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Ann and I are now in the process of reading for The Big Book of Science Fiction for Vintage, which will appear in 2016. This huge anthology of well over 500,000 words will collect the best and most unusual SF stories from approximately 1900 to 2000. This requires a lot of reading and research. Every so often I will report back about current reading and conversations about the anthology.

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Also from the past week.

“That was a movie, not a short story.��

“That was written in 1834.��

“That wasn’t an alien. That was not an alien.��

“Because there was no internet, he got away with it–look at the copyright page.��

“That was it? That’s all that happened?!?!!��

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I was thrilled to be on Science Friday today along with host Ira Flatow, producer Annie Minoff, and space archaeologist Sarah Parcak. We were talking about the current SciFri Book Club selection The Lost City of Z by David Grann .

I’m glad they’ve devoted several segments to The Lost City of Z over the past weeks as the book is too complex and too wide and deep for a single discussion. It details the Amazon expeditions of Percy Fawcett, one of the last Victorian explorers. The book also describes the author’s own attempt to retrace the footsteps of Fawcett, who disappeared during his last expedition in 1925. Grann also fills in the time between, during which many people went into the jungle trying to find Fawcett. Some of them could be termed professionals �� professional explorers or scientists �� but many were amateurs. And many of them died or disappeared in the attempt.

The ending of The City of Z turns much of the testament to human eccentricity present in the book’s first half into something profound and haunting. It is not so much a twist as a different way of seeing the landscape, and a commentary on something you see so often with early European explorers and even later anthropologists or archaeologists: the evidence is right there but they can’t see it. Either from lack of tech or lack of imagination or pre-set cultural expectations. Or through bad luck. So the book builds and builds until what’s absurd takes on a kind of quietly luminescent quality. It really is a classic.

A few things I touched on during the broadcast could do with further expansion. I just find these subjects within the book so fascinating. I also have further thoughts on ecology and the environment in the context of The Lost City of Z, but am saving those up for the presentation I’m doing for in Amsterdam later this month.

Great Balance, Little Editorializing

Throughout The Lost City of Z, Grann maintains an admirable balance in the way he moves from past to present and from subject to subject. Even, whimsically enough, temperature variation is achieved in an interesting way. Grann provides the account of a polar explorer, James Murray, joining one of Fawcett’s Amazon expeditions at just the right moment. For any reader getting perhaps a little overheated and claustrophobic from the jungle descriptions will appreciate how Murray’s appearance conjures up by association barren, frozen landscapes. The resulting compare-contrast of Antarctic versus Amazon expeditions exemplifies the brilliance of the book. (Did Fawcett really believe in the City of Z or did he have to have a Z because he didn’t have a South Pole as an objective?)

Grann rarely editorializes, letting the reader connect the dots or form their own opinion. He allows Fawcett to inhabit the center of the book in an almost enigmatic fashion; I can’t say that the more we know about him the more we learn about him. But we better understand the context surrounding him.

Along the way, Grann mentions in passing events like Theodore Roosevelt’s own 1914 Amazon expedition and the grandiose shipping of a prefabricated opera house up the Amazon that that became the focus of a film by Herzog. These footnotes to Grann’s narrative have a rich and interesting history of their own that’s worth exploring. He also provides interesting detail on the commercialization of expeditions, which, after all, needed sponsorship and in Fawcett’s day were underwritten by newspapers and sometimes corporations. Perhaps the most telling detail is the would-be rescuer of Fawcett who fails but, on the basis of his notoriety, comes out of the jungle with a contract to be a spokesperson for a popular laxative.

Fawcett’s Contradictions

Early on, Fawcett goes to explorer school, presumably with other explorers. There they learn skills like how to “make pillows out of mud.�� It’s a rather remarkable contradiction: a bunch of idiosyncratic, curmudgeonly explorer-types taking courses in their craft. You wonder how much of that actually translated to useful information in the jungle and how many times Fawcett was cursing his training or ignoring it. Did he ever make a pillow out of mud while in South America?

As the book progresses, Fawcett either changes or the inherent issues with his approach just become clearer. During the show, the claim was made that Fawcett changed along the way. But it could be argued that he just became more of the person he already was, accelerate by his horrific World War I experience.

