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One nice thing about being home for a while–I finally got around to shelving some of my favorite books, into one bookcase of awesome. Certain publishers and imprints I collect because I know that most everything they produce I’ll gobble up. Ranks and ranks of Dedalus anthologies of international fiction, along with decadent novels. Great European lit from the 20th and 21st century from Europa. That often eccentric mix from NYRB Classics that I enjoy so much–a willingness to publish a lot of things that are more surreal, existing somewhere between Dedalus and Europa. Along with the rather stunning Penguin reissues of classic supernatural fiction.

The Tartarus shelf, with miscellaneous sundries hanging off the edges, is a deceptively simple-looking arrangement, given that those dust jackets hide some rather amazing designs on the boards. If you’re not familiar with Tartarus editions, you have to check them out. The best of uncanny fiction, selected by experts.

Subterranean editions of Thomas Ligotti’s fiction, a smattering of Dalkey, foregrounded by as much Aira as I could load up on from New Directions, giving way to Archipelago and then Semiotext(e).

A more random shelf, anchored by the massive Centipede Press megaliths on the far right. If I were to try to make any of these collections complete, I’d bankrupt myself, but I’m happy to have them all in one bookcase at least. Now, I just have to find time to alphabetize it all. And figure out where to put these latest editions, which just this second arrived, courtesy of a favorite indie bookseller, Ziesing Books.

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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.

“Along with everything else he has to do to make his story believable and intelligible, the science fictioneer has to name his not-yet-invented things and methods, so the reader will recognize them. How shall he go about it? Well, he can use logic. It works sometimes…For example, you probably didn’t know that television and TV were first used in a magazine called The World Today back in 1907! Yet engineers and researchers persisted in calling it distant electric vision until halted by popular usage. Cellophane could also have been coined by the same classically educated writer; it comes from cella, small room, plus phanein, to appear, to seem. Instead, however, authors all settled on glassite as the term for transparent plastics, which did not survive. So much for logic; it’s not how things get named these days.� � from H. L. Gold’s introduction to The Weird Ones anthology, 1962

“…it is now clear that there is still plenty to argue about. The reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement, for instance, said we could certainly agree that science fiction stands or falls by ‘style.� Oh no we wouldn’t…Hostile critics will generally except Jules Verne from their strictures; indeed, it is a favourite sneer of theirs to lament the failures of his successors. [But beyond disagreements about characterization and style in SF] A final homely analogy. A mint julep is not a more subtle and complex glass of bourbon, nor is a bourbon a classically simple and authoritative version of the vulgarly prettified mint julep. Such associations perhaps befit what we intend, for our critics, as a plea for tolerance, real tolerance, nothing less than thinking again.� � from the introduction to Spectrum 5 edited by Kingsley Amis and Robert Conquest, 1966

“Some time ago most people gave up trying to say what SF was, for all attempts (such as [Kingsley] Amis’s New Maps of Hell) failed miserably to place it, show its common concerns, or explain what it was supposed to ‘do�.� � from Michael Moorcock’s preface to the Langdon Jones�-edited The New SF: An Original Anthology of Modern Speculative Fiction, 1969

“Significantly, what utterly refused to fit in these U.S.-derived categories turned out to be the ethical and philosophical, i.e., the utopian, aspects of Soviet SF.� � from the introduction to Other Worlds, Other Seas: An Anthology of Eastern European Science Fiction, 1970

“The fashionable answer to that question [of the successors of Verne and Wells] is, of course, that there hasn’t been a writer with one hundredth of one percent of Wells� ability since nineteen twenty. But even the briefest study of the output of more modern SF novelists shows this attitude to be nonsensical, if not merely snobbish. No, the real problem is one of sources, and its solution lies in the fact that the type of fiction generally produced by SF writers doesn’t originate with H.G. Wells and Jules Verne at all. It was developed from the work of Beatrix Potter…Influenced heavily by The Wind in the Willows and tempered by the outlook of the Wizard of Oz, this new fiction…has to do with comfort: the repetition of form and content [with] careful rationalization of any change in the status quo.� � from M. John Harrison’s essay “The Literature of Comfort,� New Worlds Quarterly #1, 1971

