Connections with Evan Dawson
Jeff VanderMeer on fiction, imagination and our uncertain future
9/25/2025 | 52m 6sVideo has Closed Captions
Jeff VanderMeer on fiction, fear, and the future—and why stories matter more than ever today.
Jeff VanderMeer, known for his wildly imaginative fiction and the novel behind *Annihilation*, joins us to explore how storytelling helps us process an uncertain future. With dystopian themes and blurred realities, his work offers more than escapism—it’s a mental workout for navigating our times. He shares thoughts on creativity, anxiety, and why fiction matters now more than ever.
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Connections with Evan Dawson is a local public television program presented by WXXI
Connections with Evan Dawson
Jeff VanderMeer on fiction, imagination and our uncertain future
9/25/2025 | 52m 6sVideo has Closed Captions
Jeff VanderMeer, known for his wildly imaginative fiction and the novel behind *Annihilation*, joins us to explore how storytelling helps us process an uncertain future. With dystopian themes and blurred realities, his work offers more than escapism—it’s a mental workout for navigating our times. He shares thoughts on creativity, anxiety, and why fiction matters now more than ever.
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Learn Moreabout PBS online sponsorshipFrom WXXI news this is connections.
I'm Evan Dawson.
Well, our connection this hour was made when an author was traveling through the landscapes of his native northern Florida and later had a strange dream.
He woke up with the seed of an idea that eventually became one of the most successful recent works of American fiction, a book called annihilation.
It would eventually be the inspiration for a movie starring Natalie Portman and Oscar Isaac, among others.
The author is Jeff VanderMeer, and he has one of the most inventive minds in American fiction.
His books have taken us into dystopian futures, into dark places with strange forces and blurred lines between reality and fantasy.
But when you hear Jeff speak, he's careful to differentiate his work.
Some is not necessarily fantasy, but is more magical realism.
And that matters because on one side is Kafka and the other might be Harry Potter.
Jeff's more Kafka that matters, at least in the mind of many readers.
VanderMeer also writes nonfiction.
He's done reporting for The New York Times and many other publications.
And he says he's really always been writing about climate change in one form or another.
His own writing has considered our future in many ways wrapped around the effects of climate change.
The Gulf oil spill in real life is an event that seeped into some themes of his work, just for starters.
Jeff VanderMeer is first and foremost highly entertaining, and to my ear, his ideas make me wonder if this is just another case of science fiction warning us about our own real future.
But Jeff prefers fiction to carry at least a grain of hope, not just doom.
And he's going to deliver the 2025 Walter Harding Lecture at Suny Geneseo today.
His long resume includes works like hummingbird, salamander, The Bourne novels Born the Strange Bird, Dead Astronauts.
We mentioned annihilation, which was part of the series with authority and acceptance and absolution.
And we welcome Jeff to the program today to talk about a long list of things I hope this hour.
Jeff VanderMeer.
Great to have you.
Thank you for making time for us.
Thanks for having me on the show.
The lecture, by the way, this afternoon, 415 in the Doty Recital Hall.
The Harding lecture at Suny Geneseo is free and open to the public.
First of all, I have to tell you, I already have a few emails from your fans, and this will not surprise you, but they are very excited that you're here.
They're here, they're excited.
You're on the program today.
They're excited you're at Suny Geneseo.
You know, I imagine when you kind of go to the grocery store or the some people don't know yet, but the people do know you love your work.
Has it gotten weirder or better over the years in any way like that?
I've been kind of blessed with having, fans that are really committed to the books and really get something out of them, something personal.
And and are, are really sweetly polite and and endearing in person.
So I, I, I have a I've only really had really nice interactions.
Every once in a while, it's more that I get an email from someone who's like, in 1979, I dreamed the whole plot of your book.
What'd you write about for me?
Or I get someone who's convinced that carnivorous plants in North Florida are actually a, are hiding, an extraterrestrial, invasion.
And I got my writing an annihilation wrong because I got the aliens wrong.
Okay.
But actual fans on the street, you know, and I've been splitting my time between, Portland, Oregon, which is actually a hotbed for for my readers.
And Tallahassee, which is another op ed, have been, you know, really wonderful and, often creative in ways that, allow me to include them in some of my projects.
Well, you have said that we cannot live forever the way we live now.
And one interesting idea is that you think there are people who consider climate change to be real, but also decades away, part of the future as opposed to happening all around us right now.
I wonder what your work's role is in helping people see that.
Well, I mean, it is true.
It's unevenly distributed.
So someone might read a novel like born, which is about a kind of burnt out city of the future that's, you know, in a desert that used to have water and people are just scraping by and and to some people, that's a post-apocalyptic future.
To some people, that's now right now, for various reasons, and, and so, you know, sometimes you can use a little bit of distance by using an element of the speculative to maybe make visible something that's invisible or to maybe just simply, you know, make that statement.
You know, this seems like it's speculative, but it's actually kind of real life.
You know, maybe the biotech that I use in born is not something that exists, but the actual situation is something that people have to go through today.
