Clara Sherlry-Appel (CSA): This is Story Behind the Story. I’m your host, Clara Sherley-Appel, and my guest today is writer and literary critic, Jeff VanderMeer. Over his 35 year career, he has published more than a dozen novels, and his non-fiction writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Atlantic, Slate, Salon, and the Washington Post, to name just a few. His genre-defying novels and short stories frequently engage with ecological themes, including climate change, causing the New Yorker to dub him “weird Thoreau.” In 2014, Annihilation, the first book in his New York Times-bestselling Southern Reach trilogy, won the Nebula and Shirley Jackson Awards for Best Novel; it was adapted into a movie in 2018.


His newest novel, Hummingbird Salamander, comes out this week. It follows a security analyst named Jane as she tries to unravel the mystery of a taxidermied extinct hummingbird gifted to her by an ecoterrorist, and it is the topic of our conversation today.

Jeff VanderMeer, welcome to Story Behind the Story.

Jeff VanderMeer (JV): Thanks for having me.


(CSA): As I mentioned in the intro, your writing engages heavily with the natural world and environmental themes. How did your interest in ecology develop?


(JV): I've always been surrounded by a really rich tapestry of the natural, non-human world. Just by coincidence, I guess. My parents joined the peace corps when I was four, and we were in Fiji for 5 years, in what was really a tropical paradise. And also, my parents: my mom was a biological illustrator at the time, and my dad's a research chemist. He was studying rhinoceros beetles (which are invasive there), and so we would go to a lot of natural settings as well, in addition to our house being just a 10 minute walk from the beach. So there was that; Just being immersed in it. And then when we came back to the US after two years in Ithaca — which is actually in a very rich area (I realized later), but at the time when you come from a tropical paradise to a snow bound area, (they both laugh) it seemed pretty dire. But then we moved to Florida, and especially North Florida here where we have one of the most biodiverse landscapes in the world, which I don't think a lot of people realize. When it's part of what's all around you, it naturally becomes part of your interests. But then Annihilation being made into a movie and all that, I started being asked to talk more about environmental issues; And so I began to pay more consciously about what I was doing and what I was writing about.


(CSA): You live in Florida, like you said, near the St. Mark's National Wildlife Refuge, and you have frequently spoken about the way you draw inspiration from that landscape: the mallard with a broken wing that made its way into Borne, a lighthouse that is central to the plot of Annihilation, and so on. What inspired this book? Where did it start?


(JV): It always starts with a central image related to a character, and then I'll start writing in earnest until I know what the ending is going to be, even if the ending changes a lot by the time I get there. (I found otherwise that I never finish something if I don't at least have some idea of the ending.) But the inspiration here was basically twofold: The conscious inspiration for this novel and for Dead Astronauts, my previous novel (which is completely different because that's a phantasmagorical prose poem, and this is an ecological thriller), was, you know… I was staying in upstate New York at Hobart and William Smith Colleges where I was talking to environmental classes, and they were like, ‘We would like more direct literature about this moment we're going through.’ And I was like, yeah that makes sense. I mean, I don't like to be didactic, but are there ways that I can engage more directly? So that's the conscious prompt. And then what I always do is I just think consciously about something and trust my subconscious to do the marinating and everything in such a way that I don't write something didactic. So in this case, with the eco thriller — with Hummingbird Salamander — you know, I had this image in my head of someone receiving a taxidermy hummingbird. Like, the image of a taxidermied hummingbird in this woman’s hand, and then everything expanded out from that. So sometimes you'll have the key idea for a story, and then nothing creates around it, but very soon I had this idea of this paranoid conspiracy world that she would become enmeshed in once she actually tried to discover why she has been given this by a dead eco activist, and what that exactly means. And that, of course, means it's exploring a lot of ecological issues involving, directly, the anchor of the hummingbird (which is extinct), and the salamander, which is something that she is basically tasked with finding, and that might also include in it a clue. So that's basically where it came from. And then, as I always [do], I just hike and walk around and think about a novel, and write down notes, and then put them in a word document for ordering. When I have about 30,000 words or so, that's when I know it's about time to actually start writing a draft. 


(CSA): You mentioned the visit to Hobart and William Smith College, and in the very beginning of this book in the front matter, there's a credit to Dr… I think her name is Meghan Brown Smith —


(JV): Meghan Brown—


(CSA): — Yes! And she created the descriptions of the titular hummingbird and salamander which are fictitious species, if I understand correctly. Can you tell me about that collaboration? About working with an ecologist on this, and how you got what you needed out of that, and what she brought to the creative process?


(JV): Yeah! It was incredibly important! And it came about because of being writer in residence there for a year, and also becoming immersed in a totally different ecosystem; Which made me aware of environmental issues in a way that (oddly enough) when you're so comfortable with landscape and an area, you miss things because they become mundane to you. So it really awakened a lot of things. Talking to those classes, and then talking to Dr. Brown; She took us out on the research vessel, because those lakes up there are big enough that they actually had a research vessel where they were going out.


