How the 4th Southern Reach book, Absolution, burst out of author Jeff VanderMeer

Jeff VanderMeer’s new novel Absolution works as both a prequel and a sequel to his “Southern Reach trilogy” — appropriate, considering the slippy, surreal lineage of Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance. Only one thing is really certain: The book is a vibe.

It’s been 10 years since VanderMeer dropped readers into Area X, a warped version of America’s southern coast mangled in time and space, and chronicle the expeditions conducted by the shady government organization known as Central. Absolution, told in three parts, starts nearly 20 years before the events of Annihilation. It finds a pre-Area X Forgotten Coast, carves out deeper stories for Central agent Old Jim (“ol’ piano fingers” from Absolution), then tells the tale of Lowry, the surviving member of the first Southern Reach expedition. To longtime fans of the series, VanderMeer promises answers to a few lingering mysteries from the original trilogy — and also more questions. Absolution expands the mind-melting allure of Area X, and like the previous books, it’s alive and ferocious from beginning to end. 

Ahead of Absolution’s Oct. 22 release, Polygon spoke to VanderMeer as he evacuated his home in the days before Hurricane Milton made landfall in the United States. Despite the crisis, the author was as articulate as ever on the origins of his new work, the high-wire act of expanding on lore, and why he really wanted to write a gnarly alligator book. (VanderMeer is safely out of the storm’s path, and he’s written about the last month of environmental crisis for a New York Times audio essay.)

Polygon: How did you wind up reinvested in Area X enough to write a whole new Southern Reach novel? Was there a catalytic moment that drove you back to the world?

Jeff VanderMeer: I had some of the ideas, including the idea of Old Jim being a viewpoint character, back in 2016. I wrote a short story then. I was teaching at Clarion [Workshop] in San Diego, and I always put out a manuscript of my own so that the students realized [my critiques of their work aren’t] personal. I put it in the common room — I’m like, “Go ahead and just take a red pen and tear it apart.” And this is to show it’s not a personal process, it’s just analysis.

And only one student did it — Kristen Roupenian, who went on to write “Cat Person.” She was the only student with the gumption to sit me down and tell me how terrible this Area X story was. Without her, there wouldn’t be an Absolution, because I realized that I was on the wrong track. I think three sentences from that story are in part two of Absolution. 

Then I got the idea for the first part, and I started writing a little bit of that. This past year at a convention, I read part of it, and got a great response. Something clicked in my head. Long story short, from July 31 of last year to Dec. 31 of last year, I just wrote. I woke up on July 31 and the whole damn structure was in my head. It was an ecstatic vision or something. And I literally don’t remember writing some of the scenes. I just wrote morning, noon, and night. And then the only question was to send it to Sean [McDonald], my editor at FSG, and be like, “Do you want to try and publish this next year? Do we need to wait?” So it was a very organic process that I still don’t fully understand.

What was the flaw in the original short story?

I think, in part, I picked a real-life thing that happened too soon and didn’t wait for it to transform. So I was out canoeing and I saw this small island of dirt and grass just coming straight toward me — not with the current, but against the current. And it was like, What the hell am I looking at?

It turned out that it was some kind of either meteorological or biological experiment that had been abandoned. There was either a harness attached to a manatee or some kind of motor underneath the water. And over time, the bobber at the top had just accumulated dirt and grass to the point where it looked preternatural, because all you saw was this floating island. As far as I can tell, it was for something that had been discontinued. And I put that in the story.

But it was just too easy to just put it in the story, and it kind of ruined the whole thing. So the Tyrant, the alligator in the novel, is kind of that moment transformed into a series of other moments, for lack of a better way of putting it.

You wrote the original Southern Reach trilogy quickly too, is that right?

I woke up from this dream after dental surgery, and I wrote it in about six weeks in between just sleeping. I was recovering from the surgery, and then literally within the year it was sold to FSG. And then I think in the next year before it was published, there was a movie deal already.

It’s been 10 years since you wrote those books, and in that time, the conversations around ecology, climate, and bureaucratic environmental politics have escalated. Did the present impact your writing on Absolution?

I’ve always tried to not be topical, but to be grappling with current things. And so in Authority, there’s a lot about mind viruses and hypnosis. It’s really about how we intake information in the modern era, but without ever mentioning the internet. And then I think Absolution is, on a higher level, interrogating the systems that take away our agency, that compromise us, and the ways in which we try to push back against that, or compensate for it.

And so Central, the secret agency at the heart of Absolution, might be an extreme example of it, but at the same time, maybe in more subtle and invisible ways, all of us are existing right now within a lot of dysfunctional systems — we’re not really set up to deal with the situation we’re in. Or have just devolved in general, due in part to things like fighting over the scarcity of resources and general anxiety over the future.

Old Jim plays key roles in all the parts of the book. He’s a very specific type of weary operative — so how do you picture a character like that? Is it drawn from reality? Do you have a photo reference? What are you imagining to inform the details?

There’s a couple of things. I’m not usually that influenced by other authors or fiction books, but in this particular case, I’m going back to one of my favorites, in a way: John le Carré, who I think does an amazing job of building characters to interiority while they’re investigating something, whether it’s trying to identify a mole in their organization or whatever.

There’s always this way in which it’s reflected back on the character, and you learn more about the character because of what they’re investigating. And so I really liked the idea of the first section seeming to be this tale about an expedition from 20 years ago. But you slowly realize that what you’re getting is kind of what Old Jim has put together from the files and the bowels of Central. I think there’s something really powerful about the accumulation of layers of history, and showing some glimpses of who’s actually reading this stuff and interpreting it for you. 

