Fantastic Metropolis

Jeff VanderMeer is a veteran of the literary speculative fiction wars. A writer, editor, publisher, columnist, reviewer… you name it, and Jeff has done it, and for more publications than I care to list. What’s more, he is an individual among individuals—a unique voice in both his own writing and in his editing/publishing.

So it was with great pleasure (I’m an admirer!) that I got to ask him a few oddball questions about his new collection, City of Saints and Madmen, as well as some other things that I’ve been wondering…

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Gabe Chouinard: Jeff, it’s always a pleasure to talk with you, and being able to interview you is, I think, even better. So, on the heels of your trip to England; how are you?

Jeff VanderMeer: Energized—first a wonderful dinner with China Miéville, Jon Courtenay Grimwood, Darren Nash, Dave Mathews, and Mark Roberts in London and then a long weekend with Storyville, a writer’s group I belong to, on the northeast coast of England. I’ve come back from England with a horrible cold, insomnia, and an intense desire to write.

Gabe Chouinard: It has to be something about the climate, or the landscape; just something about Europe in general makes me want to write! I completely understand Graham Joyce’s decision to move to Greece in order to write his first novel. Foreign landscapes are condusive to creativity, I’m sure. Think so?

Jeff VanderMeer: Two things are at work. First, the obvious stimulus to the senses of unfamiliar places. Second, that the place you live in always looks different when you come back from such a trip. England is for me a kind of second home—I feel very comfortable there and would love to live there someday. The sense of history is so much deeper than in the United States. The atmosphere. Everything. I believe that a good writer finds something new even in a blade of grass in his or her backyard, but there is an undefinable catharsis to travel that I do love.

Gabe Chouinard: You have a collection out now, City of Saints and Madmen—a trade paperback from Cosmos, and soon a limited edition hardcover from Prime—that gathers together various stories and assorted pieces set in the world of Ambergris. What can you tell me about this collection?

Jeff VanderMeer: Ambergris is a fantastical city somewhat akin to a combination of Victorian London and a Southeast Asian city. Nothing supernatural or magical occurs there, but it is definitely surreal. The city itself becomes a kind of extra character. The trade paperback collects the core four novellas in the Ambergris cycle. The hardcover includes an additional 45,000 words of new fiction, copious amounts of artwork that add to the text rather than illustrate it, and a number of metafictional flourishes—not least of which being that the cover includes a vignette as do the front and back cover flaps. I would also note that at least one story experiments in a way that has rarely if ever been attempted before. I’m rather smugly happy about this.

Gabe Chouinard: It is definitely a living, breathing city. Did you set out to consciously feature the city that way, or did it grow like that, so to speak?

Jeff VanderMeer: Ambergris has always, since it first popped into my head, been complete. When I add to it now, I often feel as if I am reporting on an existing place. I do also make a conscious effort to incorporate the more bizarre pieces of the real world into Ambergris. I’m always secretly delighted with the guesses reviewers make as to what I imagined and what I stole from history.

Gabe Chouinard: This is truly an ambitious project. How long have you been writing about Ambergris? Is this a Tolkienesque lifelong obsession for you? Is Ambergris central to your “oeuvre?”

Jeff VanderMeer: I have been writing about Ambergris since 1992 and it has slowly devoured my other fictional output. It is unclear at the moment whether it will become a lifelong obsession or come to an end with perhaps ocassional returns to it. Ambergris has been central to my growth as a writer since 1992, in that it has allowed me to explore a number of themes and ideas. The setting can be used for almost anything and therefore it doesn’t constrain me even as it imposes its own rules. I’ve been lucky that this has occurred, since I now write within a kind of surreal dark fantasy niche which is more instantly identifiable than before, when I would write mainstream, SF, fantasy, and experimental stories. I still write the same types of stories—they just all have the same setting now.

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.

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.

Gabe Chouinard: What’s next from you? What’s next from the Ministry of Whimsy?

Jeff VanderMeer: Next up for me is a nonfiction collection entitled Why Should I Cut Your Throat?: Selected Nonfiction, from Cosmos MonkeyBrain Books. It will consist of about 150,000 words of reviews, interviews, articles, essays, humor pieces, most of them revolving around genre fiction. The Ministry’s next project is Leviathan 3.

Gabe Chouinard: What can you tell me about Leviathan 3? Who do you have lined up so far?

Jeff VanderMeer: For Lev3 my co-editor Forrest Aguirre and I have already taken a library story cycle by Zoran Zivkovic, two pieces by Michael Moorcock, and a story by Michael Cisco. We will be taking plenty more, including some French Decadent era fiction never before translated into English. In short, the anthology has no theme this time, but Zoran’s story cycle, which the individual stories seeded throughout the collection, provides the backbone. The stories that we place around the library stories will in some way pertain to the library stories thematically, stylistically, etc. It should be a very interesting effect.

Gabe Chouinard: Leviathan 3 is also your first foray into Print-On-Demand. Will this method affect the exposure of the collection, do you think? How does this help or hinder the people that are looking for the anthology?

Jeff VanderMeer: Leviathan has always been a steady seller and a critical success. Our main problem has always been having to pay upfront to have all the copies printed and in our warehouse even though we know it will sell out over a year to 18 months, not all at once. We have also had difficulties with distribution. POD allows us to cut initial costs while making the book more readily available through Ingram’s distribution, which means anyone anywhere can walk into a bookstore and order the anthology. Unlike our other books, Leviathan has never been carried by Ingram’s before—too esoteric—and we have relied on direct mail sales and book catalog sales. Leviathan 3 should, therefore, do as well or better than in the past. And we will have plenty of physical copies available at conventions, etc.

Gabe Chouinard: Back to the world of Ambergris; you also have The Exchange out now, which is a unique pamphlet/chapbook from Hoegbotton & Sons, celebrating the Festival of the Freshwater Squid. And you have some rather unique treats to go along with it…

Jeff VanderMeer: The idea was to create an artifact supposedly from Ambergris, centered around a short story called “The Exchange.” My frequent collaborator, the artist Eric Schaller, designed the pamphlet and illustrated it. We also collaborated on some incidental text. The deluxe edition comes with mushrooms, message pellets, candles, etc. I’ve been very surprised that this self-published project has garnered so much attention, with good reviews in Locus, Realms of Fantasy, etc.

Gabe Chouinard: Yes, Gahan Wilson was quite impressed with both City of Saints and Madmen and The Exchange. That must have been quite a high point, considering Gahan’s reputation and personality!

Jeff VanderMeer: Gahan was very, very kind. Especially as the book was not yet out and I had to present him with a bunch of separate publications and xeroxes in order for him to meet his deadline. It was definitely a huge thrill. It’s always amazing to me when someone whose work I have admired and who I do not already know likes my fiction. It was wonderful when Thomas Ligotti liked “Dradin” in 1996. It was humbling with Moorcock agreeing to do the introduction for the current book. At some level, I have to laugh because I can remember coming out of high school and saying to myself, “Okay—you know you want to write, mostly because you can’t not write, but someday you are going to find your level and that level may be sub-publication or may mean you only ever publish in local publications, and you have to be happy with that.” So, to be honest, although I work very hard, all the rest of it, on some level, is just a bonus.

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.