He was, if I have to generalize, driven, unsympathetic to those not on board with his goals, and blind to the cost to others of his objectives. The modern explorers using fly-overs to map jungle and the accompanying philosophy began to mark Fawcett as a relic, changing Fawcett by virtue of a new context in which he and his ilk seemed distant from modern approaches of the time.

By the end of the book, I realized I didn’t have sympathy toward Fawcett or a lack of sympathy. He seemed simply to be a living embodiment of those stone formations that other explorers in the book keep mistaking for the work of human beings. He just is, and if everyone else sees El Dorado instead of something random, then they too are a little bit to blame. This is in part because of the way the mythology around a person calcifies over time and partially because Fawcett seems to have a secret center he just won’t let anyone see into.

After a certain point Fawcett’s “evidence�� devolves into talismans that have no scientific value but that he holds onto and believes in to instill belief in others. Grann even reports that Fawcett may have used a Ouija board in his decision-making process. After his disappearance, wife Nina turns to spiritualism and you have a sense that it’s not just as a way of finding her husband but because it allows her to be close to the things her husband had been interested in.

�� Fact/Fiction, Science and Pseudo Science

One other fascinating element is the confusion of fact and fiction that occurs as a result of the time period and the way Fawcett’s myth builds in the public eye. At beginning of The Lost City of Z, Grann makes a point of chronicling how Western fiction adventure stories speculate in wildly fantastical and science-fictional ways on the hidden mysteries of the world, including the Amazon region. Some of these stories are even written by one of Fawcett’s relatives.

But by tale’s end, as Fawcett continues to remain missing, a wealth of rumor and outrageous speculation builds up around the man that eclipses the fiction. This culminates in outrageous stories spun as fact or potential fact. In one case, there are even stories that Fawcett found Z and it turned out to be a portal to another world. In the absence of closure, the human imagination will supply an answer—and in some cases, the believers even congregate near where they think this portal exists. To them, this conclusion has been reached by a process of some sort of logic or believability. In the reality most of us live in, it’s not credible.

But also interwoven into The Lost City of Z is the link between modern science and spiritualism—including the fascinating fact that the invention of the telegraph and telephone seemed to make certain aspects of communication with the dead appear possible. In other words, advances in science allowed people to make a logical leap to mainstreaming the uncanny. And interwoven with that is a clear point about the unsound science by which Fawcett’s own culture judged the Indians who lived in the Amazon.

At the time, there was seemingly clear proof that Indians were inferior, even if Fawcett in his encounters with individual Indians admired them and find them superior to or the equals of Europeans. This in a context where Fawcett and others were engaging in a form of witchcraft in their scientific endeavors. And in the further modern context in which we can see that Indian “soft tech”—the kinds of adaptations to an environment that seek less to impose than to make use of—was far superior to European soft tech, if also embedded in similar kinds of rituals.

In short, The Lost City of Z contains as much pseudoscience used as an underpinning of action and decision-making as actual science. Systems of thought and ritual seen as forward-thinking and logical at the time come up against a context in which neither of those qualities hold up to a truthful interrogation.

The relevance of this contradiction is that it is still going on today. As much as we have made advances in science, they are asymmetrical and more fact-based in some areas than in others. In certain areas our own biases still create a dysfunction between an objective and subjective state in research. (For example, animal behavior science has, for the longest time, lagged behind, and the truest and most interesting elements of it still have a negligible effect on public policy.)

So the question becomes: What was the extent to which Fawcett was a magnificent outlier to systems of modern science and received ideas about scientific fact? And to what extent might the mix of science and pseudo-science he represents be slightly less of an outlier than it appears? And what does that mean to our philosophy of life in a period where global warming has made the future more uncertain than ever before?

Recommended Books

There wasn’t time on the show, but I’d like to recommend three books as of interest to anyone who has read The Lost City of Z and enjoyed it.

provides a harrowing account, in novel form, of Teddy Roosevelt’s expedition down the Amazon in 1914. The writing is gorgeous and the characterization first-rate.

collects his brilliant essays on lost spaces, invisible cities, forgotten islands, and feral places. Again and again, Bonnett examines why we find the unknown fascinating, what an unexplored horizon means to the human psyche, and other topics that come up in The Lost City of Z.

may be mad-cap expedition adventure fiction set in the Victorian era, but it’s also a sobering and fascinating exploration of the battle between science and superstition.