Old Jim was always a question mark in my head because I always thought he was kind of working for Central, but his story was — no pun intended — central to the first three books. But developing him further is in keeping with the spirit of the first three books. In the first book, Annihilation, the Psychologist seems to be one thing, but by Acceptance, her character has expanded and become three-, almost four-dimensional in ways you wouldn’t expect.

I really like that effect, because when you go back and see the references to Old Jim in the first three, in Acceptance, I think it then brings in the whole world of Absolution. So the books… I want people to reread them, because they’re meant to have a different resonance on a reread. And Old Jim, I just felt very comfortable with that character, in part because I understood him in the ways he was compromised. And then I understood him in the context of an unnamed Florida.

Was Absolution always a triptych, or did part one and part three overflow out of the middle section, the bigger story about Old Jim?

Actually, I was writing “Dead Town,” the first part, and I thought I’d just have a novella or something. And then when Old Jim’s voice popped up in it, I was like, Holy crap. All of part two was in my head. Then once I started thinking about part two, while I was still writing mostly “Dead Town,” then I realized Lowry was the protagonist of part three, and it’s about the first expedition. And he is high on these anti-anxiety drugs, and has kind of Tourette’s because of it. And he hates the suits. He’s claustrophobic in the suits. And somehow that all immediately made it work. So it kind of was “Dead Town,” Old Jim’s voice, and then the culmination is what happens in the first expedition.

Some writers resist prequelizing or sequelizing material because they fear explaining the unexplained. Did you have that fear at all? How did you overcome it?

I realized that some things would be answered, but there’d be new questions, and that it would continue the theme of the unknowability of the universe while still finding a way to show what happens to the world after Acceptance. I was really excited, because I got to basically have my cake and eat it too. I got to be true to what the other books are about, which are also, in a way, about the generosity of readers.

Instead of balking at the idea that the readers have to put together or complete the story, to some degree, they’ve been incredibly generous about it. So they gave me the permission to write a fourth book, in a way, and to write one that I think is the most uncanny of the four. I trust them to, again, bring their own imaginations to it, and to realize that there’s not a single sentence in this book that’s unplanned. There’s a lot of stuff in there that does actually answer things in a sly subtextual way. So I really was energized by the fact that I wouldn’t be betraying the first three books by writing this book.

To the point of every line being intentional: I know you’re a big music guy, dipping into rock and jazz, and I say with praise that some of the language feels like you jamming. There’s flow and rhythm, and even when it’s hard to parse, it’s almost musical. How do you make the surreal precise? How do you know what to keep and what to cut?

One thing to know is that part two was 20,000 words longer at one point. With these books, it’s like, how many red herrings, how many encounters with the unknown do you really need? A scene might be really evocative, but is it necessary? So one thing that I’m looking for is, am I furthering the right sense of mystery, or am I just throwing in some additional puzzle that isn’t really that important? 

And I think the other thing is that the three parts being so different gave me the ability to “jam,” as you put it, because if something didn’t seem like it fit into part one, it’s like, oh, actually this is something that Lowry, the character in part three, finds out, and he doesn’t know what it means, but the reader knows what it means. So distribution of the reveals of various mysteries allowed me to, in a weird way, be more disciplined by the fact that I could move stuff around.

Having these three parts also allows me to pour the music of it into these discrete containers that already have rigid structure. In part three, the reader just has to read Lowry’s section word for word. There’s no skimming of this guy, because despite the F-bombs, there’s a lot of stuff in there that’s relevant to the first two parts. And my only fear now after having finished it and turned it in was like, Oh my God, are people going to get so hung up on the F-bombs that they don’t see the reveals? 

Because I’m a surrealist at heart, I do have to be careful about it not just floating off into the ether. So I do have to think about structure and stuff like that. That part was such a joy to write. Lowry is not necessarily the nicest person in the world, but he is unintentionally funny. Once I realized he was going to basically propose to his girlfriend in a room full of jars of dead things, it just kind of all came together.

Did the Annihilation movie make you want to have the final word on Southern Reach?

No, not so much as that I wanted to have a final word on alligators.

I remember saying to [Annihilation director] Alex Garland very early on when he told me there was going to be an albino alligator in the movie that there had never been a good movie with an albino alligator in it. And he said, “Jeff, this will be the first one,” which does now kind of crack me up. It is a very interesting film, and it’s definitely a good use of alligators. But after that, I put it in the back of my mind. I don’t want any contamination from the movie if I write more Southern Reach, but I do want to work on the Ultimate Gator, which I hadn’t done so far.

You really did it with the Tyrant. What drew you to the alligator?

I think it was an interesting challenge to tackle something that’s kind of a cliché about Florida and make it fresh. And I love alligators. They’re very complex, social animals that take good care of their young. They’re more like mammals in terms of their behavior than we give them credit for. We look at them and see dinosaurs, so we are already thinking slow, stupid, etc. And so kind of pushing back against that and making the Tyrant the cohort of the Rogue, I thought was interesting. And then the whole idea of this alligator experiment, which is very current — currently they’re moving freshwater crocodiles in Florida hundreds of miles away from their home to see if they can relocate them or if they will try to go home. The answer is, they try to go home.

Have you closed the book on Southern Reach now? Or can you imagine entering another fugue state and continuing the story?

I’m not going to rule it out, but if I did, it would really be a long gestation period. When I say that Absolution is a sequel to the first three, it’s kind of sneakily a sequel. But that part of the book, without giving anything away, it would be very hard to expand the vision into actually writing the future, because it would be so surreal. It would be almost unrecognizably unrecognizable. So it’s something where maybe there might be enough for the concentrated intensity of a short story down the road, but it’s very much something I haven’t thought about yet. 

Your dreams will tell you if there’s more to say.

That’s true. I’m not really in charge.