(CSA): Wow.


(JV): Yeah, it was amazing! So we had this night trip on this research vessel out on lake Seneca, and the other thing that sparked me thinking about all this was just the weird echo of Annihilation, in that it was an all women team of scientists on this vessel, and that Dr. Meghan Brown was doing a lot to really encourage women scientists through the undergrads at the college, and that I thought was really cool. And then we got to talking about the confluence of storytelling and non-fiction, and she had been talking and thinking about ways in which she can include storytelling in her science classes. And that led to an interim project called, “The White Deer Project,” cuz there's this weird genetic strain of white deer in that area that seem almost mythical when you first see them, and you don't realize that they're there. So we did a white deer project where we combined writing flash fictions with research. And then, when it came time to write this novel, I thought: What if the hummingbird and the salamander were actually created by someone else, and I had to react to those details, and couldn't change them? Just like if it was a real world creature. And what would that mean for the plot? And so, Meghan created both of those. You know, you don't know what that's going to mean for a novel in terms of, like, how much are you going to use? Am I going to rewrite this? Even if I don't rewrite the facts, and in actual fact I was just blown away, because the text that you see in the novel is her text. I didn't edit it at all —
(CSA): Which we’ll hear in a little bit, I think. 


(JV): Yeah, exactly. It's pretty amazing. I also didn’t realize that I would use so much of it, but it was so compelling, and I was able to place it in spots where the emotional resonance for the novel is important — including where I finally wound up putting the salamander facts. It became a much larger contribution than I'd even imagined, and then when Meghan read the novel right through, to also give me just her notes in general, she had a huge impact on some aspects of how things were expressed in the ending (without giving away any spoilers); She noted unique aspects of the enzymes and hallucinogenic elements connected with the two creatures that actually became plot elements that I wouldn't necessarily have thought of. So it was pretty amazing all the way around, and I'm so glad that she's also going to be involved in some of the conversations and some of the events.


(CSA): That's awesome! There's that old adage about writing that you take two characters and you put them up a tree, and see what happens, or whatever. And I think there's something really spectacular about doing that with another person who you may not even think of fully as part of your writing process.


(JV): It was eye-opening to me, and it suggested for future novels this idea that sometimes maybe research is not the best answer — maybe some collaboration is. Because if I had created the Hummingbird Salamander: first of all, I probably would have put in details that made them easier to integrate into whatever I thought of as the plot, and what creates interest in narrative for me is where there's a constraint that makes you come up with something better, because you can't work around the constraint, otherwise you have to incorporate it. And then this also expanded outwards so that when it came time to think about the fact checking on wildlife trafficking, I just gave the novel to John Platt who works for the Center for Biological Diversity's Revelator website. He’d done a lot of articles, and I said, ‘Just tear this apart for that.’ And that was much better than going back and doing layered research, because he's the expert. So I do a a lot more of that lately. And then other things, like the fact that Jane (the main character) grew up on a farm. Well, the farm is intentionally dysfunctional and non-typical, so I did some research there, but because it's a-typical, because it's supposed to be a bad example of a farm, it's not like I had to have that kind of detail for that element, whereas if it was a different novel I would have.


(CSA): I'm really struck by something that you said about how in a typical novel, where you are approaching it by doing research, you might adapt or fit the research to your plot and your themes and the way you're writing; Whereas in this sort of collaboration, you are treating it more as a constraint. And that's interesting to me in the light of some of the themes in this book and some of your other writing around the way that we look at animals and the environment; The way that we think of them as humans, and adapt them to our lives rather than adapting ourselves to the places that we live in. I just think that's such a startling contrast, and I wonder if that's something that you thought of as you were going through this process and experiencing the change in your approach?


(JV): Absolutely! Because it's very important that the hummingbird and the salamander have what I would call integrity, and that the details of their lives are extremely factual. One thing I explore (and I know you've been reading Authority) is the absurdity and illogic of the human brain; and we often think we're acting in logical ways when we're not. And so one similarity between Authority and Hummingbird Salamander — probably the only one — is just simply exploring that in the characters. So I'd like the idea of the bedrock of the novel being the … if not… I don't want to imbue it with the nobility, but when Jane describes the migration path that the hummingbird has to go through, and all the obstacles and everything and the fact that this still happens, and that so many birds make it through. I find a genuine emotion in that as well. I wanted that research as an anchor that shines out across the novel, which goes to some very dark places. But for that to be the earnest anchor or bedrock.


(CSA): So you said something earlier about the fear of writing about the present being something that was sort of necessarily didactic, and I think I saw you mention this in some other interviews as well. So I'm curious to hear from you: Where do you think we are in this present moment with respect to the themes of this novel, and what needs to be said about it that you were trying to capture in this book? 


