Jeff VanderMeer's Blog, page 7

(Photo from wikipedia)

Recently, I posted a blog entry that was basically about the ways we look past the natural world, past the terrain that’s all around us, and want it to reveal fantastical marvels that it itself contains if we only stop looking elsewhere. From the response to that piece, I’ve decided to periodically post “Ecology Watch” entries, incorporating or sharing information and comments from people I come into contact with who care about the environment–whether professional or amateurs.

One such is Harry Saddler, whose comment on my prior post is shared below, along with some information from email correspondence. Thanks to the writer James Bradley for making me aware of Saddler.

Saddler’s working on a book about the Eastern Curlew–you can read the first chapter here. The book will primarily be available in Australia, when finished, but I’m hopeful it’ll find wider distribution, given the richness and usefulness of even the first chapter.

Such specific documentation and writing about a species is very important as more and more of our biodiversity becomes threatened. It’s also important for clarity on the entire life cycle of an organism, and in the case of birds what migration patterns mean to species survival–specifically, what happens when safe spots wind up being destroyed by human intervention. – Jeff V

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Saddler on Not Giving Up

Just last week I was chatting to a bookseller in Melbourne, formerly a biologist, who was forthright in his opinion that we should just abandon some species. Spoon-billed sandpiper? It’s a goner. Orange-bellied parrot? Hopeless case. Put the resources being spent on such species towards more viable conservation projects, he said. While I can see the rationale behind such thinking, and though it’s invariably presented as hard-nosed pragmatism (when it’s actually despair), what I’ve seen again and again – not just in researching my book, but in all my years of watching the natural world – is that nature will take what we give it. Red-billed choughs went locally extinct in Cornwall during that county’s tin mining boom – and then re-introduced themselves 15 years ago. They now nest in the remains of the old mines. Some of the best places to see migratory shorebirds in the vicinity of Melbourne, where I live, are old salt works – and the single best location is the Western Treatment Plant, which is still the city’s major sewerage processing facility. Just two days ago I was at Yalujiang Nature Reserve, which is one of the key staging points for shorebird migration in the Yellow Sea – and the land immediately adjacent to it is almost entirely agricultural.

I’m not trying to say by these examples that everything’s fine and people are worried about nothing, far from it. We are deep into an ecological calamity of our own making which we can barely even begin to understand. But at least some of the world we’re destroying is recoverable, if we make the effort to give it space to recover. Life wants to persist, that’s the single fundamental fact of the natural world. The whole thing exists because life wants to persist. So that begs the question: do we also want life to persist? I wish I could say that the answer to that was a clear and resounding Yes!, because it seems like that should be the obvious and automatic answer, but I know that when I think that way I’m thinking from within my own bias. Yalujiang when I was there was full of tourists, but none of them seemed to be particularly interested in the birds which is the reserve’s entire reason for existence. It was a very strange scene and I’m still trying to make sense of it. But for now I know at least one thing for sure, and it’s that I’d rather have a world in which we do everything we can to save the spoon-billed sandpiper than a world in which we throw up our hands and declare that there’s no point trying to change our ways.

Saddler on His Current Visit to South Korea

I’m in South Korea now, on the island of Ganghwa which studies have indicated is the second most important staging area for eastern curlews in the Yellow Sea after Yalujiang. I went for a long walk (over 20 kilometres) around the southern shoreline yesterday and saw numerous curlews, and I was particularly delighted when at one point a flock of fifteen of them flew across the mudflats and landed in front of me. I was excited because it was the largest number of eastern curlews I’ve ever seen at once – but almost immediately I had to curb my excitement, because there are historical eye-witness accounts from near Melbourne of flocks of hundreds or even thousands of eastern curlews, and that’s at the southern terminus of their migration when they’re dispersed all around the Australian coastline. Populations of some shorebird species in the East Asian-Australasian Flyway are declining by as much as 8% a year – including the eastern curlew, which is endemic to this Flyway. Next week I’m travelling to Saemangeum, which used to be the single most important site for migratory shorebirds in the Yellow Sea – until it was sealed off and destroyed by a 33-kilometre-long seawall built by the South Korean government.