So there's that and then there's also, I think the more important thing other than like, trying to extrapolate, which I think can be a fool's game given the way reality is so splintered right now, but to kind of just convey the psychological reality of what it's like to live in a situation, you know, and I think novels can do that really well, because what they do is they put you inside a character's head, you know, and make you experience what they're experiencing.
And as for, like, how we can't go back to the way we are now.
You know, like, I read one post-apocalyptic novel where at the end, they were all joyous because it looked like they could drive SUVs again.
And I just thought that was demented and ancient.
It didn't make any sense.
You know, it's like, who is this writer?
So.
So I do push back against that kind of impulse because I feel like it's not escapist.
I think it's unrealistic.
Well, and yeah, I am curious to kind of connect an idea that I heard you talk about in one presentation with some of the really inventive parts of your work.
You've said that it's important that philosophy and science are embedded in fiction in some way, and you prefer philosophy and especially science, to be incorporated organically.
I want to explore what you mean by organically, because I'm wondering if you mean, you know, realistically, you know, sort of conforming to the laws of science as we know them or in some other form?
Yeah.
Well, I mean, I think it just depends on each individual novelist.
I tend to be an absurdist and surrealist, but I want some underpinnings to be real, like the psychological reality of the characters and what I mean by the science coming in organically.
You know, one great example is in annihilation.
You know, you have this biologist who's the main character, and I thought about her a lot, and I thought, wow, she's actually not a great field biologist.
Like every project she's ever done, she's deviated from the actual task at hand.
She's used unorthodox, measures.
And so that was kind of my into the character, but also my into the science.
And then in other books, I often have bits of philosophy, in conversation where, it's sometimes the character you don't like very much that says the thing that's true, or the thing that I think is true.
And so you kind of muddy the waters.
And then you also kind of muddy the philosophy, because I was just talking today to someone about nihilism and how the term has become kind of, devalued pop culture in ways that don't actually fit what Neil ism was supposed to be.
But that's the way that the world works.
So so you also kind of have to take your philosophy and think, you know, how does it get strained through the popular imagination?
How to how does your average reader think about this, and what do they think terminology means?
And I think that, you know, novels, in addition to everything else, are kind of laboratories of ideas.
You can try things out.
You know, Hummingbird Salamander deals a lot with eco terrorism and kind of the implications of it.
And, you know, that's what a fictional situation can kind of do.
Let's do a little digression that I wasn't planning on.
And by the way, I don't know if I've been pronouncing it.
I say nihilism, is it nihilism?
I think I heard, I think I heard, Jeff Bridges and Big Lebowski say nihilist man, and I've just been saying nihilist ever since.
But, you know, you're probably right.
You know, the thing about me is that at an early age, I took the Oxford English Dictionary and I just like learned as many words in it as possible.
That.
But I never heard anyone say them.
Right.
So I still have this thing where every once in a while I mispronounce words because, they're not conversational words, you know?
You know, I trust you over me for sure.
I trust you over me for sure.
So.
But but how do you define that as a term?
It's interesting that you you talk about how maybe the public understanding of what that means when there is political forms of it, there are sort of cultural forms of it.
We talked about it last summer in this city.
It's a very dangerous force for kids growing up feeling.
Yeah, I think of it as a sense of meaninglessness, but I would love to hear from your take on what it means.
Well, I think I come down on the, the, the kind of popular interpretations and, and, derivations of it now where it's no longer like a discrete thing that that has a pass to it.
It's, it's literally the thing that we're experiencing from certain extremists, you know, and it's kind of like to understand them, we have to understand what it means to them.
And, you know, it's the same thing with the you mentioned magic realism before, you know, magic realism has a real specific Latin American context, and I tend to adhere to that.
But at the same time, a lot of people generally think of magic realism as a certain kind of contemporary fantasy.
So, you know, you have to, I think, in a way, give up on the original definitions of things like even the term sci fi.
When I was growing up, it was science fiction, and sci fi was something you said if you were being kind of derogatory and then suddenly it was the thing everyone was saying, because science fiction kind of became a pop culture term.
So, I guess I'm less interested in the origins of the term than I am and what it means now and how people transmit it, so to speak, as is like, you know, a mind virus, so to speak.
Well, let me get back to your your own thoughts on how you connect, maybe science and what you're trying to think about in real life to your work.
And you've you got so many family connections I didn't know about to science.
Your dad, an entomologist and research chemist.
Your stepmom, one of the world's foremost researchers in lupus.
Your mom was a biological illustrator.
Sister works in environmental science.
Your daughter.
How has that informed your work?
Well, I mean, I've already always been surrounded by scientists.
I've always been surrounded by the lives of scientists.
And, you know, the thing that's interesting is that in terms of fictional narrative, the lives of scientists can be very messy.
So, like, I remember my dad's favorite lab as being a hotbed of ambition.
And people scrambling to kind of, you know, reach the top over each other.
And, in fact, there's characters in authority, the second southern reach, both that are based directly on people in my dad's lab, you know, changed enough that there's just no issue there.
But but that's what I remember is that there's this pursuit of something that is empirical.
But getting there and who it's strained through makes a huge difference on just how objective it is.
