‘‘I feel more aligned to naturalists than to fiction writers. Lovecraft would run screaming from the shadow of a mouse! And that’s not my perspective at all. I find the natural world beautiful, not off-putting. Introducing the ‘strange’ element allows for that counterpoint, although it may let some readers deflect from the question with regard to nature. Throughout the books, if you actually read the nature descriptions, most of the wildlife that hasn’t been subverted is just going about its business. (Sometimes I have to make an effort to avoid judgment, with creatures like cockroaches – which I hate.)
‘‘The end of the world is not really the end of the world, and that’s actually a hopeful thing. That may sound dystopian to some degree, but really it’s about humanity getting to a point where we can make significant progress in how we interact with the world. In Authority, some scientists involved with the project wonder, ‘Should we just let this thing happen?’ They find out that there’s no pollution in Area X – it’s all been cleaned out, taken care of. All that’s happening is, if you go in there and you’re human, you’re unwelcome.
‘‘In Authority, the reader’s understanding of those conversations changes, and the discussions take on more weight. In the third book, Acceptance, the understanding changes yet again. Once you’ve read Acceptance, the first book seems completely different, with regard to the character interactions. For this reason, I had to be very careful with the dialogue. It’s intentionally awkward in places, and intentionally not quite in synch in other places. There’s something else going on other than what’s obvious on the surface.
‘‘Later on, there’s some suggestion that the Southern Reach may be using some kind of tech they discovered in Area X, but Authority can seem like a commentary on social media, because we’re all very suggestible. Things posted on the Internet or blogosphere or social media act like mind viruses, basically. Some hit us harder than others – suddenly, for six months, people have some new ideology. Maybe they stick with it, or maybe they don’t, but we can be manipulated. You see a lot of trolls doing that these days. In a way, the hypnosis in the novels is a way of commenting on that.
‘‘Although the books feature conspiracies, I’m not a conspiracy theorist at all. I actually think conspiracy theorists muddy the water regarding the true complexity of situations. Especially now, with social media and some news outlets starting to do joke stories, you don’t just have misinformation or biased points of view; you literally have ‘spam history’ out there! Individuals have to sort through everything and try to figure out what is closest to some kind of baseline reality or truth.
‘‘I did a lot of study of history and historical theory, mostly for my novel Shriek: An Afterword, but it also feeds into these books. We experience too much information, misinformation, and a lot of bias – more so, because a lot of it is very cynically driven. So the way the Southern Reach ‘modulates’ information for the expeditions is, in part, due to trying to figure out if there’s some information in their brains that’s going to affect the outcome, one way or the other, but also the result of the cynicism of just thinking there is no such thing as a real fact, when it comes to history, so we can create or declare our own reality whenever we want to, for whatever purpose we deem fit.
‘‘Of course, in Authority you find they’ve been dealing with this very bizarre zone for 30 years, without obvious progress. What does that kind of failure do to an organization? In addition to the morale falling, a lot of strange practices start to seem logical. Something I find interesting but don’t see enough in science fiction novels is juxtaposing old and new technology. In a lot of agencies, you’ll find them using laptops but they may also still be accessing a DOS database. Especially in the second book, I have a lot of fun juxtaposing things.
‘‘Another recent project allowed me to use the anecdote about how Annihilation came to be, the idea of how we use our subconscious in our writing, Wonderbook: The Illustrated Guide to Creating Imaginative Fiction. A lot of high schools and colleges have added it to their curriculums. It’s got some practical applications for creativity, in addition to being a book about writing, and at first I was wondering, ‘Is it going to reach that audience as well?’ But it has definitely started to do that, and the word-of-mouth is very strong. We have musicians who are using it, since there are diagrams where the fictional process is close to the beats and melodies of composition. There’s a soundtrack being done by a band, based on some of those Wonderbook diagrams. It was reviewed by a ton of places I didn’t expect, like NPR, and I’ve gotten many e-mails from parents who bought it for their teenagers. One writer tells me their five-or six-year-old loves looking at the pictures. (Hopefully, they’re looking at the right pictures.)