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Ann and I are now in the process of reading for The Big Book of Science Fiction for Vintage, which will appear in 2016. This huge anthology of well over 500,000 words will collect the best and most unusual SF stories from approximately 1900 to 2000. This requires a lot of reading and research. Every so often I will report back about current reading, although not in any systematic way. In fact, almost deliberately not in a systematic way.

When you read for a big anthology, you become a little obsessed with being complete in tracking down “the good stuff.�� The definition of “the good stuff�� varies for every editor, but for us it tends to be international fiction, fiction that falls between the cracks of “mainstream�� and “genre,�� and choices that don’t come from the expected sources. That search is, of course, in the context of re-evaluating the classics in a category, in this case science fiction, and anchoring the anthology with the Usual Suspects who are indeed the Usual Suspects because their fiction is excellent.

The search for the good stuff doesn’t always lead to what you’re looking for, even if it often leads you to something great. Take these three anthologies: The Big Aiiieeee!: An Anthology of Chinese American and Japanese American Literature, Surrealist Subversions: Rants, Writings & Images by the Surrealist Movement in the United States, and Modanizumu: Modernist Fiction From Japan, 1913-1938. I spent a fair amount of my time last week reading just about every bit of fiction and nonfiction in these books, all the while thinking to myself “Please for the love of God, let there be a fucking spaceship in one of these stories.�� Just a little spaceship, nothing spectacular. Just a hint of something extraterrestrial going on, maybe. Anything that will give me an excuse to bring it to Ann for further investigation.

But as far as I can tell, there are no spaceships and no aliens in any of these anthologies—although Modanizumu does contain “The Town of Cats�� by Hagiwara Sakutaro, which we used for our The Weird compendium. (In the same anthology, there is a store that sells stars in Inagaki Taruho’s “A Shop that Sells Stars,�� but alas the star-selling is relegated to a paragraph near the very end and seems almost incidental to the story in general.)

As anthologists, Ann and I want to create an experience that is focused while being broad and deep. We don’t want to do that by extending the boundaries of a category so far that the category becomes meaningless. At the same time, we don’t want to adhere to former borders where they seem narrow, unnecessarily constraining, or based on incomplete maps.

In reading these three anthologies, different feelings warred within me. First, there was the frustration at not finding the aforementioned SF element, which is entirely due to inhabiting the role and function of “anthologist.�� When on the hunt, you become excitable and jubilant when quarry is near. But second came the burgeoning satisfaction from reading three wonderful anthologies and allied with that was the all-encompassing contentment from learning something new—much of which is useful to me as a writer, too.

Often, then, the discontent at not being able to advance your primary goal is erased, sometimes obliterated, by the fact that you’ve gained something else entirely. As an anthologist, it’s extremely valuable to gain additional context and layering about the world of fiction. For example, the ways in which Modanizumu touches on the edge of speculative fiction from time to time means that when the editors give readers an education on the origins of modernist fiction in Japan, and its development, that gives me a greater arsenal of ways to read fiction, or, to put it another way, let texts better teach me how to read them. It may even be of use in contextualizing the Japanese science fiction stories that we’re in the process of reading from other sources. And the anthology definitely contains a lot of dark fiction, which may be of use for future anthologies.

The Big Aiiieeeee!’s commitment to extensive nonfiction in addition to its fiction, meanwhile, gave me a much clearer idea of certain aspects of the Chinese-American and Japanese-American experience, while also creating a kind of conversation with a prior great read, the novel I Hotel by Karen Yamashita. (I Hotel doesn’t really have a lick of spec fic in it either, although it boldly experiments with form and voice.) It also just has some really great stories. In some ways, it was almost a relief to read a lot of mainstream realism after having glutted myself on so much science fiction just prior to picking up these books—and to experience a different kind of organization to an anthology, a structure that was itself informative.

Surrealist Subversions, which I had read some of before, crystalized the idea of how important it is to have an awareness of context and layering outside of the parameters of whatever project you’re working on. It’s this anthology, with its feminist and sometimes intersectional underpinnings, that made it so clear that at some point down the road someone needs to do a comprehensive feminist anthology that partakes equally of fantastical/speculative stories and of the surreal and of mainstream realism. Such an anthology would include feminist pulp and hard SF for a fairly long historical period, perhaps 50 or 100 years. (Perhaps that anthology already exists, but I’m too busy reading these 500 anthos right here to find it in this moment.) In the meantime, Surrealist Subversions is a fascinating look at a non-realist fiction tradition and community that has only slightly brushed up against the science fiction and fantasy communities over the years since the 1960s.