(JV): A book can be in part about solutions, but it can't be totally about solutions — it has to be about characters. And because, again, I don't really believe in the logic of the human mind — especially with regard to how it grapples with something that's abstract and unevenly distributed like climate crisis, and why we need to grapple with that and understand why we react illogically to it, even in some of our solutions. I think that's one thing that the book is meant to be a laboratory of showing how Silvina herself — this person who’s supposed to be an expert — is grappling with it, and flailing at times, and not finding the right solution. Not sure even in the end if there's the right solution. Not sure if there is a solution, or one solution. The ending of the book is not ambiguous in terms of resolution, but it is ambiguous about how I hope the reader feels about what they find out. Because I often have characters to do or say things that I don't agree with, but that need to be somehow part of the conversation. So it's a tricky question to answer, also, before the book comes out; Because usually, after a year or so talking about it and seeing reactions to it, I get a better sense of what the book is about.


(CSA): Well, so maybe I'll tell you a little bit about what the book was about to me. 


(JV): Ok! Thank you!


(CSA): One of the shadow themes I saw in this book was around incentives; The way the world is set up, the way that informs how we live in it, and the way those incentives creep into our attempts to enact our ideals when we're not looking. So I was really curious about that part of it; What incentives you were seeing that were affecting the way that Silvina approached the world. I mean, I think Jane uncovers some of these as she is going through this process of figuring out who Silvina is, and why she might have given her this taxidermied extinct hummingbird. But yeah, I'm curious to have you talk about incentives and how they are compromising the characters in the novel, and how they compromise us in our real world.


(JV): I mean you can argue as to when things started falling apart. I mean, you can argue it started with the invasion of North America, and other places by settlers, from Europe. You can argue Humboldt — Alexander von Humboldt is a naturalist who traveled widely in South America in the 1800s, and he's name-checked quite a bit for things like his idea of total nature. But he documented even back then a lot of destruction of the environment that was unsustainable. So, you can argue back and forth as to when things went really bad. In terms of what you're talking about. in terms of incentives: is it the last 50 years of capitalism gone completely hyperdrive? And that's really what we're grappling with now in terms of: we have this short period to deal with the consequences of that, at the same time we need to think in the longer view what it is that we've been doing that needs to change philosophically. So this incentive thing that you're talking about in the novel, I think it's most alluded to through Unitopia — this pseudo utopia-istic environmental commune or community that Silvina wants to create. And there certainly are aspects of it that aren't touched on in the novel because they're not important to the plot that I then have expanded on in some visuals that will be coming out with the book tour. But by the time Jane gets to it, it's abandoned, and it's clear that it, in part, became a tourist attraction. And that in the process of trying to create it, compromises were made that made it not be the thing it was supposed to be. And so, does Silvina learn something from this? Does this factor into her later plans? Does it mean she goes in a totally different direction? I see it as a pivotal moment (and I see this in the real world too) — Where something gets compromised, and the people who come out of it are either forever jaded and turn away from it, or they use it as an example of how to rebuild better. And then sometimes also, people don't realize that even something compromised, even something that fails, leaves some positive effect on the world. And so capitalism even deforms how we think of activism, because if we're not 100% successful on our bullet points from our management meeting and our mission state, then somehow we failed in our environmental mission; When sometimes we still get somewhere interesting and useful that's a platform for something else. 


So I think that would be the one area where it specifically speaks to that. And then of course there's… what is it in Silvina’s psychology that does this ‘Hail Mary’ thing of involving this outside person? What is it, in terms of her need to connect beyond the other rational elements that leads to them?


(CSA): Yeah, you mentioned Unitopia, and although I felt like it was not physically described in this way, it kept making me think of Biosphere 2. Because there's this great documentary that I think is on Netflix about Biosphere 2 where they talk about, one — that the group of people… The guy who founded it had the history of very idealistic and sort of commune-istic endeavors that he was part of. There was this building an arc, sort of, at some point earlier in his history, and as Biosphere 2 became more and more of a thing, so many of those ideals started to unravel. I think — sorry, I'm going to spoil a tiny piece of the documentary — but for me, one of the big twists in this history that I didn't know about is that ultimately, Biosphere 2… there’s a hostile takeover, and the person who is installed at the front of it is Steve Bannon. of all people.


(JV): Yes! I think I read about that. (Both laugh) That was definitely not a plot twist that I saw coming! Yeah, Unitopia is supposed to evoke that thing, and the actual blueprint is based on Soviet-era Utopian communities; Which, you see the blueprints and they all look so authoritarian that it’s hard to see a utopia in them. Combined with this impulse in the 60s to have environmental communes, almost all of which (you noted) come apart because of egos; Because of basically bad men forming them in the first place, who then pray on their own members, basically. Or become power struck. It was fascinating because I had an early event that previewed Hummingbird Salamander, and all these people were posting about utopian communities they'd heard of, like out in Arizona and stuff, that were so great. And I had to keep saying, or mentally saying to myself: ‘Yes, but: That ran aground on this. Yes, but: this was actually extremely horrific.’ (Both laugh) It's weird how it lodges in people's minds too. Sometimes without the baggage which I find I find quite frankly terrifying.