You know, I go back to, you know, what may be a very cliched study now, but a study showing that because it was mostly men, who were studying the relationship between the sperm and the egg, in human reproduction, they, you know, gave you this kind of storyline or narrative that it was the sperm that was the active participant.
And in actual fact, that interaction is much more complex.
And there's a lot of other things going on.
So, you know, I, I'm very interested in not just science, you know, getting the facts right when I use facts, but also the blurring, you know, how the blurring occurs because it's always coming through some human perspective.
And that's kind of where story lives is in those contradictions, you know, and the difference between different applications of different people's imaginations because the other thing that I really think, drives the world is basically at a certain level of hierarchy, we have people with good or positive or benevolent imaginations attempting to to change the world or, or rework it in their vision or keep it the way it is.
And then we have people with less useful and let's say, actually malevolent imaginations trying to do the same thing.
And that that also is where narratives lives.
I'm curious to know how your readers react to some of the science and some of the the rules in your various works.
I think of when I was in college, when the new Star Wars trilogy comes out, the amount of friends in my dorm who were so upset about the idea of science are like, this is the dumbest.
That's not realistic.
You get a chlorians like, that's the whole thing.
And I'm like, wow, that's a really that's a very visceral reaction, you know, to a work of fiction.
But fans can have very visceral reactions.
So where how, how much room do you think you have as a fiction writer to to bend some of those rules?
It really depends on the the tone and texture of the fiction.
So in Bourne, you know, it's kind of a science fantasy in that I'm trying to get people to believe in a giant flying psychotic bear.
Right.
And annihilation, it's a slightly different kind of threshold for belief or disbelief.
So how do you approach those things?
Really determines whether people are going to follow you or not.
And you can do almost anything if you find the right approach and the right, Narrator.
But you know, it just depends too, because on annihilation, for example, there is a mistake where it said poisonous snakes, not venomous snakes.
And most of the feedback I got from readers directly when the when the book came out was from, people who had pet snakes, who were absolutely just so irritated that I said poisonous, not venomous, whereas field biologists were like, yeah, we interposed the terms all the time.
We forget, you know?
So it was kind of an interesting cultural experience to to get 17 or 18 emails in a row from people who had pet snakes and then having to track down the typo through all these foreign editions and try to, you know, stamp it out so that I wouldn't keep getting these emails.
If the field biologists are good with it, then why are you worried about the pedantic people who have snakes at home?
Well, because I only heard from the field biologist later when, because of annihilation, I began being invited by science departments and things like that.
So?
So that was another kind of interesting feedback loop, because I would then get invited by science departments.
I would be steeped in different kinds of science, and then things like hummingbird, salamander, other kinds of books would come out influenced by the fact that annihilation had been successful.
And I'd gotten these invites.
But, by the way, what's your verdict?
Is medical science.
Was that just a dumb and lazy like de Ex Machina or whatever that term is?
You know, honestly, I can't even remember what those are.
My first thought was just that regardless of how ridiculous it is, I like baby Yoda and The Mandalorian, even though the show itself is is kind of subpar sometimes.
So I may not be the best witness because I will respond to a particular type of, thing in a show, even if I don't like the show off.
So, Wow.
Well, I want to talk a little bit about, your views on the notion of, and how some readers might think your work tends to be dark, and you have said that you're not a fan of fiction that is totally hopeless.
Why is that?
Well, because I don't like monotone in fiction.
So, you know, sometimes, and it can be ameliorated a lot of different ways sometimes, like in, you know, I wrote these books about a fantasy city called, ambergris.
They're very dark, but the city itself was very like, you know, lit up.
The architecture was kind of bright and fascinating and interesting and, and and the culture there was so, so the backdrop was kind of not as depressing as some of the subject matter of the stories.
But monotone is a killer, I think, for reader interest and my own interest in fiction.
And then another killer is a lack of sense of humor.
You know, I really, truly believe, even if it just kind of comes in at the edges in a serious work.
If I don't see that the writer has a sense of the absurd in the world or a sense of humor, I probably am not going to read them again.
Because I feel like they don't have a true complete vision of the world or worldview.
And and in part, that's because humor often deals with really, you know, serious topics.
If you look at any stand up comedians work, you know, if you actually look at the subject matter, it's usually pretty serious.
And they're using humor to kind of get at some truth or some understanding of that, that situation or, you know, like triage doctors and nurses who use dark humor to kind of get through the day.
So I always try to find where the humor lies.
So, like in authority, the second book, which is a lot of office bureaucracy, the humor is in the absurdity of all of these interactions and the absurdity of the bureaucracy of the agency itself.
And in Bourne, the humor is in the way that the the biotech name Bourne kind of grows up and and tries to learn about the world and doesn't it doesn't have the words.
So, you know, seeing a ferret and calling it a long mouse or, you know, things like that, you know, and I think that's indicative of how people are even in extreme situations, you know, you don't just you still find ways to laugh about things.
You still find ways to, to to make human connections and so on some level, too, I think, you know, and I've said this before, so I don't think it's controversial and it's kind of punching up, but like Cormac McCarthy's The Road is really boring to me.
Whereas Blood Meridian is not.
And there's a big difference in style and tone between the two.
And and the Road to Me reads is very monotone.