‘‘Abrams Images published my Steampunk Bible, and that book did so well that they wanted me to do a writing book. They’re a coffee-table book publisher, and they said they thought there would be a market for a writing book that was visual. I’ve wanted to do a writing book for a long time – not just Booklife, my book about writing careers, but one about the craft and the art of writing. Something clicked when they said that, because until then I couldn’t figure out what would make a book I did unique.
‘‘They just basically gave me a budget and complete freedom: ‘Get your own designer, get your own artist, bring it to us camera-ready. We’ll still do copy-editing on the text.’ What an opportunity! We started out with Jeremy Zerfoss doing the layout and the art. Jeremy is an amazing, protean talent, but the same wild flights of imagination that made the art really stunning meant that we needed a little more structure on the layout. So we brought in John Coulthart (who had done a lot of work for me in the past) to be the designer, and he kind of stabilized things. With the two of them, we got to the place we needed – somewhere between ultra-structured, too text-booky, and too off-the-charts crazy. It was fun.
‘‘They’re teaching with the book at Brown University next semester, which is awesome. I think for a lot of instructors, the key thing about the book is that they’re looking for a way to stimulate their students, and their students are much more visually-oriented than they used to be. They also know (and I know this from teaching the teens at the Shared Worlds workshop) the students may never go on to write science fiction/fantasy, but their entry point into literature is something like Harry Potter.
‘‘We wanted it to be a paperback that anyone could buy. The philosophy behind the text was not to be proscriptive, not to say, ‘You must do it this way.’ A lot of writing books unfortunately codify the writer’s personal experience. Anywhere I thought someone else could say it better, I wanted to have that someone say it. And never try to bullshit. When I wasn’t sure about something, I just said, ‘I’m not sure about the answer. Here are your options.’ That could come across as wishy-washy if you did it the wrong way, but I think it worked pretty well.
‘‘The next book I’m doing is The Steampunk User’s Manual, with my coauthor Desirina Boskovich, out from Abrams in October. It’s kind of pushing the edge on retrofuturism – not really like The Steampunk Bible at all. It’s like a craft book that’s also for people who never wanted to do a goddamned craft in their lives, but would like to see how an impossible craft project can be done. You could build a giant steam-powered penguin after reading this book (if you had the resources); chances are, you won’t. Maybe it’s a little cynical to assume that many people just buy craft books to look at the pictures, but I thought, ‘Everyone is doing these craft books wrong. Some of it should be stuff no one could ever make.’
‘‘As for editing anthologies, Ann and I are doing The Big Book of Science Fiction, for Vintage, covering one hundred years in the space of 800 pages. We’ve found it’s actually easier to do one large book than three or four smaller ones. Although, given how busy I was on the Southern Reach, the credit on our previous anthology, The Time Traveler’s Almanac, should probably be ‘by Ann VanderMeer, despite Jeff.’
‘‘I do have an idea for another Ambergris n
ovel, but probably as a graphic novel, because what I want to do is explore the city about 20 or 30 years after the events in Finch, and do it from a lot of different character points of view. I think that makes more sense either as a movie or a graphic novel. I might wind up mapping out the graphic novel, then finding someone to collaborate and just do the script. I don’t know. But it doesn’t feel like a novel; it feels like something visual, where I can dip in and out of character points of view almost continuously without having to worry about having to throw a scene out, like you would in a novel.
‘‘I can do sparse prose. You see in Authority (not so much in Annihilation), that I’ve gotten more comfortable with driving scenes almost exclusively through dialog – something which I didn’t do much of in the Ambergris books. But these new Southern Reach books are set in the real world, so there’s less I need to describe. I also did the script for ‘The Situation’ (the web comic that Tor.com ran, based on my short story), so that gave me a little taste of the approach.
