Fantastic Metropolis

Claude Lalumière: What role do surrealism and decadence play within fantastic fiction—both according to your ideals and according to what’s really happening in the publishing arena?

Jeff VanderMeer: Well, as stated before, writers like M. John Harrison, Rikki Ducornet, China Miéville, and others have been influenced by these groups. Some openly seek to extend experiments by Surrealist or Decadent-era writers. Harrison shamelessly (to his credit) stole from the Decadents for his Viriconium cycle. I would have done the same for my Ambergris cycle if I hadn’t come to the Decadents late in the game. A writer like Jeffrey Ford’s surreal streak is what gives his work its uniqueness. He’s become a master of hardwiring that surreal element into works that are otherwise more contemporary or magic realist in origin. So the idea with Album Zutique is not to publish work that apes the original Decadents or Surrealists, but to publish work that builds on that work in some way. You could say it’s just as realistic and commercial an approach as identifying as “fantasy” every text that contains any fantastical element, no matter how diverse or different. In fact, it’s probably a better approach.

Claude Lalumière: How so?

Jeff VanderMeer: It more clearly identifies what makes such works unique and what is, in many cases, the driving force behind them. While I’d prefer all labels be dismantled, at least by pinpointing “Surrealism” and “Decadence” we can place works within the context of specific intellectual and artistic movements, rather than define ourselves by publisher’s labels, which have no intellectual or artistic merit, for the most part.

Claude Lalumière: How did you come to assemble the group of writers that contributed to the first Album Zutique? Which qualities, or range of qualities, were you seeking?

Jeff VanderMeer: Album Zutique #1 was an exercise in speed. I wanted it—from conception to sending it to the printer for advance bound galleys—to be an eight-week process, tops. To that end, the selection method was very unfair—I simply sent emails to those writers whose works had in the past, to my mind, exemplified some aspect of the surreal or decadent and who I had worked with before. From these submissions, I took the ones that worked best together. I was lucky in that several authors had just put the finishing touches on new work that fit the idea. And, a few authors who were wondering exactly where to send that odd surreal story they weren’t so sure would find a place with the usual genre markets.

Claude Lalumière: What are, for you, the essential works of fantastic surrealism & decadence?

Jeff VanderMeer: I think the Decadents were extremely erratic writers. Therefore, I’d recommend the Dedalus series—The Dedalus Book of Decadence, The Second Dedalus Book of Decadence, both edited by Brian Stableford—as well as other books from Dedalus, like The Other Side by Alfred Kubin, Monsieur de Phocas by Jean Lorrain, etc. Dedalus’ fantasy anthologies such as the Dedalus/Ariadne Book of Austrian Fantasy, also include a lot of great Decadent work. The collected poetry of Rimbaud, Baudelaire, etc. There’s some overlap, too—Symbolist writers who also were Decadents, or who were just lucky enough to have critics rescue them from the slightly disreputable “Decadent” label and remake them as Symbolists.

Claude Lalumière: Are there current writers whose work strikes you as especially imbued with the decadent/surreal esthetic?

Jeff VanderMeer: I think Richard Calder and Brendan Connell are two of the foremost writers of Decadent/Surreal fiction today. David Madsen, also published by Dedalus. Rikki Ducornet, Leonora Carrington on the surrealist side. K. J. Bishop is working on a novel that’s very much in that vein. Brian Evenson’s work, on the mainstream side, could not exist without the Decadent tradition. And many others, who are escaping my mind right now…