one I read, I mean, which I kind of stripped some things out because it doesn't read well otherwise, where I just recall conversations in workplace settings and the confluence of being in a workplace setting and working maybe on a really terrible project that kind of makes you thinkologically but doing it with people that you trust or respect or have some relationship to. And so there's this weird kind of combination of variables that come together to, where you're making sense of things on one level and things totally don't make sense on another. But a lot of that is just kind of subconscious, I think, coming out. Hey, my name's Tony McMillan. There's a lot of creepy stuff throughout the trilogy and I really enjoyed that. But I think the creepiest thing for me was the hypnosis. And I'm wondering two things. First off, what was the inspiration behind using hypnosis so much? And also, have you ever been, or would you be willing to be hypnotized to see what would happen? I have a weird, are you sure he's not right now? I have a weird thing about hypnosis or taking magic mushrooms or anything I think might alter every reality, which is that I don't really wanna do it. The hypnosis was meant to be kind of- Now our dinner plans are ruined. Yeah, that's right, you haven't told the dinner plans, I don't know. But actually, it started off as something to show the paranoia of the Southern Reach. I debated halfway through annihilation whether it was gonna seem to be effective or just something that they were trying out. I finally thought, well, hypnosis doesn't really work this way in the real world, but my feeling is something to do with the first expedition brought back information that allowed them to kind of be more successful with this kind of mind control. But I also meant for it to be kind of a metaphor for the fragmentation in our world, because I mean, I've seen many times on social media somebody who had one ideology suddenly be colonized by some idea or meme and then for the next six months, there's somebody else entirely. And so that's a form of hypnosis as far as I'm concerned, but it's not really that interesting in books to deal with the internet, you know what I'm saying? I mean, it wasn't as interesting to me as layering in like the old and the new technologies in there. I will say that the books were reviewed by an erotic hypnosis website, which sometimes reviews novels and apparently... I'm sorry, an erotic hypnosis website? For people who find hypnosis erotic and they sometimes review novels and they review any novel with hypnosis, whether it's meant to be erotic or not, as an erotic hypnosis novel. So Annihilation is apparently a great erotic hypnosis novel and authority is not. Just kidding. All right. You can find anything on the internet. Hi, my name is Allison Hoke and I'm gonna ask kind of a typical writing question, maybe working on a project of my own, but it sounds like you've put in so much thought and depth in terms of all the layers that you're trying to put into a whole trilogy. I'm wondering how much do you plan out the novels that you're writing? Like how detailed do you get or is some of it just discovery for you, a combination? That's always something I'm curious about for writers tackling large projects. I shouldn't admit this, but when I agreed to the three book deal with my agent and publisher, I didn't actually know if it was gonna be three books or five. But I did have a general idea of the overall story and I just didn't know how it was gonna settle and then authority ate up like 30 years of stuff and it was clear that certain things just needed to be summarized and not actually stated. When I actually worked on authority, I had like a vague outline, which is to say I knew this is vaguely how many days he's gonna be there before the shit hits the fan and this is vaguely what he would have to do as new director coming in. Whether I'm gonna dramatize all those scenes or not, I knew this is kind of the procedure you'd have if you had a new director coming into a place. So those are basically my scenes or some version of those. And so then I started editing those to like these are the scenes I actually need and then these are the people who will be in the room at the time and then it's kind of like a director who says, okay you know your motivation, we're gonna shoot this and you're gonna create the dialogue. So by the time I come to write the scene, there's all kinds of things I don't know and especially with a bureaucratic novel like that, there's all kinds of things that changed as I was writing the scenes because there's something about the layered bureaucracy of that place that was actually kind of like twisting everything as I wrote it. In fact, there was one point where I was sitting in a coffee shop and this guy came up to me and the guy he was with who I also knew for some reason didn't wanna speak to me but I'd seen them paying at the counter. So he came up to me, the other guy went behind on the balcony and I just kept writing while this guy is talking to me and I used that as part of a scene involving Whitby that later changed. So sometimes things in your environment just kind of you know, if it's the right kind of novel and it changes it as it goes along. So you have to leave enough room in there and enough chance for unexpected life but you have to have, I at least have to have some kind of structure to work from to begin with. How that helps. Talking about when you signed the three book deal, one of the really unusual things about Southern Reach is that it was three separate books published in one calendar year which you know, a lot of publishers would be wary of doing. I'm curious about how that came about and whether you and FSG were sort of confident all the way through that that was the right way to handle this. And also to publish you know, the first time this came out in the hardcover was after all three paperbacks were published which is also obviously unusual. Yeah and of course you know now someone who encounters the series for the first time doesn't really have a sense of that because all the pieces are in place and doing the hardcover as far as they know it was published first. Actually there were three offers, they were all good offers but the FSG letter came with the whole plan. Every detail of the plan, exactly what they were gonna do and how they were gonna do it, why they were gonna make three books work in a year. It was the most brilliant offer letter that I've ever received. I mean I just looked at it and it was like there was a glow coming off of it like I was in a David Lynch movie or something but you know an upbeat one. You sure? You sure? And all of those upbeat David Lynch movies, you sure there wasn't some form of hypnosis? And there definitely was, it was like FSG. But they, the main thing is follow through. They committed to following through on these