There weren’t any damn spaceships in Surrealist Subversions, either, but I’d hardly say it was a waste of my time. In fact, you could say what presumption, in searching for spaceships or other such element. What presumption in having to adhere to these categories in the first place, to place such a value on one thing over another, when there are so many other ways in which fictions speak to each other.

Yet, alas and to its glory, editing an anthology is all about eventually presuming. So we will presume to continue our quixotic quest for fucking spaceships, looking far and wide, come spring and even come summer. Eventually, in June, a book will cohere, assemble, and become clear…but the Anthologies Without Spaceships will not be forgotten.

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This summer, Ann and I will teach a Wonderbook workshop at the ��(Faculty Session II).��Ostensibly it’s for science fiction and fantasy, but really just literature of the imagination in general. In other words, even if you have a manuscript that’s not fantastical in some way, we wouldn’t mind seeing you there. The manuscript is only one component in our unique approach.

The workshop will use writing exercises, lecture, and discussion. Critique will largely occur before the sessions and any manuscript analysis be conducted in the one-on-one sessions after each morning session. During the workshop, you will use your manuscript as the catalyst or jumping off point for some of the exercises. The process will give you new insight into characterization, structure, and scenes–in the context of your own work.

Participants will need to acquire Wonderbook and will need to be willing to write longhand in class. You’ll also have access to materials and images that weren’t included in Wonderbook. And we’ll field any and all writing questions the last day and in one-on-one sessions.

If you’re not familiar with Wonderbook, it’s the world’s first fully illustrated creative writing guide–you can find out more .

Together, Ann VanderMeer and I have over 60 years of teaching experience. We believe strongly in understanding what you’re trying to do with your writing and helping you achieve what you want to achieve. (Rather than pushing one particular approach.) You’ll also have my view as a writer and Ann’s as an award-winning editor. And, it’s fun!

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Now that I’ve got your attention…here’s , which includes Annihilation but also a bunch of really fascinating titles, some of which I haven’t read. Also some nice design featured.

Even if you are watching the Super Bowl, you could do worse than spend half-time listening to��NPR’s To The Best of Our Knowledge, which with Sofia Samatar, Nnedi Okorafor, Lauren Beukes, and Claudia Rankine, and more. In their last hour, they which includes an interview about the Southern Reach novels.

Nnedi talked more about her novel Lagoon , about autobiography in SF/Fantasy. Also featuring Lauren Beukes.

If none of that floats your boat, I strongly suggest you check out Broad City, which is available on Cable on-demand. An amazing, hilarious show that’s kind of what Girls could’ve been, with more zany.

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Ann and I are now in the process of reading for The Big Book of Science Fiction for Vintage, which will appear in 2016. This huge anthology of well over 500,000 words will collect the best and most unusual SF stories from approximately 1900 to 2000. This requires a lot of reading and research. Every so often I will report back about current reading, although not in any systematic way. In fact, almost deliberately not in a systematic way.

In this case, all quotes are from Nebula Award Stories 16, edited by Jerry Pournelle, published in 1982.

Stories included, all from 1980:

“Grotto of the Dancing Deer�� by Clifford D. Simak; “Ginungagap�� by Michael Swanwick; “The Unicorn Tapestry�� by Suzy McKee Charnas; “Rautavaara’s Case�� by Philip K. Dick; “The Ugly Chickens�� by Howard Waldrop; “Secrets of the Heart�� by Charles L. Grant.

[Nebula Awards ballot .]

