Fantastic Metropolis

Gabe Chouinard: Your influences are much broader than simply “fantasy;” you draw influences from across the board when it comes to literary techniques and style and substance. Who do you admire now? What have you been reading?

Jeff VanderMeer: Oddly enough, I most admire Colin Thubron, a travel writer, right now. His books on Russia, China, Central Asia, and Siberia contain the level of detail commonly found in a good novel. Influences now are few and far between. I’ll steal or adopt technique from a book, but I’m past the point where a writer influences me to the level that, early on, Nabokov, Angela Carter, Edward Whittemore, M. John Harrison, influenced me. I have been reading very little fiction over the last few months—I find it hard to read fiction while writing it. At the other end of the spectrum, I will divulge a couple of names I think are going to make an impact in coming years, people no one’s ever heard of at this point: Brendan Connell, Vera Zubarev, Iain Rowan.

Gabe Chouinard: And, finally, how do you feel about freshwater squid?

Jeff VanderMeer: I think the Florida Freshwater Squid may be the most mis-understood creature on the planet. That thousands could flock to Sebring, Florida, every year for a festival named after it and yet have very few people truly understand its life cycle, etc., is somewhat bizarre. I plan on devoting all my time outside of writing to cephalopod studies to rectify this information. I hope to prepare some papers for the journal Mollusca early in 2002.