things and I'm fairly sure that even if the first one had tanked they would have been working just as hard for the second and the third. And thankfully they didn't and they had traction but they did just so many smart things. They had like internet magicians behind the scenes, they had, I mean they did so many things that you didn't even see that kind of affected how people saw the books and whatnot. Like what type of thing? I don't really wanna go into details but let's just say that they're very savvy. So am I remembering correctly? It was February, May and November, is that right? September, yeah. September, so was there a moment after Annihilation was published in February where you sort of felt like you were on the edge of a cliff and holy shit like the next two books might totally fail if this one doesn't work? Well usually what happens, the second book in a trilogy, even if the first one has been successful is susceptible because it is the middle book. It's not gonna provide all the answers and if it comes out a year after the first book the whole publishing landscape kind of changed. So I was actually fairly happy after Annihilation came out and did well because I thought, wow authority actually has a chance, probably it's gonna get dinged a little bit but we'll still have momentum going into the fall and I had committed to touring behind all of these and they had committed to sending me out on tour so I had spent five and a half months on the road last year. So three separate tours. More like four or five. I mean because there were the different literary festivals and things that were like in between books and whatnot. And what was the, or was there any drop off in sales between the first, second and third? Well there's always gonna be a little bit because there's many people who, there's some people who think Annihilation stands on its own, they don't really want to know. There are those who read Annihilation and wanna read further and then there are those who absolutely hate Annihilation and never wanna see my name ever again. And so actually for a while at the very beginning when I was still reading Amazon reviews it would be like five stars, oh it's brilliant, classic, based on Lovecraft. No it's not based on Lovecraft, you bastard. And then one star, hope he burns in hell and all of his things with him. And it'd just go back and forth like that. It was literally, it was so weird, there were like no three star reviews or just like one star, five star, one star, five star. And gradually the five star reviews were beating out the one star reviews. And then after a while I got too scared to keep track of it anymore. But the other books are still selling very well. In fact, if Annihilation hadn't like kind of just become this kind of dreadnought, the other two books would have been enough to be an order of magnitude more than anyone could expect. So there's a little bit of a drop off but not really that much. And I know you said that Paramount's moving forward with an Annihilation movie. Are they thinking of that as the first movie in a trilogy? Or they are? They are. And it's kind of wise because there are three very different books and I could certainly see three different directors, three different script writers. The second one, you know, needing more of that kind of espionage touch and so on and so forth. And right now, I guess it's no secret because Alex Garland is going around doing promotion for Ex Machina, his new movie. And he's the one writing and directing Annihilation. And he's finished a screenplay. And there's quite a bit of movement on the movie that I can't talk about, but it's so close. When I hypnotize him afterwards, I'll get all the details. It's so close that I don't even want to think about it. Is there a projected date already? I can't talk about that. Okay. I can only talk about whatever Alex Garland says while on tour. Okay. I have more questions, but are there more audience questions? All right, well one other thing I just wanted to touch on is I was struck, I guess after the fact, after I had finished all three books, about the ways in which there's a range of racial perspectives, sexual perspectives that felt completely natural and integrated in a way that I oftentimes don't experience in fiction. I just recently finished David Mitchell's The Bone Clocks, and which I really enjoyed. But I had to go back and think afterwards about whether there were characters that were not Caucasian or not in heterosexual relationships. And I was wondering if that was something that you sort of consciously decided that you wanted to do, present that array of perspectives. And also whether the way that those perspectives were revealed sometimes, why you chose to do it in the way you did. So oftentimes you would know a character for hundreds of pages and then find out that he or she was Hispanic or, which I found fascinating because it made me confront my own expectations and my own what I was bringing to the character. Well, once I decided to make them nameless for various reasons having to do with area X and how that embeds them in the landscape, I also decided not to in annihilation give them physical characteristics because they were all women because I see a lot of judgment on physical attributes that way. I thought it would be more interesting to have them be judged solely on what they say, do and think. And then I thought it would be interesting not to reveal their ethnicities until the second book for that very reason that you would have formed that mental picture and then you would be jolted out of it with a secondary idea that that, along with some other things would jolt you out of the mood of annihilation because authority is such a different book. So there's that. I have written about non-white characters for a long time. All of my far future stories, including in Venice Underground, the characters are not white. It doesn't make sense for a future that's all white. And it just hasn't been probably noticed as much. I don't know why. Well, I mean, I guess I noticed them mainly because I hadn't noticed it in some senses and also because like in authority with control, you find out things about him and about the psychologist's personal relationships that are fairly along their development as characters. Right, yeah, so yeah, that's true. You know, so part of it is just that, you know, this is who this character is and this is who I'm gonna write about. Part of it is people that I've known that I'm using little pieces, bits and pieces of along with my own imagination to create a character. Part of it is definitely that a few years back I read something about, you know, audience and who your audience is and I wanted to make sure that I did a better job of writing books for a wide audience for everybody. And I think that that has actually really resonated. I keep getting people saying thank you for doing