I’ve only been in South Korea for a few days but it’s notable that there is not a single vista that is not dominated by signs of human habitation. The mudflats in the Yellow Sea have to be seen to be believed – the mud is metres thick and extend for kilometres offshore. The processes that created them, through sediment deposits from the Yalu River and other rivers in China and through annual dust-storms, have been going on for millions of years – but all it takes is a few years of human construction to destroy them. We really need to make people care about mudflats, because as ecosystems go they’re as rich and as productive as any ocean or rainforest – but mud and crabs and worms and drab brown birds just aren’t sexy. I really believe that if more people knew about the lifecycle of migratory shorebirds, and the role that mudflats play in sustaining that lifecycle, more people would start to care. I’m astonished that migratory shorebirds aren’t one of the most famous and celebrated groups of birds in the world. But the history of conservation is dotted with examples of previously obscure animals gaining mass popularity and cultural awareness (the “Easter bilby” campaign in Australia is one example that springs immediately to mind) so change is possible. If I didn’t believe that I think I’d have to just give up!

(Mudflats: not sexy, but incredibly important ecosystems. Photo by Saddler, South Korea.)

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One of the best things I’m associated with every year is the Shared Worlds teen SF/Fantasy summer writing camp. I serve as co-director and run the creative writing track. As recently announced, the wonderful writer Julia Elliott has been named our Amazon writer-in-residence, in conjunction with an $18,000 grant from Amazon that will help fund scholarships for teens who need financial assistance. You can .

Every year, teens from all over the country and even the world come to Shared Worlds for a unique mix of world-building and fiction writing. Our guests in addition to Elliott include Nnedi Okorafor, Tobias Buckell, Leah Thomas, Nathan Ballingrud, and Terra Elan McVoy, with Hugo Award-winner Ann VanderMeer as editor-in-residence. We’ll also have a ton of cool activities, in addition to Skype sessions with the brilliant bestselling authors Lev Grossman and Daniel Abraham about their writing and their TV shows on the SyFy Channel.

Also, starting this year, all the students will receive a free copy of my writing guide Wonderbook, from Abrams Image.

Shared Worlds is in its ninth year, which is just an amazing accomplishment. Very proud of this camp. More info, including how to register, at the website.

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Getting off of social media to work on fiction always also helps me find more reading time. If you missed it, one of my favorite novels of the spring was McKenzie’s The Portable Veblen, which I reviewed for the LA Times. Favorite long read recently was Robert McFarlane’s “Generation Anthropocene“. Here are some recent reads of note.

Lost Landscapes by the LOLA Landscape Architects – A linked series of stunning essays by Netherlands architects, Lost Landscapes also features some great landscape architecture images to illustrate various points. Something about the narrowed focus on one country and a few projects allows the writers great clarity not just in setting out basic ideas about their profession but also thoughts on ecology, leisure, and the interstitial spaces between cities and countryside. I especially appreciated how much thought went into the layout and design–it’s seamless.

The Hare by Cesar Aira – I finally got around to this cagey, sneaky account of a nineteenth-century Argentine expedition to find a mythical rabbit. Aira does a great job of evoking the era and of raising issues related to culture and nature, and the cultural nature of evil. The characterization is accomplished in nimble thumbnails, slipping into and out of points-of-view.

Bleak Houses: Disappointment and Failure in Architecture by Timothy Brittain-Catlin – Apparently nothing is more entertaining that reading about people who didn’t quite make it, or who failed disastrously, or were overshadowed by famous fathers. In talking about Gothic, Edwardian, and other styles of architecture, Brittain-Catlin makes a compelling case for not discarding architectural failures and for re-examining the idea of “failure” in architecture altogether. In part this case is made by pointing out how architectural ideologies tend to exert force and pressure outside of the context of the actual creations that come about because of them. That, and how personalities and lucky circumstances can lift up one architecture over another. Like any field, really, except it’s rather astounding how many failures still exist in our local landscapes–the name may be writ in water, but the results were writ in brick, wood, and stone.

Dispute Plan to Prevent Future Luxury Constitution by Benjamin H. Bratton – Perhaps it’s because Bratton is a kind of architect-philosopher or because his mosaic of stories stitched together into a story don’t have to follow any kind of commercial fiction template…but whatever the reason, Bratton’s Dispute Plan from 2015 strikes me as fresher and more relevant than a lot of more linear novel-like science fiction. The ideas are layered thick but never in an unclear way, and by bringing in issues like claims to the South China Sea the book feels relevant and contemporary. Yet there’s also Ballardian compression and expansion of time and space in Dispute Plan and a fascinating overall narrative structure. 

To Save Everything, Click Here by Evgeny Morozov – A great antidote to the simplistic technophile/luddite duality that seems to haunt every discussion about “the Internet.” In criticizing giants like Google and Facebook (while also pointing out their benefits), Morozov rightly points out the uselessness of referring to “the Internet” when we actually mean individual power players who have made conscious (and often for-profit) decisions about how we use social media and other aspects of the internet. He also makes a compelling case for why some of the efficiencies so desired by Silicon Valley re politics and other “meat world” situations are actually counter-productive to the workings of a democracy. Every once in a while, Morozov’s a bit repetitive or the argument gets thin, but in general this is a great book to get people to think about what they’re doing on “the Internet.”