From Jerry Pournelle’s introduction:

“Campbell groomed a lot of writers…It was a traditional route, and it worked, but it depended, more than we knew, on editors like Campbell and Gold. But now it’s 1981, and Mr. Campbell is dead and Horace Gold has retired; and no one has come forward to replace them. Maybe no one can…But for whatever reason, there are few magazine editors working closely with new writers. One exception to that rule is my editorial assistant, John Carr��.He doesn’t get to work with very many new writers, because we don’t buy many original stories [for our other anthologies]; but more than once we’ve received stories that aren’t good enough to publish—one was plain awful—but which show unmistakable signs of talent. They must be rejected, of course, but I’ve watched John Carr write nine-page encouraging letters. One result of John’s editorial work was that a writer got a cover illustration for his first published story. I wish that could happen more often; but we can’t do it, and not many others seem to be interested in trying.��

“This is a strange field. I’m editing the Nebula Awards volume, and there’s almost no chance that I’ll ever win a Nebula. There’s a fair chance that when I’m old and gray they’ll vote me a Grand Master, but I doubt I’ll ever write a story that wins.��

“It’s traditional for the Nebula editor to write about science fiction as literature, but I can’t do that. I don’t know much about literature.��

“Alas, it didn’t take long for the [Nebula] awards to become ‘controversial.�� There were accusations of lobbying and vote-swapping. Writers were accused of voting without reading all the contenders; other writers were castigated because they never voted at all. Each year’s Nebula Awards Ceremony saw one or another writer walk out in disagreement with the rules. Each year’s annual meeting saw introduced a resolution abolishing the awards.�� [in a context of believing the awards have gone to “very good�� stories]

From Michael Glyer’s report on SF fandom, “Whatever Weirdness Lingers��:

“Always before [at the Hugo Awards], Lin Carter had taken the stage to announce the Gandalf winner. Not in 1980. Carter was absent, and no trophy was on hand. When no one associated with the award appeared, Harlan Ellison and master of ceremonies Robert Silverberg improvised some zaniness and rescued the ceremony from an awkward moment. Was Carter’s absence a protest of what went on at the business meeting, fans wondered. Apparently not, as the available evidence showed no one had even manufactured [the] trophy.��

“Fandom contains as diverse a variety of people as ever: space technologists, strategic weapons specialists, computer programmers, students, filmmakers, unemployed, medical doctors, tax protesters, and endless teenagers…One of Norman Spinrad’s many attacks on fandom appeared in a January 1981 Publishers Weekly: ‘In part to blame for the frivolous label attached to SF are the egregiously visible bands of fans,�� Spinrad believes. ‘These are the groups done up in bizarre attire and behavior that cluster together at frequent cons�� [They’re] largely responsible for whatever weirdness lingers around science fiction.

“In American society, science fiction offers enough of the whole cloth to costume every popular myth. Nowhere is this more literally true than at a science fiction convention. With distant echoes of Simon and Garfunkel, some fans are still looking for America, in long hair, beards, Levi’s with guitar in hand, quietly sharing grass in an upstairs room. Ironically, at the same time in another room, former Young Republicans smoke of the same leaf and echo a ‘Hallejulah Chorus�� now that Reagan has won.

“Except for the probability that Spinrad meant to condemn them all, either group might agree to look askance at the costume selection of some young fans appearing at recent conventions. Stimulated by the imagery of Star Wars, the number of jackboot-and-leather-vest wearers has increased, in parallel with khaki-clad mercenaries with plastic mortars and aluminum copies of submachine guns. These fantasies of violence are not to be confused with those in reality who poke a shotgun out of the window of a moving Chevy and murder a rival gang member. The latter are unarguably malicious. But one can speculate that what a fifteen-to-twenty-year-old wants, either in a gang or in a paramilitary costume, is a sense of mission in the world, and recognition. At a convention, this is basically innocent.�� [from there, the report goes on to acknowledge “at least one behavior problem involving a sword�� per con and the presence of fake weapons soliciting the attentions of a SWAT team at the Disclave con]

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From Bill Warren’s article ��1980: The Year in Fantastic Films,�� which includes analysis of The Empire Strikes Back, Altered States, Saturn 3, Flash Gordon, and more.