So when, you know, a lot of people love it, when you encounter works that are relatively humorless, do you think that they carry a tone of sort of self seriousness that is too too much?
Yeah.
I just I just think that, yeah, I mean, it can do that too, because sometimes, I convey the, the most serious ideas and the more humorous scenes, they're scenes in authority where they're talking about linguistics in ways that are kind of absurdist, but also it's it's giving you a lot of information, but in theory, it's an entertaining conversation.
So I am also thinking about the fact that, you know, in some speculative fiction and especially you might have you might have to be inventive about how you get across ideas.
Because I personally want them to, to live in the reader's mind, to kind of live in their body.
I don't want it to be something where they kind of glance off of them in the book because of the way that they're presented.
I think there are times where works like yours seem, at first glance like entirely impossible or out there and then you you start thinking about the the world we're living in now.
And you've referenced, for example, the Gulf oil spill that, until you mention this, I didn't realize that there was some thought that it could go on for 100 years, you know, uncounted, which is just that, to me, seems like science fiction.
That is remarkable to think about something like that.
How often are you looking for the events of the world around you and looking either subtly or not so subtly weave them in?
Yeah, I think, mostly I'm just trying to, you know, go with what seems organic and from the heart.
So I'm not really looking to be topical.
But I, you know, sometimes that's that's not true, though.
Like, I have a novel called Finch, again, set in the city of ambergris, where there's an occupation and that was a deliberate attempt to find a distancing mechanism to write about my feelings about the Gulf War.
In addition to some other, other issues about, like, the police state and things like that.
But, and I couldn't write about it directly.
It'd be kind of presumptuous.
You know, there are a lot of Iraqi novelists writing about that same situation themselves.
But finding that distance of, like, a different context is, is is kind of similar to and why I like fantasy and science fiction sometimes is it's similar to an autobiographical novelist who they just need time to think about what's happened to their life before they can write that autobiographical novel.
And sometimes the fantastic or science fiction element, the changing of the context does allow me to be topical, but any time I am topical, I'm also thinking about I really like novels that you can still read in 30 years, and even if they were topical, they they're actually still relevant and they don't seem dated.
So, you know, I would never mention a particular political figure in a novel, because then all the associations we have today with that figure come into the reader's mind.
And maybe I don't want those all there, but I want the basic situation to be there and something to be laid bare, made visible by the fact you're not thinking about that particular politician.
And the same thing for for other situation, today.
But then, you know, like the Gulf oil spill was just very organic.
It's just simply that I think my subconscious came up with the idea of area X, this kind of enclose thing of a natural area, as a way of protecting it from that kind of stuff.
Because you're right, we did, you know, you know, commentators were saying this might go on for 20, 30, 40 years.
I know that also laid bare another universal thing, which is that there are, like oil spills on land, for example, in, like Nigeria and, and other places that are still ongoing.
You know, there's some in North America, too, I think, where there's constant spills and we just don't don't think about them because they're not as dramatic, you know, so so there's that as well.
I'm always thinking about what is the more universal topicality of, of a subject we're going inside the mind of, one of the great fiction writers in this country, Jeff VanderMeer.
He's delivering the 2025 Walter Harding Lecture at Suny Geneseo this afternoon.
And that's going to take place at 415 in the Doty Recital Hall.
That is a lecture that is free and open to the public.
And, in just a few minutes, I'm going to start reading some listener feedback.
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Have a call from Rochester.
2639994.
I got just a couple more that I want to hit.
And then I'm going to turn over to listeners in a moment here, Jeff, and I apologize in advance on this one, because my guess is this is something you probably asked about a lot these days, but it is in the world of science fiction I feel is very futuristic to me, and yet it is very present.
And one of the conversations we've been having in the last month is where we draw the line on the creation of art, where I can either assist or do the work.
So, for example, we had a panel of musicians last week who talked about if I've got a chorus and a verse, but I can't finish a song, and I've had writer's block for years, I could put this in sono and sono will finish it for me, and then I could put it out there and tell people it's my song.
If I have 8000 words of a novel, but not 80, I could put it in and they'll.
The more of a prompt you get, the more of a maybe a nuance to work, so to speak.
You can get from AI.
Are you good with any of that?
I mean, like, where are your lines on this stuff?
Yeah.
I mean, you know, for very deliberate reasons.
The most advanced thing that I use is word, and I mostly handwrite, and I do that because I don't want other systems imposing their point of view on me.
And in any software program you use, anything you use of that nature is still imposing a point of view.
No matter what you feed it.
For example, that's why I don't use Scrivener, which a lot of writers use to organize their novels, because it's still giving you a set number of, you know, presets or presumptions in terms of how you organize stuff.
And I feel that, ultimately begins to limit your options.
Then there's the issue with generative AI that it's theft.
It's just outright theft.
You know, and you can see that from the lawsuits and the settlements that are beginning to, to come out.
And then also, you know, it robs, you know, like I've seen some writers say, oh, I might use this for transitions between scenes.
Well, you know, those, you know, just to give that give you an idea of the complexity of just that one issue, the way that you cut scenes, where you begin, how you end, you know, can change the reader's perception of whether you're reading, a genre novel, so to speak, or a mainstream literary novel, whether you're, you know, it can it can change a perspective, a perspective on characters.