Hot Milk by Deborah Levy – I love Levy’s fiction and have since having my mind blown away by Beautiful Mutants long ago. Levy isn’t formally experimental, and yet there are experimental and transgressive impulses very near the surface in her work. She’s also an exceptional stylist, with a slightly different approach in each novel. In Hot Milk, about a daughter who takes her mother to a health retreat to solve a problem with her legs, that takes the form of a narrator tic that works really well: some key word in one paragraph then used in the next to go off on a riff into other topics entirely. Which, unexpectedly, has a lot more cohesion and relevance than one would’ve thought. It’s also another dangerous novel, with ominous bristlings, and wonderful dialogue.

The Biology and Ecology of Giant Kelp Forests by David R. Schiel & Michael S. Foster – I like to pick up books about particular ecosystems, even if it’s likely the book in question may include information beyond a layperson’s interest. This tome on giant kelp forests contains enough for the non-scientist in terms of the history and intricacies of these fascinating ecosystems but also enough scientific data to satisfy biologists (I think). Am I the only one who thrills to discussions of “beach wrack” and “animal assemblages”? Seriously–this is an exciting exploration, as are most books about incredibly productive and intricate places.

The post Books Read: Giant Kelp, Lost Landscapes, Hot Milk, Theory Fiction, Hares, Bleak Houses, Squirrels, Doomed Futures, and Broken Intertubes appeared first on THE SOUTHERN REACH.

The ghost is under the burning wedding ferry, where the ceremony took place. The ghost is under the burning wedding ferry, where the ceremony just now took place. The ghost is hiding under the burning wedding ferry, holding its breath. The bride and groom are pyres of flame, taken up by the explosion. The water is gouged with shards and splinters that burn faint orange and red, hissing out their heat, spearing the river bottom. The figurehead has pitched forward, sagged to kiss the rippling surface as water bugs glide by.

The river turns red, but you’re not afraid even though you’re the only one left. Once, boats turned the river white with wake. Once, storks nested in the trees on either side. Once, fishermen stood silent, patient, in the weeds, theo children jumping off tire swings into the swirl invisible to them. Once the water ran true, free of silt, and fed the fields and hills beyond. But now most of that belongs to old photographs like the ones in your bag. But now what’s left has no sense of permanence. But now there is just you in your scuba gear and red mask, resting at the bottom of the river amid cool gray-blue rocks split by green algae…letting the current take you…letting the current take you…drifting like a dead thing as you try to understand all the other dead things that tumble by or bump into you.  A rusty gasoline can wiped clean of brand sits half-buried in the silt in front of you. A tiny golden bottom-feeding fish lives inside, slides half-out to stare at you. The water pulls at you and pushes at you and you plunge your gloves deeper into the silt. Hovering there, staring at the fish. You are a bottom feeder, too. You’ve reached the bottom, and you’re still breathing.  You can do this because you can pretend no one watches, no one judges. Anyone who matters is miles away, safe across a border. This is a remote part of the country. This is a place untouched by anything but war for decades, and, for now, the war has moved beyond the hills and left behind the red river. Still, this place is full of secret identities, the effect stark because you meet so few people. You can never tell if a person is who they say. You can never tell if the mask they wear is too old and in place to take off.  Militias used these waters, hid in shadowed inlets using canoes with outboard motors. Some of them stayed behind when the war moved, took up disguises. You have a gun in your knapsack because you’re not a fool or perhaps because you are a fool. But it can’t help you down here. Every time you dive, you expect to come back up to a world where they stand wordless, have already judged you. After a while the annoying fish wins your staring contest and you grow restless in your drifting, feel cramped within your second skin, need to surface and clamber back onto the river bank. No one waits for you. No one puts a bullet in your head. You take off the tanks, and then the flippers and mask, and then the sky is blue again…and yet somehow everything is still red. It’s dusk now and the birds make such delicate, ravenous sounds, but you can’t see them. It’s dusk now, and the trees have become silhouettes; you can hear their quiet creaking but when you stare at them, they are completely still. You’re standing there alone in the mud and thinking about your grandparents, how they could ever live in a place so stunning and yet so empty. A terrible crime happened here, and you still don’t know what it was. They would never tell you.  The ferry has been holed and abandoned for years.

The ghost is under the burning ferry, holding its breath.

End of dream #4.