[“SFWA used to award a Nebula for Best Dramatic Production. I ought to know; I invented it…A few years later, SFWA, by a narrow vote, abolished the category. Two reasons were given. The first appealed to the cheese-paring faction: the Nebula trophy costs over a hundred dollars and a Best Dramatic Production trophy won’t often go to an SFWA member. Better to put that money into SFWA parties.�� �� from Pournelle’s intro to the movie article]

“Of the two new characters in [The Empire Strikes Back], dramatically and technically Yoda is a triumph. Yoda is, in fact, a Muppet. The voice and manipulator of Miss Piggy and Fozzie Bear, Frank Oz, also manipulates and vocalizes Yoda, and his is an Oscar-worthy performance…The other new character, Lando Calrissian, is much less interesting. In this case, the failing is less that of the script than of Billy Dee Williams, who, as Lando, is largely charmless. Whatever the real reason for casting a black actor as Lando, George Lucas…could have found a more appealing performer. Sidney Poitier, Glyn Turman, James Earl Jones (in body), and Harry Belafonte are not only more appealing than Williams, but are better actors.��

“There were some good things about [Flash Gordon]. As Ming the Merciless, Max Von Sidow is so fine that he sails over the arch lines he was given. While others in the cast read their lines as they meant this silly drivel to be taken at face value.��

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From Aldys Budry’s essay “What Did 1980 Mean?��

“Science fiction proceeds in steps, or seems to. In hindsight, we identify a Golden Age of what was then called Modern Science Fiction, from roughly 1939 to 1949. Noting that John W. Campbell, Jr., its founder, assumed editorial direction of Astounding Stories in 1937, we can postdate a period beginning with Hugo Gernsback in 1929 in which ‘scientifiction�� evolved, via ‘superscience stories,�� into ‘science fiction.�� In 1950 we find Galaxy magazine emerging; by 1951 a whole new generation of writers, prominently featuring Robert Sheckley, Philip K. Dick, William Tenn, James Blish, Cyril Kornbluth, and Frederik Pohl, is well on its way to creating what might be called Post-Modernist science fiction. The early 1960s saw the flourishing of England’s ‘New Wave,�� which has since become everyone’s wave, just as each previous one of these short generations still flourishes within us.��

“��1971 to 1980 was the Women’s Decade, with all that that implies. A majority of the important new novelists were female, representing an unprecedented situation when one considers that for many years it had been politic for women SF writers to hide behind nominally male bylines, and even so, there had not been all that many of them.��

“…when the SFWA membership—as distinguished from prominent SF community articulators—is polled for its opinion on the year’s best, there is a spontaneous tacit recognition that general literary standards fall short of encompassing all the excellences possible to SF…It may be that all literatures in some way find their ultimate validation not in their prose but in the social hopes they sustain. It may be; in SF, the possibility seems more clearly visible than anywhere else. SF is not intrinsically just another sort of Western or crime story [but] a separate literature, for all that it shares with all other literatures the property of containing much that inept, cynical, or shortfallen. The Nebula Awards and this anthology are testimony that nevertheless it is capable of unique and effective literary attainments. And that, in a sense, is what 1980 meant.��

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Over at The Atlantic’s website, . It’s a kind of tell-all and as such that comes with certain risks.

Revealing weakness or eccentricity can influence a reader who then goes on to read the novels. Being candid about the life of a full-time writer—which is both fraught with uncertainty and one of the best jobs you can have—is also dangerous, especially when many��think book tours don’t happen any more and that most writers self-publish. Encountering a narrative suggesting that traditional publishing is still going strong can be bracing. Encountering a narrative suggesting that you can be a full-time writer can be bracing, too. (Full disclosure: I’ve been full-time since 2007, but sometimes made my living from editing anthologies and writing nonfiction, and until recently I supported only myself, with a firewall between my finances and my wife’s finances—for her protection.)

The issue of all three novels being published in one year led off a New York Times article on “binge reading,�� which raises the question, too, of “binge writing.�� Yet any writer will tell you that you can spend a decade writing a bad novel and nine months writing a good one. Depends on the situation and the novel. In my case, I was lucky to have more uninterrupted time to work on the Southern Reach than ever before,��if in a slightly compressed number of months. Although not mentioned in the essay, I was given additional time, too, during the editing phase. FSG was kind enough to let me make substantial changes long after the proof pages would be locked down in a simple proof-read. That, and a disciplined day-to-day writing schedule—something that in its sheer repetition doesn’t make for good reading in an essay—brought me through and meant the novels as-published are exactly as I meant for them to be.

Along the way,����I had really amazing editing from Sean McDonald�� and great support from everyone over at FSG. Publicist Alyson Sinclair was amazing, too. When you know you have that kind of support, it makes the writing and revising very easy. You’re willing to take more risks and you relax into the writing. It also helped that I had a partner in my wife, Ann, with whom I could discuss scenes in progress and novel drafts when finished. She also took a lot of other projects off of my plate, meaning she did almost all the work on our time travel anthology and took over management of other book projects, too.