:::AD BREAK:::


(CSA): If you’re just joining me, my guest today is New York Times bestselling author, Jeff VanderMeer, whose new eco thriller Hummingbird Salamander, is out this month from Ferrar, Strauss, & Giroux (FSG).


This next question is brought to you by the fact that I've been reading Das Capital all 2021, but I feel like we're already in that territory a little. So there's a passage in Hummingbird Salamander that the struck me where Jane is attending the professional security conference, mostly to get to New York so she can talk to a taxidermist—


(JV): As one does.


(CSA): As one does! I mean, really. And in the midst of it she realizes how vacuous her work is at heart and she narrates, “But the system was fixed, and I helped to fix it. What I believed the bulwark or siege defense, morphed into the predatory. I allowed systems to flourish without consideration of people. Efficiency, and especially the word ‘proactive’ lived in our heads always.” And that was evoked for me again when I was reading through your other interviews as research, because there's a line that you said in an interview, where the interviewer asked you about efficiency of process, and you said I'm not a big fan of efficiency when it comes to creative writing. And so I was curious about that word and what it signifies for you, in writing and in the context of where it appears in this book.


(JV): Right. The thing but I try to do as an overlay in the book, too, is that she may have had that revelation of the conference, she may have had that revelation while writing about her experience of the conference. So there's also this overlay of where she's writing from when she does this account. You know, I've had a lot of work experience before I became a full-time writer that made me very jaded, and you probably experienced my autobiography in Authority — (he guffaws) — in a weird way. Like, even inheriting an office from a dead co-worker that I didn't know was dead, with a dead mouse, and a plant. But anyway, efficiency often doesn't actually mean that; In the business world that I work for, and for the software consultants, and working for state Florida departments and whatnot on various projects, it often really more has to do with the appearance of efficiency, the appearance of being logical. And you wind up creating a project that's actually about the illogic, again — human beings. My wife also experienced this, being in the software industry before she retired, where you'd have,like… the simple example is you wind up with a field in a screen when your processing a bill or something that's only there because the person using it needs to have it in that spot; Not for any logical reason, but it fulfills some psychological requirements. So there's that. With regard to the creative process, it's just that you're creating something that has all these layers, hopefully, that building a desk is one thing — It'll have a certain amount of imagination and be its own art form. But, you know, it still requires this thought process, it still requires your process being the thing that gets you there. So, I don't even use like Scribd, or whatever that software is that helps you organize your chapters, because I feel like then somebody else's mind (knowing how software is built, it's built by somebody) is organizing for you. We're saying: ‘These are your options.’ When I write, it's deeply inefficient. You know? Sometimes I'm writing notes on leaves, and the main thing is you learn which leaves are not going to fall apart in your pocket while you're hiking if you run out of paper. Sometimes inefficiency is about: you spend seven years thinking about a novel and you don't start to write it, and then when you do write it, you make a typographical error in the first paragraph that winds up being essential to the plot. So, I actually put a lot of barriers to being efficient in my way. I work in handwritten, I work off of note cards. I appreciate the mistakes that occur. I appreciate, actually, even losing text. I feel like that has some impact on what happens. And then out of this accumulation, then, you begin to become more focused. But again, it's not a business process; Business processes should actually be logical even though they often aren’t (He chuckles). But writing a novel is not like that. 


(CSA): There are several mentions of pandemic and pandemics in Hummingbird Salamander; And I think I would be remiss in this present moment for not mentioning that, and not asking you about it at least a little bit. It's part of the atmosphere, and while I think there's, in the book at least… the link between climate change, ecological disturbance, and pandemics isn't made explicit; it's just part of the background. They are of course connected, and we've been hearing more and more about that this year as we have lived through pandemic ourselves. So I'm curious for you, cuz you were writing this during the pandemic, at least in part. How did living through this experience — How HAS living through this experience that we're still living through, brought on by climate change, affected the way that you've approached this novel?


(JV): I was still rewriting and/or revising, I think through May — which is pretty usual given the fact that it's coming out in April. So usually there's a year after you turn it in to the whole process that it goes through. And then of course I was editing beyond that, after I had my notes from my editor, which is all just to say that: yes, definitely. The pandemic got into the novel, and then also a certain amount of paranoia and isolation. I was very lucky, in terms of the writing process, that I was writing this novel because — I have to admit, that on almost all my other writing, I was completely frozen, I would get frozen because of the news, because of the elections as well, and then get unfrozen. But it would have been a choppy process. But the fact that Jane, during what seems to be alluded to as a pandemic and also environmental emergencies and societal breakdown, is isolated and in rural areas and paranoid, having to be in her mind a lot in the latter part of the novel — and I did write it chronologically. It was extremely helpful, oddly enough, because I just channeled my own paranoia, my own feelings of the needs and stress into it, and so it was oddly therapeutic to be able to do that. I don't think I could have finished it otherwise. I was just lucky that it turned out that that's what I was writing at the time. 