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Rust to Ammon: “I need to solve this lawnmower mystery.” Ammon: “I like buildings in wildlife refuges.” Rust: “Who murdered love?” Ammon: “Snack?”

Rust to Ammon. “The dust of galaxies feather-deaths your precept.” Ammon: “I need a working toilet and a Sham-wow.” Rust: “All is death.”

Rust to Ammon: “Chill your harsh, man.” Ammon: “PETA just gave me a petrified celery stalk.” Rust: “Build a labyrinth in your mind.” Ammon: “Snacks?”

Rust to Ammon: “Ten thousand ghosts lubricated the passage of your birth.” Ammon: “I’m going to hit you with my gun.” Rust: “Bugs bunny was a gun-bearing rabbit and he saw the sheer beautiful despair of life.” Ammon: “I just need to desecrate some ground.” Rust: “You can piss over there.”

Rust to Ammon: “Why do you like snacks?” Ammon: Why do you love death?” Rust: “Cause it’s chewy and salty and you can pet it.” Ammon: “Can I tell you something? Snacks in refuges are like Ballardian Crash scenarios to me.” Rust: “That a fact? Cause I’m gonna create some distance here if so.” Ammon: “I love you Rust. I want to have your snack-babies.”

Area X wrapped its fungal conduits around Ammon’s supple neck. Then it licked away his microbial shield, penetrated his nostrils, clung to his symbiotic tailbone, and caressed his circulatory system, after which he exploded in an ecstasy of euphoric spores.

End of Dream #3

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The trains are circling again as if they’ve always existed and the town between was never more than an afterthought. Day and night, night and day, dusk and dawn, and each minute or second between, I lose track, the trains are running and running and running. The trains the trains the trains. They never really stop. Even when they wait sullen and dull on the tracks for some arcane sign, some moment that I cannot divine, for the moment when they will move again…the insides of them never really stop. Inside of them, everything is still moving and humming and vibrating, somewhere deep within where the stillness cannot touch them. The metal is full of life.

It goes beyond timetables or cargoes or any who inhabit them, although I have never seen a person on any of these trains as they circle, wait, and “stop.” These “stops,” this “circling,” this “waiting”—it is obscure, it is horrifying in that it cannot be predicted and that nothing can be done about it. There is a disgusting element to this unpredictability, and it makes me think of the cars as metal on the outside but flesh inside, that if you were to break them open, each compartment would be scarlet red, and organs and blood would spill out.

I cannot even guess the schedule or order or orders, what pattern forms from above, if I were to build a drone and watch from above. I’m afraid to try. I’m afraid of what I’ll find. So instead I look for the pattern formed by their stillness and their solitude as they wait in the weeds of tracks, in the rust by broken dead refrigerators and old tin cans and bottles drunk in the gravel, coated in whatever amber liquid once was inside….and when these trains come to life, when they move with squeal and screech, when they run so long and hot and fast that this must mean something, that this urgency is creating some speech or language not meant for me. When this happens, I watch ever more terrified, but trapped here beside the trains, trapped with their language, all my senses robbed before it.

I never see a conductor. I never see passengers. But that is another theory: that they exist, inside the cars, the barrels, the cylinders. If there is no flesh within those compartments. Which would mean that although I cannot see them, they might be able to see me—pinprick holes in the outer skin of the trains—and if they see me they can comment on me and judge me for staring at them without knowing anything. For not understanding them, or helping them. If they need help.

Perhaps this is a hell I walk through, a punishment for crimes I don’t remember, and in there is the heaven—that if you cracked open a car, you’d find a cool dark center that feels like bliss. But I will never know. I’m am just out here, reacting to the trains. Reacting to the trains because they give me no choice.

Through their very blankness, the lack of effect in their non-faces, the seamless crunchy rust of them, the trains disguise their intent. They disguise not just if they have passengers who perceive me, but if the trains can perceive me and know me and assess me. But I’m not fooled by this aspect. I know what is going on, even if there is nothing I can do about it, even though I cannot get on the trains. They would not have me. But then if I did, they would have me, they’d convert me, and I’d be just like them, never stopping, never caring about the things humans care about, but instead turned into a being who cares about the mysterious things trains care about, that they scheme toward that, yes, the trains love. The trains love velocity and they love noise and they love the tracks that constrain them, too, and they love to ignore me while they also try to destroy me with their sound and their lack of attention. By their essential nature they break me down every day and every night. As thoroughly as if I was a threat to them, but not one that meant very much, that counted much. The trains the trains the trains the trains the trains the trains

End of dream #2

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The seance hadn’t gone well. The dog had ended up in the ceiling. Well, maybe. Hindquarters were all that were showed. Sagging. Man’s best friend once again led into the abyss. Somewhere in the desert beyond a coyote-wolf snickers and howls.