this and I keep telling them don't thank people for things you should already have. But it is definitely something that has struck a chord. Thank you for doing what type of thing. For having a character who, and I never really reveal it, who may be bisexual and is definitely, or maybe lesbian, having a diversity of characters, not killing off the black character third from last at the end of the third, you know what I mean? That kind of thing. And part of that is also a narrative thing. It's something that because in movies it's become so common. It's something that you sadly expect and therefore it actually works against the plot in a way. In addition to the obvious other considerations. Any other audience questions? Anything else you guys wanna talk about before we disembark? Eric you look pensive. I was wondering if you had other examples. Well actually I'll bring up, maybe the first time that the ethnicity reveal has really waded to a second novel. I mean because you do get like Robert Heinlein revealed partway through one of his novels that a character was black, which has always been something that Chip Delaney has really talked about was very formative for him in thinking about science fiction. But this is really much delayed sort of information in that context. So you're asking if I have other examples of how that happened. No that's not Eric actually, but either of you. You were talking about other examples of science and whatnot that you'd had that no? No no no, I was saying more, you mentioned being pensive and that's why I was thinking about the question of ethnicity and again how this had played out previously. In science fiction more generally. Or novels in general too. I mean that's I think a question that cuts across any genre. Right. But you know there are ways of writing these characters in other ways that I couldn't possibly write them. I love that book Americana by that Nigerian born writer. Yeah. Adice? Yeah yeah. And it's a book I could never write. I'm really happy about that. I really am happy that I can read books and think I could never write this. And this is an amazing look at race relations in the US and everything else and has a complexity to it. She's an incredible writer. So the last question I guess then is you mentioned tonight that this was probably the last time you were gonna write about the Florida wilderness. Why is that? Well I mean I just, you know when you're writing this I was writing this book and I had no idea how the books would do. When I wrote Annihilation, you know I had bronchitis. I had dental surgery that had led to bronchitis and I was out of my mind and I just basically wrote this thing on automatic pilot and then slept the rest of the day and it was done in like four weeks and I handed it to my wife and I said is this a novel or is this about four women just kind of wandering around this wilderness that happens to be the hiking trail that I've done for the last 14 years and Sans Tunnel Tower and so I didn't have any expectation and so when I was writing the third book I still had no expectation. I mean I thought it's possible even though it was remote that they might even get to the third book if the first one didn't do well and what that would mean for my career. I mean I've had so many career. You might not get to the third book? Yeah I mean they committed to it but you know in the back of your head you always have if the sales are really bad who knows what's gonna happen and I'm writing this while also while Annihilation is you know beginning to get advanced reviews I'm still finishing off the other book and so you're kind of in this space where you just don't know what's gonna happen. So that I guess I lied when I said the last question because I was curious about that so you were not completely done with the three books by the time Annihilation was being sent out essentially to. Yeah so I had to kind of block myself off from I mean and the movie deal was made while I was writing Authority which actually worked because Authority was kind of in my mind as I was writing a cinematic book so I began to think about what a very intricate layered movie might look like. If it had hit if that news had hit when I was writing Acceptance which was a very different book it would have been disastrous. It would have been very difficult for me meant to do. But it hit before Acceptance. So it worked very well for Authority. Right and you didn't have that in your head still? No I didn't. What I had in my head is that I'm at the very limits of my endurance. I'm getting the book that I want done done but there was a point where I was writing the last scene which is not the last scene of the book but the last scene I wrote for the book where I felt something kind of go like this in my brain like something was switching off or was trying to fire and wasn't firing and I didn't know if that was a temporary thing or not. So it felt like I might have writer's block for a long time after this. What was the last scene you wrote? Now? No, no. You said the last scene you wrote wasn't the last scene in the book. It was a scene where the lighthouse keeper has this kind of vision that's kind of occurring because of what's beginning to kind of take him over and then after that he has a conversation with a little girl whose name will be redacted so it doesn't give you any spoilers which is the last time that he's gonna see that person who has become kind of close to him and I couldn't get the vision right and I had this thing I'd bought, this book of miracles from Taschen books which is basically about people trying to record scientific phenomena that they thought was supernatural which kind of fit because it's all medieval paintings of comments and things like that. And so I just basically opened the book to a page, pointed to a picture and I said, you're gonna just, Jeff Van Demer, you're just gonna write this image, you're gonna describe this effin image and somewhere along there the engine's gonna come back on and so I just described that image and then it did after about a paragraph it clicked back on and I had the whole scene in my head and the novel was done. So, but it was a near thing. Glad you finished. Well I could have always pretended to finish oh this is where I was supposed to end. Well thank you both again so much. Eric at some point I'd like to get you down here to talk about your scientific work which I also find fascinating. We do have or Howard Bookstore does have books for sale right outside. Buy them, Howard Bookstore is an independent bookstore, you should support your independent bookstores. Jeff will be around to sign them. I'm gonna sign down here or out there. I think probably out there. Yeah, I think there's a table set up out there. Yeah. Thank you all for coming. Yeah, thank you. The Communications Forum will be back in the fall with a great new slate of programs. Thanks.