But there's also the issue of distance. For example, you'll notice that there's no president's name listed; there's no keyword in there. Which, once you start to get that close in, all these other things come in with that word that destabilize what you're working on, and it becomes something else. So I had to find the right distance for the pandemic too. And to my mind, it's more or less like the novel starts in our past, moves through our present, and then slightly into our future just a little bit. Basically that corresponds to Jane being more embedded in her workplace and world, and then not being. So that by the time (in my mind) the pandemic really gets going, she's already isolated from the world, which allowed me (just by circumstance) to allude to the pandemic, to have that looming in, but not have it be the central point of the novel. I'm also very wary, sometimes, of being too much in the moment, and then therefore not actually being able to say something interesting about the moment, and just being topical. Which is fine; If it had been a topical novel, if that's what I thought I was going to be, then that's what it would have been. It would have had all that right in your face. But that wasn't what the novel was ever meant to be. And then I was lucky, in that FSG let me edit the novel right up until the time it went to the printers, so there were a couple little details I was able to tweak or make more general or more specific based on where we were in the news cycle to accommodate that and not have been out of date.


(CSA): Well, we've been talking very generally about this book, about half an hour so I think now is a good time to have you read a little bit of it and go ahead and set it up for us first. Let us know what we're going to hear.


(JV): Yeah. Jane’s basically, at her workplace, is a security consultant, and she's received this hummingbird from this dead woman. and she's not (you can tell) not happy with her life. There's some things in her past she hasn’t really come to grips with either, and so it makes it easier for her to fall into researching this as an escape. And she does some research on the hummingbird, to start. Some clandestine research while she's at work, and so that has her thinking about her job and her past. And then also, the facts of the hummingbird — and I should note that all the quotes that are about the hummingbird are texts that Dr. Meghan Brown wrote, which again I think is quite interesting and fairly unusual for a novel.


(He begins to read)


Were companies units or loose, ever-shifting alliances of individuals? Still didn't know. But I'd learned on the farm that animals were not individuals, not persons, but groups. Categories. Mother, father, grandfather told me this, every day, growing up. It was the most constant, repetitive lesson learned from the grown-ups in my family. In both word and action.


This was the way of the world at large, perhaps with more callousness. On the farm — or, at least, on our farm — you respected animals, but they also gave you eggs or milk or meat. Your goats had names, but one day you would slaughter them. You scratched the pigs on the coarse hair of their backs until they grunted with pleasure, you knew their personalities and habits, but then one morning your father would be helping put them in the back of a stranger's truck, and they'd be gone forever.


On top of that, I had a decade of what Silvina called "indoctrination." From raising a daughter who we encouraged to love YouTube videos with cute animals, without once thinking about the context or source. Animated movies where birds talked and smiled like people, and maybe the animal was the villain, or maybe not, but it, too, talked and made faces and in every way tried to be part of the human world. That had distanced me from anything useful I might've known about animals. Something not tested or something foundational where you should seek the exception. Something toxic from the monoculture.


"Using 'us' when thinking about the environment erases all the different versions of 'us," Silvina once wrote. "Many indigenous peoples don't think this way. Counterculture doesn't always think this way...


So maybe at first the frisson of mystery and intrigue came from reading what I'd printed out while idling in the parking garage, doors locked, before heading home. Alert for every possible employee approaching.


"Hummingbirds are aesthetic and aerobic extremists," read one site. "Their tiny bodies hover akin to flying carpets; did one just zip by? Hummers evolved high in the Andes Mountains with progressive colonization of lower altitudes and expanded latitudes, especially in the north, and eventually to the far reaches of Canada and Alaska. They remain restricted to the Americas, with the vast majority of the 300+ species residents of South America."


"Information isn't story," Silvina wrote. "No animal should be condemned to a summary in an encyclopedia." But all I had was information at first. And a dead bird's body. Because that's all she'd given me.


"The naiad hummingbird is of moderate size, with an especially long migration that delights the most diligent of birders across its range. Although difficult to find and observe by humans, the brilliant colors and patterns of the males are adaptations to catch the eye of their mates."


I had a large female specimen, then. Pitch-black. No-nonsense.


"They are fine athletes whose stunt repertoire includes backward flight, treading air, and maneuvering precisely in gusty wind. And whose migration between the Pacific Northwest and Argentina equates to several back-to-back ultramarathons."