Herman had exploded into sparks of pure night, scalding the floorboards, and nothing had been heard from him since. Out in space a scream might be pieced together from cooled shards of black glass. But was there a reason to bother?

The table is unscathed, even if Jennifer and Edward’s heads thrust up from its surface without much evidence of bodies in the darkness beneath.  Their heads aren’t made of flesh anymore. Whatever had come out of their mouths and into the rooms had been made of some stronger, stiffer substance. Only their eyes move now. It was an old table. Once, it could have been called Edwardian free of irony.

The smell is of the burnt inside membrane of a chestnut. It licked around the table and over to the window, which has been split by a spirit that had fractured the glass with such force that out against the desert sky, you can still see the pieces turning over and over in their unholy trajectory. Some day soon they will coalesce into a glittering necklace and embed against the throat of a passerby. People will remark on the victim’s unluckiness. But is that the truth?

“I am your damager,” says the voice from the darkness under the table. “I am your damager.” The darkness is getting darker still. Whatever they meant to raise is rising still.

“I am your damager,” comes the voice. It keeps repeating itself. The room begins to collapse into the darkness under the table.

I wish I wasn’t the only one left in the room to hear.

End dream #1.

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Sometimes I feel as if most of the world is on a different page, and then I have to wonder if it’s something that’s wrong with me. With regard to environmental issues, I feel very much as I did right after 9-11. I worked in an office then and as soon as the second plane hit, I was torn between sorrow at the loss of life and immediate concern that George W. Bush would use the attack as an excuse to tear up the Middle East and tear up civil liberties at home. Those thoughts expressed aloud didn’t go over well. I was supposed to be patriotic, nationalistic. To be bifurcated between loss/sorrow and concern for the future wasn’t allowable.

And now I wonder if it’s the same situation, different context. I feel out of step with so many people I respect about global warming and about the environment. Not enough urgency. Solutions that seem not to address the basic problem.

I wonder if E.O. Wilson may feel the same–especially given his latest book, Half Earth, which made me nod, aghast at the things he documents–the rationale by some that because so many places are compromised, no places are worth fighting for. That somehow we should give into rampant greed and corruption and unexamined business practices and just turn the world into asphalt and cities, with maybe some small gardens and zoos to document a past in which the nature we came out of still existed.

I see so much rhetoric that makes no sense to me. Business as usual is sociopathic. Continuing existing practices, even if global warming did not exist and was not human-made, would be a kind of self-destruction. The kind of act that would mean we should expect no pity and no mercy from any extraterrestrials who came down from above to judge us.

We are not smart enough to gauge the complexity of the world around us, even as we feel entitled to destroy it in the perverse, finite name of re-making the world to hold more of us and to contain less of everything else. Yet scientists tell us even insect brains are more intricate than we previously knew. Bears are complex organisms with feelings. Birds are highly evolved and still offering up their secrets. And yet somehow we think we are entitled to kill them whenever we like. We somehow still operate from the idea that the wealth of the world is infinite.

But this attitude goes beyond how we think of animals, how we create rationalizations for how we treat them that allows us to continue to exploit and destroy them. It is also about the landscapes we inhabit and how we think of them.

James Bradley on facebook alerted me to this great piece on the Eastern Curlew, which reads in part, “To refer to a place, particularly a natural landscape, as liminal’, demonstrates not imagination but a catastrophic failure of imagination: it is to refuse or to be unwilling to see a place for what it really is, which is above all else of itself.”

I was thinking of this when watching the last third of a critically acclaimed movie about kind-of aliens, Midnight Special. It’s actually a terrible, very stupid movie that disguises this fact with a very smart first half. But by the second half, the pay-off is a disturbing kind of closing-down into Hollywood cliche, and cliches about the world we inhabit. I can’t pretend that it didn’t hurt me to see the movie makers use the St. Marks Wildlife Refuge as a backdrop for what is basically a hymn to sentimentality and senselessness, but any natural backdrop would have shown the dysfunction of the movie.

Leaving aside the many irrational, illogical moments in the movie’s late stage, there’s a scene in which alien structures appear in the backdrop of the marsh reeds of St. Marks. It is the very exemplification of what the Eastern Curlew chapter warns against, as jarring as it is distasteful. To the filmmakers, the natural world–the wonders of that world–are just the frame for the real wonder: a vision of another wondrous other world that is straight out of 1950s science fiction, with all the blinkers that implies.