There's literally thousands of ways that you can you can transition.
And so learning that skill is actually part of becoming a novelist.
And if you like, farm out some of this stuff, you know, it's just lazy.
I'm sorry.
You know it.
You either do it yourself, and, and limit the number of ads that you have.
Or I personally, as a reader, just don't.
I'm not interested in it because I don't really feel like I'm hearing from you.
And so there's there's all of these decision making.
There's the fact that generative AI is incredibly stupid.
In addition to being theft, it takes a lot of resources to, to, to use.
So, yeah, maybe you'll get that thing as a musician, but you'll wind up like, you know, draining.
I don't know, you know, 100,000 gallons of water in the meantime, you know.
So is that a trade off you want just so you can get that chord progression?
I think that that's that's really kind of deranged.
So, you know, if it became a situation where it didn't violate copyright, where the resource exploitation was not the same, I would say it could still be useful.
You know, it could potentially be a tool, but it's not one that I will ever use.
And at the same time, I'm not a Luddite.
You know, I, I'm very active on social media, and I do a lot of other things that have to do with modern technology.
But I'm pretty adamant about this.
In fact, if anyone on Facebook uses generative, I block them immediately.
Wow.
No.
So.
Okay, so I want to make sure I understand a couple things here.
First of all, I think it's really interesting you bring up the energy resource use here because that is the one thing that almost never comes up in the conversations we have, which, you know, so I think it took 5 or 8 years when we were talking about cryptocurrency for people to realize what is Bitcoin mining doing with energy.
And I think that's starting to happen with AI, but that's not at the forefront of most of the conversations.
Most of the conversations are culturally.
Is this synthetic art?
Is it real art?
And so when you talk about theft, I want to make sure I understand what you're saying.
I think what you're saying is we can't exactly know.
Even the creators of most I can't tell you why it took Jeff VanderMeer 5000 words and turned it into 50,000.
The other 45,000 words, where did it come from?
They probably can't perfectly trace that.
But we do know that it is drawing from existing material written by and created by artists and human beings, and just the fact that it is using that material is a form of theft is that it's a it's a copyright.
It's a it's a copyright violation.
It's a for it's also a theft of labor because literally they're drawing they're feeding all of this material, including my own novels into their, their I yeah, you know, whatever it is, in order to, to get something to come out and that's even more, visible obviously on the art side, you know, artists can actually trace their work.
Some artists have actually said, look at this piece of art that this person generated.
You can see my signature in the corner of it, because I put it in in such a way that if it's used an eye and there's a little piece of it left, it'll show up.
This is literally theft.
And it's not just theft of copyright.
I know there's some people who have a debate about whether copyright should be in place as long as it is, you know, 76 years or whatever it is.
But it's theft of labor.
And, you know, if it happened in any other context, we would see that more directly, you know, if it was directly like, you know, taking away, a plumber's livelihood or a roofers or something like that, we would understand exactly what we're looking at.
But because in general, I think we've kind of devalued the creative arts as, like, labor.
You know, we don't necessarily see that.
And also because of how well wired we like the next shiny new thing, just like magpies.
And so we don't really want to question where it's coming from.
You know, we also need to question our energy usage when it comes to things like literally using social media and stuff like that.
But Bitcoin and generative AI are much higher.
As I understand it, drivers of energy loss, right now.
So you could have a situation where you ironically switch to solar, but you're still using so much energy and you're using so much ground water that you're kind of you're kind of in trouble anyway.
So, you know, these are all things that, that, you know, art shouldn't be hidden costs, but they should be visible.
You know, they should be really pretty obvious.
You know, there should be any accountant should be able to tell you that this is an actual literal, you know, loss leader, so to speak.
And then also generative AI is, like I said, extremely stupid, and inaccurate and, doesn't produce good results.
So in some ways, you know, beyond the those issues, I'm like, go ahead and be a mediocre artist by using AI.
Congratulations.
That's what you want to do.
I'm not going to buy it.
And I and I also think that there's a bubble there, and you're seeing that in the losses.
You're seeing that in some of the stock prices, and you're seeing that in reports from like the MIT, from MIT, that like 95% of generative AI is worthless.
So, you know, a lot of people are excited by this shiny new thing, just like they were buying bitcoin.
Just like they were honestly buy, buy e-books.
You know, e-books are a viable, great part of the market.
But there was a time, back in around 2010, where you had all these soothsayers saying that e-books would completely take the place of physical books and that physical books were, you know, this outdated concept.
And in actual fact, what we have is balance.
You know, and balance is good, but we don't have balance on generative AI right now.
What we have is a lot of speculation and a lot of people who are basically, con artists entering that that area and generating companies and trying to get a lot of startup money, based on almost nothing.
Yeah.
So, so it's it's got to be it's got to be.
Yeah.
There's no regulation there.
So, so, so one of the point on this then, because I do think of your work as the kind of work that does help us think about future scenarios.
So looking into a future of AI, it sounds to me like you are optimistic that we are going to both culturally start to reject synthetic art, or I created art, but also perhaps legally do so.