I’m also truly blessed and fortunate that so very many��readers have embraced the Southern Reach trilogy.��So, what the hell��?��It’s certainly in the tradition of my usual “debriefings,�� including about City of Saints and Madmen. (Thanks to the Atlantic for their enthusiasm, too–really great people over there.).

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We are editing The Big Book of Science Fiction for Vintage and would like to solicit your��ideas between now and the end of March of this year. This is a massive anthology of more than 500,000 words scheduled for 2016 publication.

As we conduct our own research, we would love your own recommendations. We know readers of SF are passionate about what they read. You can��email��us at [email protected].��Due to expected volume of emails, we cannot reply but rest assured we will read all recommendations. Please read this entire post before sending us a recommendation. - Ann and Jeff VanderMeer

–The Big Book of Science Fiction will publish short stories��originally published during��the period 1900 to 2000.

–We define short story as any work of fiction under 10,000 words. Works��under 6,000 words will have the best chance.

–We define “science fiction�� very broadly, from realistic hard SF all the��way to surreal material��with a science fiction flavor. This includes what might be called “science fiction myths.�� However, we do not define SF as including traditional��stories about ghosts, zombies, werewolves, vampires, unicorns, etc.

–Whether recommending the stories of others or your own work, please provide: the title of the story, the author’s name, the date of original publication and the publication source.��

��A sentence or two��describing the story and author would be helpful–as well as why you are recommending the story.��You may make multiple recommendations in one email, but whether single or multiple please list at least the author last names in the subject line of the email.

��If recommending your own work, please limit yourself to three stories.

–As possible, attach a scan, PDF, Word, or RTF document of the story. If the story is online, a link is sufficient.

–We are very interested in international SF originally written in English.

–We are very interested in��existing translations of international SF originally published in a language other than English. (In such cases, the date of original publication, not the translation date, must fall between 1900 and 2000.)

–We are very interested in commissioning a limited number of new translations. We would love recommendations if you read in a language other than English and have encountered a mind-blowing story. (We have translator resources in place already.)

��If the story appeared in a Nebula Award reprint anthology,��or an anthology edited by Judith Merril, Michael Moorcock,��David Hartwell, Damon Knight, Kathryn Cramer, or Robert Silverberg, we are probably already aware of it.

–Keep in mind that we are already aware of the best fiction by iconic writers like Ursula K. Le Guin and Ray Bradbury.

Thank you in advance for sharing your opinions–we appreciate your time. We wish we could reply to all emails. However, we will be in touch if we have questions or further interest.

(Art by , just ’cause we love his work.)

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Origins Magazine asked Ann and me what makes a relationship work. Ann said plenty of drugs while I’m talking helps and $$ penalties for putting up with my stupid. Or maybe we both said laughter goes a long way long-term. As does mutual respect and sharing the same passion for certain things.

Here’s a photo from a recent workshop we ran that demonstrates that wearing serious hats is of use, too.

It also doesn’t hurt that Ann’s smart, cute, hilarious, and much better with a tool kit than I am.

Anyway, and it’s kinda cool to be featured as one of their top couples. (Thanks, Nancy H., for recommending us, and thanks to Francesca Myman, who took the photo that’s in the mag.)

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I can’t even tell you what it feels like to box up the entire Southern Reach trilogy–every last major draft, print-out and handwritten scrawl, every notebook and scrap of scribbled inspiration. But it’s done because it needs to get out of the house and into storage just as a de-cluttering issue. And after I took this photo I found another box full of Annihilation drafts I’d forgotten about. A total of three years of work including touring behind the novels–the proverbial blood, sweat and tears.

A fair number of notes and scene fragments are written on torn-out pages from an advance copy of Colson Whitehead’s Zone One. Loved the novel, but found myself in a situation where I had no paper and needed to write some stuff down. And, yes, there are also some notes written on leaves, while I was out hiking and ran out of anything to write on. (I’ve written a behind-the-scenes tell-all that will appear some place very cool in the next couple of weeks.)

I’m happy to have tamed this monstrosity–if I’d left it longer, I think Area X would’ve formed in my office. Here’s what it looked like yesterday:

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