I tried to imagine traveling that far as an adaptation, through so many different kinds of terrain. This was an epic journey — and one only allowed due to incredible specializations. The changes a human being would have to undergo to inhabit such places without equipment. Wouldn't they change your point of view, too? Wouldn't you become someone else?


Like many species that have northern-skewed ranges for breeding, the naiad hummingbird is a snowbird and migrates closer to the nexus of hummingbirds in South America. In winters in the Andes (where, of course, it is actually summer), oxygen is limited at these altitudes as well as during the bird's migration; nonetheless, the naiad hummingbird maintains extraordinary metabolic rates that are enabled by adaptations to the hemoglobin protein that binds oxygen to iron. These changes to the group are inducible during their migration and winter in the Andes, but are not present during their summers at lower elevations in North America.


But it wasn't just the journey. The flowers. The nests. All of it, once I had time to really immerse myself. Caught up in a way I hadn't expected, not just because of the mystery. But the data, after all. Who wouldn't be moved by the details? Maybe it was just me, or maybe it was the flush of the first real intel.


Status: Unknown. The last documented observation was in British Columbia. Not just rare, then, but presumed extinct. Last seen in 2007. I felt a pang of emotion, as if this was a twist. But a twist that you could see coming. And after the pang — it took no time at all — that emotion began to recede from me. Couldn't hold on to it. Self-inoculation.


That month the southern white rhino and a species of pangolin had gone extinct. Wildfires in five countries meant animals were crawling to the side of roads to beg people speeding by in cars for water. People were poisoning vultures and shooting bats out of the sky, scared of pandemics. To care more meant putting a bullet in your brain. So, like many, I had learned to care less. Silvina called it, "the fatal adaptation."


Alone with my thoughts, this was all unsettling, destabilizing. Excitement, joy, sadness, unease, in the briefest period. Even now, I can't truly explain the nexus of that, and how it rippled through me.


(He finishes reading)


(CSA): Thank you so much.


(JV): Oh, sure!


(CSA): I really enjoy that passage, and there’s a line in it: “information isn't story,” which I found fascinating in the context of this book, and of your work in general, because it is so grounded in ecological reality, so it always does involve facts and data — which of course Jane would like — but also detailed observations about the natural world. When you're processing that information and turning it into a story, how do you approach it? And how is it different in a story like this one, where the discovery of that information is really an integral part of it, versus some of your other novels where it's more background?


(JV): Well, I’ll just compare and contrast the Hummingbird Salamander and Dead Astronauts — the last novel. Because they both came out of the same impulse of talking to these environmental classes. I mean, at least in part. It really depends on the level of reality which I’m portraying. So, Dead Astronauts is phantasmagorical, surreal; it flips between realities. I have a kind of obligation with, like, a blue fox character — not to get, necessarily, the facts of foxes right, but the cultural associations we bring to them. So that's a different kind of detail,


In Hummingbird Salamander, I was thrilled at the idea of a thriller, because I felt like the very fact that the mystery revolves around so much that's environmental would energize the exposition. So the exposition becomes clues, red herrings, things that have to be sorted through to get to some truth about the mystery. At the same time that you have (even if it's secondary) Jane’s awakening or awareness of environmental issues, because she completely hasn't thought about that. She lives in the suburbs in a way where she hasn't had to think about it. She maybe thought about it when she was on the farm and with that up bringing to some extent, but this is the first time she's really had to grapple with it head on. And I think that's the condition of a lot of us. And it's not, still. And why? Again, it's because climate crisis is unevenly distributed, but what that means is just that the information takes on this supercharged quality and I was thrilled at that idea. I was thrilled at the idea of writing the book where I could directly have put in a paragraph about something environmental, and have it integrated with the plot in that way. And that's why I probably haven't written this direct a book before, because I was searching for the way to do that without being didactic, without being preachy in a certain way.


(CSA): Silvina, who is the woman who gave Jane the hummingbird, and who is sort of alluded to a few times in this passage — She's extremely sensitive to her environment, and particularly light and sound, and that sensitivity significantly informs her worldview. Could I ask you to talk about that, and maybe about why you set up this contrast between her and Jane, who (as we saw in this passage) has developed this fatal adaptation of automatic numbness to ecological collapse.