But there's going to be powerful forces, you know, the Sam Altman side that try to try to argue that it is not theft and that it should not be banned.
Do you really think that we're going to see artists successful in creating a marketplace where AI is not allowed to be used because of copyright, because of other legal issues?
Well, all I know is that all my contracts with my publishers and for any kind of work whatsoever specified that no way I can be used by either side.
And a lot of contracts specify that right now.
You know, anything can be a useful tool, but the conditions under which generative AI is used right now are not useful at all and are actually actively harmful.
And so these discussions about whether it can be used creatively are kind of jumping the gun.
It's kind of like some of the biotech, discussions like I saw last year, somebody talking about how great it'll be when kindergarten gardeners can create, creatures, in their classrooms, which I guess in theory, then they just kind of destroy, you know, and there was like, no ethical discussion of, like, whether a kindergartner should be able to create some piece of living, you know, some living creature.
And so I feel like, you know, one thing that, the tech bubble and the continuing tech bubble, you know, kind of does is we have these these new kind of wizards or gods, in the form of these, these kind of, like the prototypical tech bro feeding us the stuff that we want to believe in because it sounds so shiny and great, but in actual fact, it's built on, on a lot of nothing.
So I don't know how that's going to, turn out.
But I do think that when wealthy people start finding that they don't have enough groundwater for their houses, out in the desert, that that maybe something will happen with regard to data centers and things like that, because it's a it's astonishingly and startling, just how much groundwater we're losing, and how much that data centers, for example, use.
So, so that's a real issue, a real environmental issue that we need to tackle.
Dallas writes to say, Evan, you're hung up on the nobility of music.
I am hung up on the nobility of music.
I'm guilty as charged.
That right.
But I'm.
I'm hung up on the nobility of of human created art.
Dallas.
And we've been talking a lot about music lately, but we're going to keep talking about, this because we are drawing new cultural lines by the day here.
And I think we need to be aware of what that means.
We had to take our only break of the hour, and we're going to come back and welcome.
Dallas, by the way, is a big fan of Jeff VanderMeer.
And we've got an email from Dallas on the subject.
We've got some others as well to read.
We're talking to Jeff VanderMeer, who is, gracious with his time for us this hour.
In fact, right at 1:00, he's hopping off to talk to students and then, down at Suny Geneseo and he's delivering the, the Harding lecture this afternoon at 415 and Doty Recital Hall.
It's free.
It's open to the public.
Jeff's work, is very, very well known.
If you love, I science fiction, I guess.
Fantasy.
I mean, fantasy is a is a nebulous term, magical realism.
I mean, it's been great work for decades.
One of the, one of his books got turned into a movie with Natalie Portman and Oscar Isaac.
It's a long, long resume, and he writes nonfiction.
He's an editor.
It's a great resume.
So we're glad to have Jeff, and we're going to get some of your feedback on the other side of this.
Only break.
Coming up in our second hour, the president has made some wildly inaccurate remarks about autism this week about what might cause autism.
And we're talking to folks from the autism community about what that has been like.
And we're also going to hear from a medical professional about Tylenol and the way some mothers, mothers are being blamed for causing autism in their children.
We're going to try to set the record straight next hour.
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This is connections.
I'm Evan Dawson, all right.
Darla says VanderMeer is good.
He doesn't write enough.
I forget names the dead astronauts the way he imagines the fluidity of possible genetic experiments and changes.
It's never enough.
I want more, he says.
I've heard the next big revolution will be when we all have home genetic modification kits like home science experiments for kids.
That will be an exciting time.
That killer amoeba thing, that one at its own apartment that the lady pulled off the giant bear.
The underground lake where the crime boss lived.
He has great visual ideas and fun, fun reads.
Anyway, says blah blah blah.
I could go on.
I'm rambling now.
That's from Dallas.
So he wants more.
It's never enough.
Jeff, how much are you writing these days?
Well, I think I'm laughing because, I don't think of myself as prolific, but in actual fact, I tend to write novels in bunches.
So during the pandemic, for example, I didn't think I'd written very much, you know?
And then I looked at my notebooks and I had like four and a half novels have written.
And so I have actually had, you know, until the pandemic hit, I actually had had basically a novel out every year and a half, which is pretty ridiculous.
But it's also because I, you know, way back in the day, I'd like, you know, written all these half novels and then went back to them because that's just the way I work.
So, yeah.
So I'm working on a new stuff already.
I'm working on another southern reach, book called abdication that just kind of came to me.
I'm working on a southern reach, coffee table book for Abrams image.
That's going to kind of take as the conceit that it's actually from that milieu, that that setting, with a lot of secret documents and images and things.
I'm also working on another novel called Drone Love, that I'm really excited about, featuring a giant, bear like creature unrelated to all the other ones.
And, yeah.
So I'm, I'm, I'm extremely busy, doing stuff, but there was this kind of break, you know, I think all of us had it.
Where from, like 2020 to 2023, the world was much more uncertain.
And you were, you know, even though obviously the pandemic is still going on, despite people not wanting to believe that, you know, it's it's definitely not the same kind of mental situation.