‘‘I am also working on a novel called The Book Murderer, which I’m having a lot of fun writing – though I don’t know if I will survive its publication, because (in altered form) it’s pretty much every horror story I’ve ever heard of or experienced in the publishing industry over the last 30 years. It’s about this guy who has the idea that he’s going to destroy every book in the world. He knows it’s impossible, but if he were to destroy just a certain number of books he’ll feel like he’s made his mark. He plays headgames with writers on the Internet, and he becomes an assistant to a writer on a book tour so he can learn what the enemy is up to.
‘‘I’m also working on a novel called Borne, which is kind of like if you wrote a Godzilla/Mothra movie but it also had a Chekhov play going on in the foreground. (Before you ask, I don’t care about the new Godzilla movie, but if there was a giant Chekhov movie I would go to see that.)’’
–Jeff Vandermeer
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Kevin Wayne Jeter was born March 26, 1950 in Los Angeles. He attended California State University of Fullerton with classmates Tim Powers and James P. Blaylock, where he also met his wife Geri, and graduated with a degree in sociology. During the ’70s he became friends with his literary hero, Philip K. Dick. Since then he has led ‘‘the ramshackle writer life,’’ residing up and down the West Coast until moving to Ecuador a few years ago.
His first published novel was Seeklight (1976), followed by Dreamfields (1976), Morlock Night (1979), and Soul Eater (1983). The first novel he actually wrote, Dr. Adder, appeared in 1984, followed by sequels The Glass Hammer (1984), Dr. Adder in Death’s Arms (1987), and Alligator Alley (1989, co-written with Ferret). With Infernal Devices (1987) Jeter became a pioneer of the steampunk subgenre – a term Jeter coined in a letter to this very magazine that same year. Farewell Horizontal (1989), Madlands (1991), and Noir (1998) are SF thrillers, but he turned increasingly to horror with titles like Mantis (1987), Dark Seeker (1987), In the Land of the Dead (1989), The Night Man (1990), and Wolf Flow (1992). He wrote four-volume comic Mister E (1991), and wrote many novelizations in the ’90s, including Star Wars and Star Trek volumes, plus three novel sequels to the film Bladerunner, based on Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
After a hiatus of some years, Jeter has recently returned to the field with Fiendish Schemes (2013) from Tor, a sequel to Infernal Devices. He began self-publishing the Kim Oh thriller series with Real Dangerous Girl (2013), with four volumes out so far.
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‘‘Fiendish Schemes is the long-delayed (as they tell me) sequel to Infernal Devices, so I’m picking up the steampunk thread that so many others have done fabulous things with. I jumped back into that pool and am having a fine old time.
‘‘When I wrote Morlock Night I hadn’t traveled to England. Before I wrote Infernal Devices, I managed to get to London and I could see all the things I got wrong, of course, but gratifyingly there were at least a few things I got right. In terms of influence, I’ve always been a stodgy old person (even when I was young) and so I read a lot of Victorian literature. Not just the obvious stuff, Dickens and that sort of thing, but the more obscure people, like George Gissing. He was a literary writer, a friend of H. G. Wells. He’s just about the grimmest writer you could ever imagine. There are a bunch of his books I’m glad I read, but would never read again because they’re so depressing. There were also great Victorian thriller writers like Harrison Ainsworth, probably best known for his novel Rookwood. He was the Stephen King of his day in terms of writing pulse-pounding thrillers. I always recommend people read Harrison Ainsworth. I’m also a one-man anti-defamation league for Lord Bulwer-Lytton. A lot of people make fun of Bulwer-Lytton, but he was actually a good writer, except for his poetry, which is dreadful. His novels are quite good. I think he’s unfairly ridiculed, so I’m constantly recommending him. Of course, people just assume that means I’m as crazy as he was.
‘‘People sometimes ask about myself and Tim Powers and Jim Blaylock all being there at Cal State Fullerton. In some ways there was a certain reactionary streak on our parts, in that we were interested in reading stuff that other people turned up their noses at. The three of us, even though we seem very mild-mannered in general demeanor, have this strong contrarian streak. Jim and Tim especially were reading all sorts of old poetry, but we were all reading Edwardian and Victorian novels. Maybe we actually read too many of them.