“Science fiction has been standing neck-deep in bullshit for so long that some of its practitioners have come to accept that condition as more than just a fact of life—in some mysterious way the bullshit has been transmuted into a necessity, the argument being that we need all that bullshit around us in order to recognize quality when it floats to the top. That argument itself is part of the bullshit we have to cope with.� � from David Gerrold’s introduction to his anthology Alternities, dubbed “All New Electrifying Stories of Original Science Fiction!�, 1974

“…we all see the future through the spectacles provided by our own culture. Our reasoning is filtered through the things we hate about our culture, and the things we approve, and a host of other things we accept as given without question.� � from the introduction to Nebula Award Stories Nine: The World’s Best Science Fiction Stories of the Year, edited by Kate Wilhelm, 1975

“To be sure, the western has its occasional A.B. Guthrie, and science fiction its rare Ray Bradbury, and they are very good indeed; but we have yet to produce our Proust of the prairie, our Stendhal of the starways…It seems more likely, however, that both western and science fiction will be things of the past in another hundred years or so…As we escape further in time from our frontier heritage and our landscape is further eroded, polluted, and submerged in the spreading megalopolis, and the Indian is at last no longer isolated on his reservation, who will be left to sing of sagebrush and sixgun? [As for SF] It will no longer be fiction when we have colonized the star system and set foot on those now seemingly inaccessible planets orbiting the distant stars.� � Joseph Elder, 1976, introduction to the anthology The Farthest Reaches, 1976

“Regarded with a slightly pessimistic eye, this string of winners and runners-up over the twelve-year period since the Awards were begun could look to be a result of a series of favorable accidents—accidents so favorable, in fact, that it would seem to be flying in the face of statistics to expect they would continue.� � from the introduction to Nebula Winners Twelve: The World’s Best Science Fiction Stories of the Year, edited by Gordon R. Dickson, 1978

“Does it matter in which language the good SF story has been written? Does it really matter at all, as long as it is a good SF story? Why, of course it does! The language makes all the difference in the world. Have you read any good SF stories written in Hungarian, Serbo-Croatian, Hebrew, etc., lately? Probably not, unless it just so happens that one of these languages is your mother tongue. And it is not for lack of good SF stories in those languages. At least, I suspect it isn’t; I wouldn’t know; I’ve never read a good SF story in Hungarian, Hebrew, etc. Or any kind of story, for that matter. It’s simply that I can’t read the languages. I depend on translations. There are next to none of those.â€� â€� Krsto A. MažuraniÌýfrom the foreword to The Penguin World Omnibus of Science Fiction edited by Brian Aldiss and Sam J. Lundwall, 1986.

“I would not wish to say that everything in the meat-and-potatoes cuisine of storytelling is ignoble; but at the very least SF should be permitted to be as innovative as contemporary fiction tries to be. Admittedly, much experimentation fails, but so does much conventional storytelling. ‘My books are water,� Mark Twain once said, ‘and everyone drinks water,� Mark Twain said. Good enough; but who expects to find water in their wine bottles.� � from the introduction to Synergy: New Science Fiction, volume 3, edited by George Zebrowski, 1988

“Bloodchild was [Octavia] Butler’s second story sale to Isaac Asimov’s SF Magazine; her first…had already won her a Hugo Award the previous year, but Bloodchild was to prove even more popular, going on to win both the Hugo and Nebula Award. Bloodchild was another controversial story. In my headnote for it in The Year’s Best Science Fiction I wrote, ‘Here’s as powerful a story as you’re likely to see this (or any other) year,� and although IAsfm lost a few subscribers over it, it was more than worth it.� � Gardner Dozois, story note for “Bloodchild� reprint in The Best of Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, 1988

>>Coda: Most bizarre idea found in the week’s fiction reading�that Audubon speculated that the disappearance of birds might not be due to humans hunting them and destroying their habitat; instead, Scott Russell Sanders in “The Audubon Effect� (collected in The Sixth Omni Book of Science Fiction, 1989) speculates that birds may have achieved warp drive and “winked out� in mid-flight to find themselves on other planets.

