Fantastic Metropolis

Gabe Chouinard: You have been active in the industry for a long time, and have accomplished much in those years—not least of which is the World Fantasy Award for “The Transformation of Martin Lake,” which is included in the collection.. You’ve run your own publishing company, you’ve won awards, “discovered” several excellent authors, published umpteen stories… What do you think is your greatest accomplishment so far?

Jeff VanderMeer: The World Fantasy Award, hands down. It is validation for having struck out on my own in a direction that few other authors have followed and it has given me the confidence to continue to pursue a unique and in some ways eccentric vision. I certainly owe a debt of gratitude to my many influences, but I feel now that I have stepped away from them. I’m also very proud of having published Stepan Chapman’s The Troika through my Ministry of Whimsy Press.

Gabe Chouinard: And you’ve published Jeffrey Thomas’s offbeat sf stories in Punktown, among others. Which, it should be noted, is another collection that revolves around a particular landscape/locale…

Jeff VanderMeer: Certainly. The genius of Jeffrey’s Punktown stories is how he mixes horror and SF with the influence of such mainstream writers as Thomas Hardy. I’ve always felt that such cross-pollination is where the true innovation lies.

Gabe Chouinard: Are you ever going to write a novel?

Jeff VanderMeer: A far-future sf novel, Veniss Underground, is making the rounds. I am three-fourths of the way to completing another novel, set in Ambergris, entitled Shriek: An Afterword. I am 15,000 words into another Ambergris novel, set 500 years after Dradin, In Love, entitled The Zamilon File. And I have about 10,000 words of a third Ambergris novel, also set in the city’s “far future,” entitled Fragments of a Drowned City. It’s just a matter of time before I get around to finishing these works. I have consciously resisted sitting down to write a novel. I believe each piece of fiction has an ideal length and that to say, “I’m writing a novel” before it’s clear it should be that length is to hamstring yourself before you begin. I have been moving toward the novel length steadily—most everything I have written in the past five years has been 15,000 words or higher.

Gabe Chouinard: The commercialized state of the sf/fantasy industry is something that you and I both fight against. Where do you think the industry, as a whole, is headed? Will we crawl from the wreckage of commercial products, triumphant in the quest to gain mainstream attention for literary sf?

Jeff VanderMeer: I’m not that interested in science fiction, per se. As for fantasy, I believe most of the best novel-length fantasy is already being published in the mainstream—Hansen’s The Chess Garden, Stevens’ The Circus of the Sea and the Air, Auster’s The New York Trilogy, and any number of others. So the question may be moot—the best long material may continue to migrate to the mainstream ranks. However, the best short form fantasy is still clearly published within genre magazines and anthologies. It is very important to cultivate the more literary and surreal authors and make sure they receive more space and attention in such periodicals, perhaps even by creating other outlets for them.

Gabe Chouinard: Hmmm, yes, I like that idea… You’ve been a strong supporter of many periodicals, both print and web-based. Who are you working with these days? That is, where can people find the ‘good stuff’, in your opinion?

Jeff VanderMeer: If you mean magazines, you can find fragments and bits and pieces in a lot of them—The Silver Web, The Third Alternative, F&SF, Interzone, Asimov’s, Century, Redsine, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. But there is no one magazine that satisfies my own loves in fiction—that I read the whole issue and I just am ablaze with light, so to speak (of course, given local fire codes, it’s probably good this happens infrequently)—and this might be why I continue to push forward with the Leviathan series. I do think it is almost impossible for a magazine editor to fill four to 12 issues a year with always scintillating fiction. But, conversely, most magazine editors are too conservative or too narrow in their tastes. I want more and more to open a publication or anthology and have the whole spectrum of fiction jump out at me. I want to feel the same thrill from reading short fiction that I get from writing, and that’s become more and more uncommon.