In fact, there is little to differentiate the horrible banality of that final vision in Midnight Special from the visions in Tomorrowland, a lively movie that is still, in the end, unthinking in its foundational assumptions. In Tomorrowland, as if to articulate what Midnight Special only presents as visual subtext, the protagonist gets to a vision of a glorious 1950s-ish technologically positive future while waist-deep in a swamp depicted as fetid and distasteful. Waist-deep in one of the very kinds of ecosystem complexity that might one day be the salvation of our species if we can unlock its secrets and/or restore its primacy to our landscapes.

It’s little wonder then that in both Midnight Special and Tomorrowland the vision of utopia is of clean, crisp concrete and glass, with little moments of carefully cropped and cultivated greenery. But this is not a vision of utopia: it’s a vision from the past for one thing, because it’s no different from those 1950s extrapolations. And it’s also a vision of dystopia, because it is once again a failure of the human imagination to integrate culture with nature. (Those who want to say humans are part of nature rather than a thing apart are deluding themselves at this point. Those who take this distinction as license for dominion are simply psychotic or selfish or corrupt.)

The truth is we won’t survive if we don’t bend, if we don’t adapt, if we don’t look at the natural world–from which we are now officially and terribly estranged–and take our cues from it. If we do not tell better stories with a more multi-dimensional and empathic imagination. And, ultimately, if we don’t make our tech mimic the “tech” of the natural world, we are, quite simply, toast, and the planet with us. In reality and on the level of ethics and morality.

Because in continuing to pursue a course of hard tech that is simply incompatible with quality of life for us and other organisms, we are pursuing a species-wide derangement. One that refutes science. One that refutes logic. One that, in the end, refutes any right to call ourselves ethical or moral. No amount of carbon trading to try to get out from global warming will solve this larger problem.

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This July, Vintage will release our The Big Book of Science Fiction–about 800,000 words covering roughly the twentieth century. With more than 105 stories from 29 countries, it’s the most wide-ranging and largest single-volume collection of twenty-century science-fiction stories ever published. You can read some of my prior blog posts about the research at this link.

Entertainment Weekly did a cover reveal along with a piece we wrote giving an inside look at editing the anthology.

Just this weekend, Io9 did a reveal of the table of contents, which includes Borges, Bradbury, Le Guin, Butler, Vonnegut, Dick, St. Clair, Lisa Tuttle, Tanith Lee, Stanislaw Lem, Samuel R. Delany, Kim Stanley Robinson, and…well, check out the link.

But just to break down that TOC a little bit more…

–We chose the twentieth century rather than up to the present day to give ourselves the distance to properly evaluate the fiction and also to allow ourselves enough room to include what needed to be included, given we wanted to explore science fiction from all over the world. (We don’t feel a twenty-first century reprint SF anthology with truly blanket coverage has yet been published, but The Mammoth Book of Science Fiction Stories by Women is an excellent resource for readers looking for a rich overview of the past 15 years or so.)

–We’re proud to have a major novella by Liu Cixin in the anthology–one not widely familiar to SF readers in the West–and also stories by writers like Kojo Laing and Alfred Jarry who may not be thought of in terms of SF but have definitely made fascinating and unique contributions to the genre.

–We’re proud that the estate of David R. Bunch allowed us to reprint three of his infamous Moderan stories–the first time in two decades that has occurred.

–James White’s “Sector General” galactic hospital stories have been underrated for a long time. We’ve included one of his longest and best in our anthology.

–Our anthology features approximately 40 translations out of 100-plus stories, from more than 20 countries.

–The following stories have never appeared in English before now–and Barberi and Zozulya are authors who have never appeared in English before–ever. Ocampo is a major Argentine writer who had previously not been thought to write science fiction, but her story from the 1950s is a very good one indeed!

Jacques Barbéri, “Mondo Cane” 1983 (France) – trans by Brian Evenson

Angélica Gorodischer, “The Unmistakable Smell of Wood Violets” 1973 (Argentina) – trans by Marian Womack

Han Song, “Two Small Birds” 1988 (China) – trans by John Chu

Silvina Ocampo, “The Waves” 1959 (Argentina) – trans by Marian Womack

Paul Scheerbart, “The New Overworld” 1911 (Germany) – trans by Daniel Ableev and Sarah Kaseem

Karl Hans Strobl, “The Triumph of Mechanics” 1907 (Germany) – trans by Gio Clairval

Yefim Zozulya, “The Doom of Principal City” 1918 (Russian) – trans by Vlad Zhenevsky