So, so, you know, I wrote abdication, I mean, absolution, in just six months, into 2023.
And I think that's because, you know, I had just not written anything for, for a while.
And then finally just all came out.
So, yeah, I'm, I'm fairly prolific.
I'm happy that people will follow me just about anywhere.
I mean, Dead astronauts that he mentions is a totally different kind of novel.
Formerly experimental, with prose, poetry and stuff in it, you know, from boring or anything else.
So, you know, I've been very blessed that a lot of readers, you know, willing to follow me across a lot of different types of fiction.
All right, Dallas, thank you.
Back to the emails.
This email or asked to be anonymous if this is read on the air, and here's the question.
This email says I have a few ideas for fiction.
And sometimes I feel daunted because my knowledge of certain parts of the setting is undoubtedly superficial, although other parts come out of direct experience, which can be challenging to convey in its own ways.
How much research in writing your books do you do?
Research into scientific knowledge, technology, history, and so forth.
That's a great question.
I'm a firm believer in by the time you start to write a book, usually, whatever you remember of a subject is what you should try to put in the novel, because that's probably the most interesting.
I do see, I think novelists overexplain, in part because I think they feel they need to use all the meat on the animal, so to speak.
And so they need to, like, learn to use everything they've learned about a topic.
And, and it's usually pretty obvious when they have, and so, you know, for example, I knew I was going to write a noir fantasy adventure many years before I got to it.
And so I signed up to do reviews for Publishers Weekly of mystery and noir novels and as I, you know, did as reviews for several years.
And even though I knew that genre having stuff just sent to me that I had to read, really steeped me in it.
So by the time I did finish, I already really knew all the tropes and everything, and I didn't have to think about anything or, you know, I could just do it organically.
Similarly, with history, research and things like that, I'll usually, you know, take the long view and I'll start researching stuff like a two years before I'm going to write something and and then by the time I get to it, I'll just use the stuff that I, you know, that I, that I have when it comes to setting, I'm a big believer in first hand experience.
I, I once, in judging, online competition of already published books, called the morning Festival or something like that, where they pit books against each other.
The morning tournament, I think it's called, disqualified one book, because I was pretty sure that the writer who most of the book was set in conversation between two men, had fallen into a dry well.
I was pretty sure the writer had never been in a dry well, and I had no idea what that experience was like, and a lot of people misunderstood the point of that, which is that the place is the narrative.
I'm pretty sure if he had crawled down into a dry well, all kinds of other narrative possibilities would have occurred to him.
And so a lot of the narrative of the Southern Reach books comes from hiking in North Florida, and the fact that any anything uncanny aside, every single physical detail of the world is from firsthand experience.
And what I've discovered is, you know, even when I travel, you know, if I'm going to transpose something into a fantastical setting, I keep a journal just of textures of a very minute details, things that I find really interesting or unusual or that I think are indicative of a place.
And so that helps.
And I don't know if that helps the, the person with the question or the concern.
But then, you know, the other thing I do and, you know, this might be the privilege of having been published for a while is I'll just farm it out to the expert, like I won't even do the research.
So the hummingbird and the salamander, they were created for that book were created by a biologist, actually, in upstate New York, at Hobart and William Smith College.
Megan Smith, Megan Brown and, and that was revelatory because if I'd come up with it, the entries about those, those creatures would not have had all the scientific in-jokes, all the depth and wealth of information.
They would have been more static.
And so having to respond to what she came up with made the book a lot better than if I had come up with it myself.
So sometimes I literally just go to the expert and say, hey, do you mind writing this?
You know, and I'll just react to it.
Yeah.
I, I first of all, I think it's great answer.
And second of all, I think related to the question from the listener is an idea that's been more acutely, I think, explored in the last decade or so, which is this.
It's one thing to say, should you write about a subject if you haven't researched it?
It's another to say, if you don't have a disability, you shouldn't write about characters with a disability.
If you you know, and it gets into a lot of identity, I wonder where you are on that kind of, argument.
Well, I pick my spots like, Rachel in Bourne, is a black woman, and, it's never specified what country she comes from, but that's a very different, level of of reality than if I were to try to write, Americanah, which is about, Nigerian and Nigerian American women trying to navigate modern America that I would never I would never I would never try that because I just simply, you know, am not I don't have any, any, inside knowledge of that experience.
And so, I think, you know, there's two things.
This first of all, you know, just how much experience you have in the world and where it comes from and what you can put in of your personal experience.
So there's some of Rachel's memories that are my memories from Fiji, where I grew up.
Kind of like, made more distant and different.
And then there's also the, the fact that, you know, you can also.
Yeah, you can just basically use different, different techniques to kind of like create a good a situation that works, but then also some writers don't understand their strengths and weaknesses.
If a character, if a writer is already kind of like not great at characters, then obviously someone from far outside their experience is probably not going to come across strong on the page.
So, you know, I think sometimes it's almost like the writer doesn't understand that it's not it's not their strength.
It's not their strength to do this story.
And one way to avoid getting in a situation where you do something that's weak, so to speak, is to have a lot of ideas and be able to pick and choose and say, this is the one that best suits me as a writer.