(JV): Well, I mean there are a lot of different contrasts between them; like Silvina, for all of her activism, she still comes from an incredibly wealthy family, which I think also allows her both to imagine and not imagine certain things because of that. In some ways I feel she still doesn't quite escape that. And Jane comes from a very (what you might consider) lower class family, although she has all the resources of being on this farm being provided for, in some ways. So there's that, which I think actually does feed in, subtly, in the background. Silvina’s sensitivity is, like you said, another contrast with Jane. Jane has other kinds of sensitivities, in part because of where she works. But that also brings up the point where, where possible, I try to draw on the autobiographical, which is to say that, although not to the extent the Silvina does, I have sensitivities to light and to sound that I think are actually a plus sometimes. Sometimes with regard to rewilding ravine, that sensitivity has let me know that animals may be experiencing the same thing I'm experiencing, that someone else who doesn't have those sensitivities would realize. Like including night lights, and whatnot, that really are incredibly bright. LEDs are just very difficult for me. I know they're difficult for a lot of people, but things like that. So I thought that would be an interesting entry point for Silvina in a very different way, because it also mimics, again, what I just said, which is to say that: We travel through a world where we're not necessarily bothered by the sounds of the world that we've created. Like, we either get used to them — I used to live in a house near a four-lane highway, and going back there the other day, I just was astonished at how loud everything was. Cuz living there for 25 years, I had blocked it out. Well, animals may also adapt to this but they come with certain abilities in terms of their senses that make them more fine tuned, some of them. So for some of them, they're moving through a hell of light and sound that we don't even experience. So I thought it was useful for that reason, and I also was thinking how Silvina would become radicalized. I always feel it can be an intellectual thing that gets you involved, and then it lives in your body and viscerally, but sometimes it's because something viscerally happens. In this case, what happens to her in terms of the things coming on in her brain, in terms of how she interprets light and sound, sometimes it's because you literally live next to a sand mine or something, suddenly. That's something coming up in Tallahassee right now: They want to expand sand mining on the south side of town, so it's actually in a residential neighborhood which would mean that those residents would experience 24/7 loud vibrations, truck rumbling, in addition to the sand, you know… basically, the wind taking it and the coating their communities. This is a thing that, depending on where you are and how climate change has come to your door, you’re already experiencing very viscerally. And I wanted that to be an element of Silvina’s radicalization.




(CSA): Well, speaking of her radicalization, there's a line from her in the book that is repeated many times: “We must change to see the world change.” And it's reminiscent of the oft-cited but apocryphal Gandhi quote, which, the way that I've seen it cited is: “We must be the change we wish to see in the world.” But it's also more urgent than that, right? It's about changing ourselves, changing our behavior — not so much embodying change that is happening around us. So tell me about that line and what struck you about it, why you brought it in, and what you're trying to convey.


(JV): It's apologetic to my own condition, which is to say that I feel that, for a long time, there were things I didn't see, and that I had blinders on about various things. And it's not about suddenly becoming part of paranoid conspiracy theories. It's just that, simply, unfortunately, because of capitalism being in the way it is, there's a lot of stuff going on behind the scenes that we don't always see that is absolutely horrifying in terms of how things get done, and so some of that I didn't see. Some of that, my workplace actually revealed to me over time (with state and federal contracts), but there came a moment, like, three years ago where I suddenly started researching native plants — which is separate from the novel in the sense, but it's part of how the landscape came alive to me. Because once you start studying native plants, then you basically start studying things like indigenous land management before the settlers came, and things like that. And so it opens up all kinds of social and cultural things as well, that you may have read an article about, but then suddenly you're dealing with a plant in your backyard that you realize is something that's natural, but also has been part of the ongoing human intervention on the landscape in a positive way. And then the landscape when you're hiking comes alive. So I used to hike and be disappointed if I didn't see a mammal or a bird of note, and now it's like everything around me is of interest. It's almost overwhelming. So there's that aspect of feeling like my own environmentalism has become more complete because of that studying and because of other things, and thinking about how that would transfer into the novel. And I think that's really what Silvina is saying, is that there are so many things we don't notice. In fact, the part of Unitopia that is actually from my own lectures is the long quote that's attributed to the Silvina or whoever created that part of Unitopia, about how if we could see the world in a different way, if we could see through the layers of it, if we could see all of the natural processes that are going on that we’re breaking the links to, would we then break those links? I mean if we were so connected to it that it was painful to see those links broken, would we still do the things we do? Is it simply because, in part, we are not connected enough to the world? And that's where the salamander comes in, too, because the hummingbird and the salamander are so different. The hummingbird suffers attrition because of its long migration, maybe some of the aspects of its diet, in terms of how development wipes that out, the plants out. But the salamander actually breathes it in through its skin. The salamander doesn't really travel that far, but it's so susceptible. It's breathing in pollutants into its skin. If we were that susceptible, would we keep doing it? Even though we are that susceptible, we just… it's so slow motion, or we acclimate to the point of like oh, now 40% of the people in the world have cancer. I wonder how that happens.


(CSA): I read that figure recently and it was shocking to me!


(JV): Yeah, but we acclimate to it: “This is just how the world is. People get cancer.” Not, “Oh, we have crap tons of microplastics in our systems, and all kinds of pollutants!”To the point where if you were to do an autopsy on a person from 300 years ago, and one now, you might be like, what happened??? That's also why the animals are very carefully chosen, even though they're also organic, because I have a connection to salamanders and hummingbirds personally as well so...