‘‘We discovered that the disparagement of a lot of the Edwardian and Victorian writers started with the Bloomsbury group. The Bloomsbury group were pretty snotty towards a lot of the old Edwardian and Victorian writers, especially towards a onetime famous writer named Mrs. Humphrey Ward. She outsold Dickens for a while. Wonderful writer, but the Bloomsbury group and especially Virginia Woolf and her associates just ridiculed her. The problem was that writers like Mrs. Humphrey Ward and George Gissing wrote what we now think of as social novels, where they talked about the great issues like poverty, class divisions, and stuff like that. The Bloomsbury group turned away from the preoccupation with social issues and ridiculed writers who talked about them. They focused on the internal lives of their characters, so you get novels like Mrs. Dalloway and To The Lighthouse. They had a lot of introspection, and certainly there’s some value to that, but at the same time they set themselves apart from the great social writers like Elizabeth Gaskell and Mrs. Humphrey Ward. A lot of people think the international copyright laws between the United States and Britain were to protect Charles Dickens’s works, but they were actually more to protect Mrs. Humphrey Ward’s than anyone else’s. The problem was that Mrs. Humphrey Ward, despite her incredible accomplishments and the many charitable things she did – I think there might still be Mrs. Humphrey Ward’s homes for unwed mothers in London – the problem was she was just about as politically incorrect as you can imagine.
‘‘She’s generally credited with delaying women’s suffrage by about five to ten years. She was so well-known and such an important writer that she could single-handedly delay women getting the vote. Virginia Woolf and her crowd were pretty annoyed by that. Mrs. Humphrey Ward had a theory that the role of politics, especially in Britain, was to support the British Empire. And the British Empire was essentially a mechanism for going to other people’s countries, grabbing all the good stuff, and bringing it back home to England. She said only men were cruel and rapacious enough to be trusted with that job. Women were too kind and softhearted. So it was better for cruel, stupid, dumb men to be sent off into the world and bring the good stuff back to England. Women would have had too much sympathy with the people whose goods they were taking and they wouldn’t have done it as efficiently. This was a hardhearted and unflinching analysis of the differences between men and women back then. I don’t think she anticipated the degree to which women could become like men and become as mean and rotten as men are. By golly, we’ve broken through that barrier – and thus we got to Margaret Thatcher and women like that.
&n
bsp; ‘‘I grew up in a blue-collar household. I had a lot of aunts, and they were incredibly accomplished at whatever they put their minds to. They were hard-headed women, my mother and all of her sisters. As far as a political agenda, I don’t think I have that – I just have memories of how incredibly accomplished and busy and always doing stuff in the civic sphere all of these women were. It’s almost autobiographical to talk about any strong female characters that might be in my books.
‘‘The characters in Infernal Devices use a machine that gives them fragmentary glimpses of what will happen in the future; that’s something I return to in Fiendish Schemes, only now I have a lot more hindsight about what the future turned out to be, from the perspective of the Victorians. Infernal Devices was designed to be a lighthearted comedy, with a sad-sack central character who gets swept up in events. Fiendish Schemes turned out a little deeper and darker because of that additional hindsight I have now about what the future became. What I didn’t have a clear picture of when I wrote Infernal Devices so many years ago, but other writers have picked up on since, was the ability to use this crazy anarchic ahistorical approach that steampunk has become, and do some really interesting things with it. In a lot of ways, I’m influenced by the younger steampunk writers who came along after me and by what they’ve accomplished, taking this crazy notion and doing anarchic things with it. That’s been exciting.
‘‘Every time you read another writer you haven’t read before and they turn out to be so astonishingly good, like so many of the new steampunk writers, it’s like, ‘Damn it.’ I had a joke, after reading some books by Tee Morris & Philippa Ballantine, that their stuff is so good I want to kill them. Tee Morris posted on Twitter, ‘Oh, my God, K. W. Jeter wants to kill me!’ It’s just about at the point where I’m going to propose we institute a senior division for people like myself, like they have in golf. As our meager talents fade even more, we’re to be given more allowance. We’re allowed to move the ball closer to the hole.
Locus, July 2014 Page 2