This other one is, is not, you know, so so that's where I come down on it.
From YouTube, a listener, a viewer watching on YouTube says, I've read some classify climate change fiction books that come across as so preachy and exaggerated that I can't suspend my disbelief.
That's never happened to me with VanderMeer.
How does he pull that off?
Well, I, you know, thank you, first of all, for the compliment.
You know, I guess the first thing that I think about is the character and everything about the, the setting is going to be from the character's point of view, whether it's first person or third person.
And so, once you just try to get that interiority, it's harder to be preachy.
And then I always do think about the exposition I'm using.
So like hummingbird Salamander is an eco thriller with the mystery that's embedded in it.
You know, ecological concerns are very relevant to it.
So in theory, when there's exposition in that book, it's actually clues about the mystery.
And so that was one way of, of of dealing with that issue.
The other was the formal experimentation in Dead Astronauts, where the lyricism and the kind of surreal, poetic, aspect of it is what, you know, kind of dilutes that didactic element.
And, and in actual fact, you know, both those novels resulted in part from, an environmental class at Hobart, William Smith, you know, here in the Finger Lakes District that, you know, they, they the students were like, well, we like annihilation, but we want something more direct.
And of course, you know, novels are not supposed to be didactic.
Not in my mind.
You know, they're supposed to be about the psychological reality of what the character is experiencing.
And so, you know, put that in the back of my head and I try to find, you know, ways to to satisfy that that urge which was also an urge that I had, but that that would be the maybe the, the longish answer about how how that works for me and maybe why it's working for the reader.
Yeah.
I agree, it's a great compliment that you got there.
Going to get as many listener questions as we can in the next few minutes.
Quinn says.
It's speculative fiction.
It's not science fiction, fantasy or magical realism.
What do you think, Jeff?
I think I might know Clinton.
Hi, Quinn.
If it is the Quinn I think it is, yeah, I mean, speculative, I do, I do, like, as a term, I like weird fiction is a term.
Basically.
I like terms that are not bookstore categories.
And I think that's because especially if you're at like a science fiction convention or something, and you're on a panel, you wind up talking about marketing.
When you talk about categories that are easily modifiable, and even climate fiction has kind of become that way.
And when you do that, I feel like what happens is you reduce the work down to just one part of what it's doing.
Like born.
Yes, it is a kind of science fiction fantasy novel, but it's also really about a mother raising a kid, you know?
So that part gets completely kind of like pushed to the side.
So speculative, weird fiction, anything that allows a conversation that feels a little more complex and nuanced.
And that said, you know, I think it's a perfectly respectable term, science fiction.
Like, I love space opera, and space opera is going to get really weird.
And talking about them in a science fiction context is is absolutely essential.
But I like to I like to have broad conversations that, that allow for a certain amount of complexity and speculative and weird help that.
Quinn.
Thank you.
Here's an email from a listener named Greg who says, what has it been like living in Florida, where your work on climate change is probably rejected by your own state government?
Well, I mean, I have written stuff for time and for Esquire and other publications that is basically taken the current administration out beside the, out behind the woodshed, for anti factual positions on the environment.
You know, there's a lot of people in Florida who believe in the facts and are horrified by, you know, just basically, a construct of an artifact to fit an ideology.
And I think all anyone really wants is a situation where the reality is based on good policy, good regulation, and good land management.
You know, in the case of what's going on in Florida, where you basically have developers out of control, because literally 43% of the state legislature is made up of people who are in the land business, so to speak.
You know, so it's skewed.
It's, and it's skewed against the ordinary citizen and their quality of life.
So that's really what, you know, I was writing about.
And, and people need to understand that, that there's a ton of really, you know, committed people in Florida trying to push back against this stuff and just, just have balance, so to speak.
Briefly, where do you want our audience to find your work if they want to engage with more of your work?
Jeff?
Well, you know, I have a website that's just a Jeff vandermeer.com and pretty much on social media, it's kind of hard to to miss me.
So you'll find me if you just type in my name.
Is that better than Amazon?
I would prefer you use your your local independent bookstore, if at all possible.
There's some amazing independent bookstores in this country, and they've really done a great job of bouncing back after a seeming slump.
So I say support them.
All right, last 30s, I'll squeeze one more question in from a listener.
Are you good with fan fiction as a genre, or do you think fanfic is weird?
No, absolutely.
And it's it's it's it's just a great expression of the imagination.
I have absolutely no problems with fan fiction whatsoever, and I think that, it can also be really useful if you want to write, fan fiction in your own original fiction.
It can it can teach you some things, but it can be also totally valid art form in its own right.
All right.
So listeners, you got the green light on fanfic.
There we go.
Jeff VanderMeer, thank you for making the time to come.
Talk to our audience to answer questions from our listeners.
Really great having you.
You are generous with I know you got to get right to the students.
So thank you very, very much for being on connections today.
Thanks for some great questions.
I really appreciate it.
That's Jeff VanderMeer, just awesome stuff from him and a lot to think about and a lot more to think about in the days and weeks to come.
Listeners, especially on things like AI and a lot more, we've got more connections coming up in just a moment.
After a brief break.
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