–We also commissioned re-translations, usually in cases where an existing translation was more than 25-30 years old or where we thought the existing translation had some flaws. These are those new re-translations:

Juan José Arreola, “Baby H.P.” 1952 (Mexico) – trans by Larry Nolen

Dmitri Bilenkin, “Crossing of the Paths” 1984 (Russia)– trans by James Womack

Adolfo Bioy Casares, “The Squid Chooses Its Own Ink” 1962 (Argentina) – trans by Marian Womack

Sever Gansovsky, “Day of Wrath” 1964 (Ukraine) – trans by James Womack

Alfred Jarry, “The Elements of Pataphysics” 1911 (France)– trans by by Gio Clairval

Arkady & Boris Strugatsky, “The Visitors” 1958 (Russia) – trans by James Womack

Miguel de Unamuno, “Mechanopolis” 1913 (Spain) – trans by Marian Womack

Valentina Zhuravlyova, “The Astronaut” 1960 (Russia) – trans by James Womack

–Stories by Robert Heinlein, Van Vogt, and Bob Shaw were not available to reprint as the respective estates do not provide permissions at this time.

–Far-future SF “indistinguishable from magic” (like Jack Vance) we have decided to consider for a future Big Book of Fantasy. Time travel stories were largely covered by our Time Traveler’s Almanac. Steampunk stories seemed more fantastical than SFnal and also have been covered in our three Steampunk volumes.

–We had the opportunity to acquire what you might call fairly complete “through-lines” of some Latin American and Russian/Ukrainian SF. Other lines of inquiry yielded less information, and not every country or literary tradition has a wide science-fiction component. That said, we know we could have included much more French SF, for example, and areas of emphasis to devote very robust resources to for our next antho, a Big Book of Fantasy, include not just much more from France but increased focus on countries in Southeast Asia and India, up to the present day.

The 11,000-word introduction to the anthology and the 50,000 words of author/story notes provide additional context and information. We’re very proud that the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction allowed us to use some material from their site in the creation of the author bios.

The post The Big Book of Science Fiction from Vintage: Some Background Info appeared first on THE SOUTHERN REACH.

This is a guest post by Ben Roswell, who contacted me via email after having read the Southern Reach Trilogy. I was really humbled by his reaction to the novels and thought it might be of use to share it, if the idea suited–and it did. His post discusses in part “the robust vintage” of his “particular god-given grab-bag of disorders and learning disabilities,” fiction, the Southern Reach, and being a writer. – JeffV

Ben Roswell is a transgender horror writer and aspiring literary critic. His short term plans involve studying Theatre Design and Production at Boston University and working on his novel. His long term plans involve changing the world by talking about monsters as loudly and often as possible. You can find him on twitter @roswellwrites. 

***

You gave me the word terroir. I’m sure I would have eventually stumbled upon it on my own, but you can claim the small honor of having given it to me.

I have been thinking about my personal terroir, the things inherent to me and to my environment that have turned me into this and why they have done so, for a long time with out having a word for it. Except, perhaps, “nature vs. nurture” which isn’t really accurate and far too stark a dichotomy for my tastes. The thing I have become, the person I am, is not separable from either my genetics or my environment; through me they are bound to each other. Terroir to me means talking about the massive web of things that effect me as interdependent and strange rather than clearly distinct. Not that I didn’t do that already, but naming things always makes it easier.

The word also has the implication that my particular god-given grab-bag of disorders and learning disabilities are a desirable and robust vintage rather than a random collection of circumstances and base pairs. An Implication that I am embracing, have been attempting to embrace for a long time, but now have the language for.

I recognized in your novels something familiar. I have severe Attention Deficit Disorder and severe Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. I get obsessed for days or weeks with one thing or another, but I cannot hold onto it. Focus slips away like something with slimy scales. I fill up with words on one thing or another but I don’t have the executive function to do anything about them. In the Southern Reach Trilogy, I found a semblance of my experiences. The obsessive questions with out answers and well springs of ideas without action, without the the ability to act, with out even the ability to to understand what action would entail. The way words and images in the books disappear only to come back again, more precise, more unrecognizable, like Area X is a grindstone.

I have been thinking of my mind like a grindstone for a long time. I pick at things, turn phrases over and over until they erode within me leaving only their dust. I’m filled with it. I’m full of bits of words and granular phrases who have lost all meaning but that which I give them. Just like Area x takes all meaning but its own. It makes communication frustrating, to say the least.

When I first started to recognize those familiar forms of frustration in your Trilogy I thought, extremely briefly, that I would have to put it down because it was too close to home. However, reading about it was practically therapeutic. It was terrifyingly refreshing to read a book in which brains like my brain could exist (and later when queer characters arrived on the stage, where sexualities like my sexuality are evident).