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Eye on Design , including comments from Corral.ÌýI think the cover’s probably the best I’ve ever had for a book–simple yet complex, and daring from a commercial standpoint. There’s great attention to detail,Ìýstarting withÌýthe deliberate juxtaposition of a natural element and an element in orange that suggestions caution/danger and something human-made. The play of shadows from the leaves against the orange stripe adds a three-dimensional aspect. The treatment on the spine continues a theme both of taking risks and a certain playfulness. It’s no wonder the New York Times chose as one of its covers of the year.

As someone who has been the art director for an indie press and who also usually has a say-so in the creation of covers of my books it’s been a great joy to, quite frankly, be relegated to giving comments like “looks wonderful!� That’s a sentiment that extends to the marvelous trade paperbacks designed by Charlotte Strick with art by Eric Nyquist, and all of the rather ridiculously excellent foreign editions. Sometime soon it might be time to create a slideshow with all of them.

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Having finished co-writing an introduction to our anthology Sisters of the Revolution (May 2015) with Ann andÌýwriting an intro to an upcoming Thomas Ligotti reprint (Songsâ€� and Grimscribe) from Penguin Classics, I’m engaged in a lot of reading. A fair amount of this reading is in some way applicable to Borne, the new novel I’m working on, but it’s never really possible to know what a new book will spark.

Currently, I’ve got three groupings of books on the table. Group 2 is current fiction, mostly short story collections, and Group 3 is comprised of reading for The Big Book of SF we’re putting together for Vintage. (One hundred years of science fiction, from roughly 1900 to 2000.)

Group 1, pictured above, could be loosely framed as an exploration ofÌýhuman irrationality and a study of violence. (A kind of Group 1-a subset consists of William Vollman’s seven-volume treatise on violence and a Group 1-b subset consists of his book Imperial.)

The Kills by Richard House is a re-read of selected passages that speaks to my current main focus, The Senate Intelligence Committee Report on Torture. The two books share points of commonality, not least of which is how each, one in fiction and one in horrifying nonfiction, speaks to dys/functional fictional narratives let loose in what we think of as reality. If you’ve read both books, the semi-parallel between the sociopathsÌýSWIGERT & DUNBAR in the committee report and the myth of Mr. Rabbit & Mr. Wolf in “The Killâ€� section of The Kills isÌýinteresting to ponder.

From there it’s a short distance to travel, fromÌýThe Kills’Ì�depictionsÌýof Italy at theÌýend of WWII and theÌýideas set out in John Gray’s Straw Dogs and especially another book by Gray I’m reading, The Silence of Animals. Gray’s ideas are eye-opening to say the least. I’m still processing them, and vaguely thinking of experimenting with a character whose underlying belief system is informed by those ideas. This is not just good for the fiction in question but for a kind of field-testing of them on a personal level.

Cyclonopedia by Reza Negarestani, with its idea of sentient oil and U.S. “asymmetrical engagement with occultures,� seems even more relevant in the context of the report on torture, or, at least, timeless at this point, and useful. A re-read of Cyclonopedia with selections from John Gray and The Corpse Exhibition by Hassan Blasim (another re-read) seems to reveal the outlines of a fictional conspiracy. It is the kind of comprehension that rewires the parts of the brain that seek to tell more unique, or at least different, fictions.