:::AD BREAK:::


(CSA): If you're just joining me, my guest today is New York Times bestselling author Jeff VanderMere, whose new eco thriller, Hummingbird Salamander, is out this month from Ferrar, Strauss, and Giroux. 


What makes a story interesting to you when you're writing it?


(JV): There has to be some aspect of discovery. The kind of novel it is determines whether I even have an outline or not. So, like, with Hummingbird Salamander, I knew there were these general progressions that were going to possibly occur. I knew that there were these characters in play. And the thing I thought was the most important was that even with minor characters, I needed to method act those characters in their point of view so it wouldn’t just be scenes where Jane is getting what she needs at every scene, more or less. The discovery, for me, was in building out even the minor characters in a way that sometimes isn't required, frankly, for a novel, depending on what you're writing. Like Dead Astronauts doesn't even… I don't even know what a minor character is in that book. But here it was very important, so I know a lot about the inner lives of, like, Fusk the taxidermist, even though he's only in a few scenes. And so that brought in an element of discovery in terms of Jane moving through this exploration of the mystery. But basically, it's just simply that the interiority of this book is such that there were things I didn't want to know until Jane encountered them. So there were aspects of the mystery where a scene that I wrote would completely change what's going forward to some degree, and what I do in that aspect is, you know, I talked about the endings — Usually, there's three or four different possibilities for how something can end based on what you have presented up to that point. And so I just think about what are the variables? And sometimes you have to scrap everything and come back to it fresh, but usually that's what works. Then by the time you get to the end, you’ve realized what ending makes the most sense. So there's absence of discovery, too. I mean, without going into detail, it was just as much of a revelation for me in some ways to write the final scenes of this book as it is for Jane to discover what she discovers. And then other things happened, like there's some time jumps (without going into detail again) where I thought for sure she would find things earlier, but in actual fact, things happen to get in the way of that. I think you know what I'm talking about in the ending…


(CSA): Oh yeah I know what you're talking about!


(JV): I actually thought the ending would be much sooner than it actually was, but it didn't make sense for, also, the world beyond the novel in a weird way. 


(CSA): You do a lot of research for your books, so I assume that you are reading a lot of non-fiction when you do that. What do you read fiction wise? What are you reading now?


(JV): I'm reading Alexandra Kleeman’s latest novel, which is out in August, and I am afraid the name escapes me, but it's coming out in August and it has an absolutely scathing satire of bottled water and the fetishism of it, with this new project called WTR (without the vowels in it). It’s like water, but slightly better but seems to have this odd effect. And it involves this guy going out to Hollywood to see how the movie based on his book is being made. As you see in the backdrop, this ecological collapse encroaching on the novel. I'm halfway through this novel and I really think it's a brilliant novel on climate change, but also so funny, and so satirical and it's such a great balance to see that along with the psychological reality of the characters. So I'm really looking forward to that coming out. But mostly what I read is… because my wife and I do so many fantasy and science fiction anthologies, I mostly read what you might call contemporary literary fiction, with maybe some surreal aspect or slight weirdness to it. I must admit that I can't really do the “slice of life” relationship novel. That's not really my thing, but any little tweak or quirk on that and I'm in there. And eccentric characters are fine with me.


(CSA): So can you talk about upcoming projects?


(JV): Yes! In addition to Hummingbird Salamander this year, in September, Drawn & Quarterly is going to put out Secret Life, which is an adaptation of a short story of mine set in an office building, where a vine from a houseplant that someone brings in gradually takes over the building. Theo Ellsworth — I just handed the story to him and he's this amazing artist who also does comics — and I just handed the story to him and said, ‘does this look like something that would be of interest?’ And then basically what happened is he handed me back a draft of the graphic novel that he had storyboarded in his head and just drawn out — and it was perfect! I was thinking there would be a step where I would have to write a script (which I hate doing), and all this other stuff, but he just somehow is such a genius, he just did it all in his head and it was perfect. It's actually better than the short story, I think. I think he leaves a lot more room for certain things visually that make sense and I’m really looking forward to having that come out.


(CSA): Well a lot to look forward to for us too! Jeff VanderMeer: Thank you so much for joining me today.


(JV): Thank you for having me.


(CSA): To learn more about Jeff or order a copy of his book, visit JeffVandermere.com. 


Catch Story Behind the Story the first Friday of every month from 5 to 6 p.m. on KSQD 90.7 FM To share your thoughts on this or other shows, drop me a line at Clara@KSQD.org. 


Join me next month for a conversation with the Pushcart Prize nominated writer Muriel Leung about her forthcoming poetry collection, Imagine Us, the Swarm.


The Story Behind the Story is produced for KSQD 90.7 FM by me, Clara Sherley-Appel. Our sound engineer is Lanier Sammons; He also wrote our theme.