It was terrifying because had foci of our obsessions not been different I would have said that you had been in my head. It was terrifying because it was a horror that played to my experiences, that took them to extremes. It was terrifying because in Control and in The Director and in Ghostbird and in Saul and even in poor Whitby I could see what I might become if my brain ever decides that the little respectability I have managed to maintain is not worth the effort.

(This is not my decision to make, one day I will simply wake up and find that it has been made for me.)

Ghostbird in particular rang true to me, because for her there is no separation between her self and the transforming agent. There is no separation between her self and the horror she experiences. She cannot draw a line and say this is where I end and my opponent begins. She exists as a person within the continuum of her environment and her fundamental makeup, she exists as a person only within the disaster that is Area X.

Of course, the impulse for self dissection is compelling; I sometimes catch myself thinking that if only I can peel always all those parts of me that have been tainted by brain chemistry and a discrete series of crises, only then I can be real. I think sometimes that I am not a real person at all. I think sometimes that I will only be okay if can shove my hand through my chest, through the clutter of constructs and compulsions that nestle there, and pull out from somewhere deep within me a bloody core of something that is nothing but me.

Of course this is stupid because I cannot shave away the parts of me that have been transformed. I, like Ghostbird, exist as I am now only in the context of my own ongoing disaster.

She is the futile desire for self-definition given a voice. She is the fear of personal unreality given hands and the ability to act. I think we are not so different, she and I. (Though if she is a ghost bird then I am the ghost something else; something full of teeth.)

This is about my mental illness and my trauma because that is the lens though which I understand horror – the feeling or the genre. To me The Southern Reach Trilogy was an incredible work of horror not because I can so easily imagine something growing inside me but because something already is. The thing inside my chest is hard and crystalline not soft and fungal, but a parasitical family resemblance exists between it and The Brightness. Some days it is nothing but a slight obsession with religious paraphernalia and spinal trauma. Some days it is something that I am absolutely sure is just about to burst through my skin, that granite scales and marble fangs are about to grow from me.

I wanted answers at the end of The Trilogy not just because I was curious but also because I thought that maybe it would be like you reaching though your words to tell me what was wrong with me, why it was wrong with me. I thought that maybe once I could understand what grew inside your characters, I could name what grew inside of me.

But that would have been untrue. Not least because the thing that is wrong with me is most decidedly not an alien ecological disaster. Not least because you are not me. It would have been untrue because the thing that has transformed me is not something that has a why and it is not something that has internal logic. It is senseless. It does not work within whys or in any way that is going to be comprehensible to either of us. I cannot tell you why spinal trauma haunts me or why reliquaries call to me. They did not choose to do so. My OCD did not choose them. I certainly had no say in the matter. These things are just things that happen. Mental illness is just a thing that is.

I want to thank you for the lack of answers in your book and for the way you portrayed a search for those answers as both sympathetic and fruitless. That’s how my search for answers is, and that’s how I want to be seen. I have spent a large portion of my life scraping and scrambling for answers on the edges of the unfathomable, as desperate as a wild animal. I most likely will continue to do so. This is okay. Its is only natural to need resolution. But I will never have answers that are satisfactory. This is okay too. These two realities do not deny each other’s validity. The balance between being sympathetic and pointing out the pointless is a hard one to strike, and one I am more than glad to see here.

Your book reminded me that I am still okay if I cannot trace the lines of obsession and compulsion that spiral through me to their origin. It reminded me that it’s okay if I don’t have a clear cut why within me, like so many characters in so many books that feature mental illness do.

Instead of a why, I can have a terroir.

You also reminded me why I wanted to become a horror writer in the first place. The way that horror lets you come at things sideways but also face on. When done well the normal can become horrible and the horrible normal, and almost comforting. Just as it is for me. The way horror lets the general you and the specific me escape from the confines of the dichotomous and shows all the ways people like me, and people, or not-people, like Ghostbird can exist in, around, and through the margins. We can exist there because horror breaks the prohibition on the ugly and the incomprehensible. And neither Ghostbird nor I ever claimed to be easy people.

I started writing seriously because I wanted to write the words that I needed when I was younger, so that maybe some other scared kid can find them. I started writing horror because that was where I could find my self, because that is where I could grow and expand, because that is where I found things about myself being discussed honestly with all their fuzzy edges and horribleness intact.

My life and brain are not perfect, pretty things. I would not wish them on anyone, but that does not mean I want my reality treated with anything other than honesty and sympathy.

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