Another current read, Hyperobjects by Timothy Morton, is at the heart of things and at the fringe right now, in terms of how it is messing with my mind. It encompasses everything in the other books, in some sense, and yet is also very specific and tactical in how it seems to apply to thinking about my new novel, Borne. I’m still struck by how elements of the Southern Reach novels mirror the requirements of Morton’s definition of a hyperobject, even though I had not encountered Morton’s work until this year. This is a challenging read for me, and one I’m absorbing slowly.

Meanwhile, the first sixty pages of The Infernal by Mark Doten have been both fascinating and to some extent frustrating. The novel invokes sophisticated uncanny iconography that flows seamlessly from advanced tech and reminds me ofÌýan unholy compromise between Michael Cisco’s novel The Narrator and H.R. Geiger (stripped of his fetishism). On the other hand, the design of theÌýbook evokesÌýa hokey semi-semblanceÌýto the idea of secret files and espionage conspiracy that it would be better off without. In the use of versions of real people like L. Paul Bremer for viewpoint characters the novel’s brazen and bold, but also then makes itself vulnerable to scenes of questionable interior psychodrama that work so hard at the semblance of/adherence to some idea of accuracy of personality that it’s distracting. Even though I admire Doten’s bravery, I don’t know yet if the virtues of this novel will outweigh its liabilities.

One of those liabilities is beyond the author’s control, and it’s rapidly rendering a lot of fiction obsolete. Reality isÌýin someÌýways usurping fiction’s role, even if the audience and the format seem to us asÌýdifferent from where we expect fiction to reside or project from–would a darkly absurdist view of a day in the life of the real L. Paul Bremer be that far removed from a kind of fiction? As an idea of an objective reality continues to fragment and as hyperobjects like global warming get closer to us–closer in the mental sense–the effect is to eclipse certain narratives or to contaminate themÌýso they becomeÌýa different story than the one the author meant to tell. It is impossible at the present moment to know what level of distance in what context will preserve “universal resonanceâ€� in a given fictional text, but a fair amount of fiction is headed for extinction, in this context.

The Senate Intelligence Committee Report on Torture is, in one sense, “merelyâ€� confirmation of what we already knew. Torture is immoral. Torture doesn’t work. Torture deforms not just the victim but the torturer. But on another level, this report is a remarkable account of the creation of a vast fictional narrative (in the grotesque sense). It contains no heroes unless there is something heroic inÌýa clear reportage of atrocity that also reads almost like a novel. But it does include twoÌývillains, who keep popping up almost likeÌýpsychotic agents of chaos–disguised in their true nature because they are clothed with logic in the form of bureaucracy and chain-of-command. SWIGERT & DUNBAR,Ìýwho were contracted to develop the enhanced interrogation techniques.ÌýIn the course of reading the report on torture, it becomes necessary toÌýask if they are indeed villainsÌýin the personal, acting-alone sense or on some psychological level emissaries ofÌýa dark American desire that can’t even really be defined by the word “revenge.â€�

I read an Ian Rankin Rebus novel about addicts in between some of these readings and it seemed pretty upbeat. I pet our cats and took long walks and went to the gym. I looked at pictures of cute baby animals.

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(Note: Today only the U.S. e-books of my novels Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance are deeply discounted everywhere. Also, a reminder that I’ll be participating in of The Lost City of Z on February 6.)

Today I was , which was reprinted by Dedalus late last year.

The Other Side (1908) tellsÌýthe tale of a Dream Kingdom, somewhere in Central Asia. The mysterious and wealthy Patera has had a European city uprooted and brought to its new location, along with sixty-five thousand inhabitants, and named this city Pearl. The narrator, after some hesitation, agrees to visit and travels with there with his wife. Things soon get very strange indeed. The book is a masterpiece of a very precise kind of metaphysical phantasmagoria.

