Fantastic Metropolis

Gabe Chouinard: And do you find this liberating, or limiting? Some authors can stay with the same setting for decades, producing rich works within those settings, like Fritz Leiber’s Lankhmar. Others… well, others become somewhat inflexible when it comes time to write the newest tales set in La-La Land, or whatever they wish to call it…

Jeff VanderMeer: I have a set of quite finite but deep and wide goals with the Ambergris material. If I actually stop to think about it, I would imagine that I will eventually stop writing about it, but that’s three or four novels away. Ambergris is flexible and I can write up and down its timeline. A lot of fantasy writers do not take advantage of that scaleability. For example, two of three novels I’m working on take place about 300 to 400 years after the current work. In them, the gray caps have reclaimed the city. Technology is at about a 1930s level. The style of the writing, too, is changing and evolving. And I continue to collaborate with artists. For this later—era work I will probably be collaborating with the English artist Dawn Andrews. Her multi-media creations are simply amazing. The mere texture of her art will help to inform my own use of texture through words. The main thing is to keep moving, to keep experimenting. I do not want to repeat myself. For this reason, I probably won’t be writing any metafictions for awhile. I do feel, and have felt for the last couple of years, that I am finally moving into a phase where the technique I have gathered is equal to the vision of what I want to write. So I’m very happy, confident, and ready to kick some major ass.

Gabe Chouinard: One of the things that impressed me about the City of Saints and Madmen is the sheer imaginative power within the stories. It is… well, quite unlike anything else I’ve ever read! How did you come to discover Ambergris?

Jeff VanderMeer: A friend of mine in high school told me his parents met when his father looked up and saw his mother in a third story window. He immediately went up and proposed to her. Rather than necessarily being an indication of love at first sight, it struck me as odd, and fraught with peril. I had wanted to write about this for many years. At the same time, I had written a story called “Learning to Leave the Flesh” which contained a description of the River Moth and a creative type named Voss Bender. I liked the idea of the River Moth and wanted to include it and Bender, in altered form, in a fantasy world more suited to both ideas. One night in early 1992, I woke up at around midnight from a deep sleep. In my head, I saw a missionary, just returned to a city named Ambergris, look up and fall in love with a woman in a third-story window. I immediately went to the computer and typed the first four or five pages of “Dradin, In Love,” the first Ambergris story. Although I slaved over revisions to the piece for six months, the initial pages remained virtually unchanged. What astounded and frightened me was how complete the city had become in my mind, even before I finished the story. It almost seemed like it existed in some other reality and I had managed to access that reality. It has continued that way ever since—elements of stories have had to be ground out and finished through sweat and hard work, but the city, its history, people, and landmarks, has always come to me very naturally.

Gabe Chouinard: With fantastic fiction gaining in popularity, why did you decide to publish through Cosmos and Prime? Why not go for the big publishers?

Jeff VanderMeer: There isn’t much of a market for novellas, even interrelated novellas. It took me a long time to find publishers for many of the novellas when they appeared separately. When it came to putting together a collection of the novellas, I honestly did not perceive it as a commercial publisher project. If I had had a novel or two out, I would of course have gone to the big publishers first—no offense to the present publishers, who have done an excellent job. Although, frankly, in the case of the hardcover, I’ve had a level of involvement that would not have been possible at a larger publisher. Inasmuch as the hardcover book will be an artifact of sorts, I have been able to mold it in many ways, working with the designer (and Prime editor) Garry Nurrish. In general, I do tend to use a top-down approach to marketing my work.