Kubin is a fascinating individual in part due to his amazing art and fiction but also his connections to other well-known creators. He illustrated Edgar Allen Poe’s fiction in its first German edition. He knew Gustav Meyrink and when Meyrink hit a snag in finishing The Golem, Kubin took his preliminary sketches and found ways to use some of them in The Other Side. Kubin also created illustrations for the influential early German SF novel Lesabendio by Paul Scheerbart, among others.

Check back tomorrow at . We’ll be featuring several pieces from the archives.

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I’ll be on NPR’s Science Friday on February 6 talking about their latest book club selection, The Lost City of Z, along with an Egyptologist! I hope you’ll listen in, but in the meantime, check out the SciFri Book Club page .Ìý That includes a free book giveaway from Powell’s.

When I told my wife Ann I’d be on Science Friday, a squee went up that could be heard around the world. She’s a big fan, apparently, which I did not know.

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The New Yorker , and I’m delighted they’ve focused on weird ecologies. I also think this may be the first time they’ve had to explain something like “mushroom dwellerâ€� to a general audience. Anyway, it’s heartening to see them differentiate Area X from the post-apocalypse subgenre and to bring up Timothy Morton, whose latest book I’m currently devouring. The first Morton I’ve read, and it’s truly strange the parallels and similarities with some of the subtext of the Southern Reach novels. And thisÌýall tends to feed into the next novel I’m working on as well.

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Over at The Millions, –some fascinating answers. Anyone who read my over at Electric Literature or for The Globe & Mail knows I loved Richard House’s The Kills–my favorite fiction read of 2014. I also included it over at FSG’s site, where I wrote:

Richard House’s The Kills approximates the general idea of a thriller but the structure of four interlocking short novels makes the reader work to put the story together. (in a good way) The fact that one of the four novels is primarily thematically linked to the other three creates a unique kind of connectivity, and a situation where the entire shape of the story only locks into place on the very last page of the book. It’s not that The Kills just subverts genre tropes-—it’s not actually operating via those tropes, even in how characters enter and leave the narrative, and yet the ghostly outline of thriller expectations still do intercede on the reader’s behalf.Ìý The exquisite tension caused by this ghostly outline, brought to the text by the reader, held me transfixed and admiring as The Kills keeps becoming something different, and something different again.

There are few novels these days that read to me as if the writer understands some of the unique aspects of our modern condition. The Kills is one, Ledgard’s Submergence was another, and The Corpse Exhibition by Hassan Blasim (translated by Jonathan Wright) a third. I believe we’re in an era whereÌýa lot of what we’ve held to be universal or relevant in literature will begin to seem dated and nostalgic. But not these books.

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If you came here via facebook or twitter, please note that while I won’t be on social media much this year, I will be blogging–and those posts should auto-populate to my fb and twitter accounts.



Last week, the Morning News . Annihilation is one of them and, as my editor said, it would be only appropriate for Annie to be knocked out in the first round and come back as a zombie. But we’ll see. It’s one of those situations where you say it’s an honor to be nominated…and you actually mean it. In non-morning news, thanks to Joe at Book People for choosing Area X: The Southern Reach Trilogy as . Thanks also to The Stake for making the publication of the trilogy . You can find highlights of Area X best-of-year honors .

Since the Southern Reach tour ended, I’ve been spending time at home relaxing and reading–and thinking a lot about the next novel, Borne. I tend to take a fair amount of time living with the charactersÌýin my mind before writing a rough draft. But I’ve also made good progress on a draft. Part of that progress is always about what you surround yourself with reading-wise. In this case, Timothy Morton’s Hyperobjects, which Matthew Cheney . I’m also slowly savoring William Vollman’s rather brilliantÌýImperialÌýbefore tackling his 7-volume work on violence–meanwhile devouring Zizek’s much smaller tome on violence, Violence.

Some of this feeds into what I will talk about at the next month. Ostensibly I’m reading from the Southern Reach trilogy and participating in a Q&A, but I’ve decided to preface that with some comments on the ways in which fiction has failed to keep current with what is happening to the world–as well as delineating those pathways and approaches that seem to hold promise.

Speaking of the former, I have to say my most depressing current fiction reading has been in the post-Collapse or mid-Collapse genre–which most commonly now takes the form of a novel in which some virus wipes out all butÌýX percent of the population. Never all but 1 percent, though, since no doubt that would beÌýconfused by reader with The One Percent. Almost inevitably, these novelsÌýreduce down their character listsÌýto a pretty generic and non-representative core sample of the population and proceed to get on with the Nostalgia Show, the longing for the life before–i.e., the unsustainable one we’re living now, which is also a misery for so many–whilst discreetly hiding the bodies of millions and millions somewhere offstage. Incredibly, in most of these books global warming is just a kind of nebulous thing, no hyperobject or true catastropheÌýbut perhaps responsible for some storms and such off in the distance. In any event, real life–and the future we live in right now–is much more effective a critique of this approach than anything I could say here.

On a more pleasant note, there are some books I read over the holidays that I liked quite a bit and I’ll blog about them soon. As Ann and I read and research more for The Big Book of SF (Vintage), I’ll talk about that as well.

In addition to the Amsterdam conference, this spring I’ll be appearing at the University of Buffalo, Tallahassee’s Word of South lit-music festival (with Vernon Reid!), and at MIT. Over the summer Ann and I will teach at the Yale Writers� Conference and at the Shared Worlds teen writing camp. I’ll post a full schedule sometime in the next week.

Outside of that, it appears I’ll probably be on NPR’s Science Friday (February 6) if all goes well and The Atlantic online will be publishing a long tell-all about the story behind the Southern Reach. My interview with Richard House, author of the fantastic novel The Kills, will post at The Millions next week. I’ve also turned in an introduction for Melville House’s edition of the Strugatsky Brothers Dead Mountaineer’s Inn, am working on another intro for a Ligotti reprint from Penguin Classics, and will complete an intro for PM Press’s reprint of Moorcock’s Breakfast in the Ruins later this year as well.

In blurbing news, I’ve been happy to blurb Kelly Link’s forthcoming story collection, Leah Thomas� first novel, and Rikki Ducornet’s latest nonfiction collection.

And, I’ve not really had time to blog about it, but Italian editions of the Southern Reach Trilogy will come out this year. Indonesia, Finnish, and Czech Republic rights recently sold, too–meaning Area X will appear in a total of 22 countries.

And, also, happy to see Jenn Brissett’s Elysium Congrats, Jenn!

Finally, why is there a photo of our cat Neo at the top of this post? Just because.

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(Thanks to for this wonderful photo–and support all year.)



It’s been a ridiculously amazing year for , which included making the New York Times bestseller list and nonstop touring. Now, at year’s end, the trilogy has made over 35 year’s best lists. In addition, Annihilation is a , was a finalist for the Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ Choice Awards, and is . I also made Waterstones Booksellersâ€� and the cover of the Area X omnibus from FSG .

Perhaps the most exciting best-of list to make was , along with , Amazon’s top 100, Buzzfeed’s Top 24, ±·±Ê¸é.´Ç°ù²µâ€™s favorites, Gawker’s best reads, HuffPo’s best,ÌýGlobe & Mail, and the Los Angeles Timesâ€� 2014 recommended reading. But you’ll find a selection of those year’s best lists below—in case you’re looking to spend some post-holidays gift-card money on books. You’ll find some great stuff on these lists. (Perhaps the most perplexing to me:Ìýmaking Slate’s . I’m grateful, but it seemed to me you could hardly walk a block through the book culture this year without tripping over the Southern Reach.)

My own year’s best lists can be found over at Electric Literatureâ€� and . I also and to FSG’s survey . In addition, I wrote about . (You can findÌýthe restÌýof my nonfiction for the year, give or take a couple,and this . Also check out this flipbook of links and imagesÌýand Ìýand .)

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Best

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