Jeff VanderMeer's Blog, page 5
February 17, 2017
Jeff VanderMeer BORNE Tour Schedule
[image error] (Author photo by Kyle Cassidy)
I’m thrilled to post my book tour schedule for , my new novel out from MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux in hardcover on April 25. has received glowing, starred reviews from Publishers Weekly and Kirkus Reviews, with National Book Award Winner Colson Whitehead providing this great blurb: “Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy was an ever-creeping map of the apocalypse; with Borne he continues his investigation into the malevolent grace of the world, and it’s a thorough marvel.� Paramount and Scott Rudin Productions have acquired the film rights to Borne and the novel made many most-anticipated lists, including from the New York Times.
You can .
“Am I a person?� Borne asked me.“Yes, you are a person,� I told him. “But like a person, you can be a weapon, too.�
In Borne, a young woman named Rachel survives as a scavenger in a ruined city of the future. Rachel ekes out an existence in the shelter of a run-down sanctuary she shares with her partner, Wick, who deals in homegrown psychoactive biotech. One day, Rachel finds Borne during a scavenging mission and takes him home. Borne as salvage is little more than a green lump—plant or animal?—but exudes a strange charisma. There is an attachment she resents: in this world any weakness can kill you. Yet, against her instincts, Rachel keeps Borne. She cannot help herself. Borne, learning to speak, learning about the world, is fun to be with, and in a world so broken that innocence is a precious thing. For Borne makes Rachel see beauty in the desolation around her. She begins to feel a protectiveness she can ill afford. But as Borne grows, he begins to threaten the balance of power in the city and to put her security at risk. For new enemies are creeping in. Soon, Rachel’s world will change forever.
Unless otherwise noted, these events will consist of a reading, discussion, and Q&A, followed by a book signing. Please also , including Houston, Cornell, Sigma Tau Delta conference in Louisville (w/ guests like Marlon James), and DePaul for Earth Day. I will also introduce Ottessa Moshfegh for an HWS event in Geneva, NY.
I hope to see you on the road! I should also note that my wife, the award-wining editor Ann VanderMeer, will be along for the entire tour and will be happy to say hi as well. You can check out the full schedule below and (links below to facebook event pages)
� Best, Jeff
BORNE BOOK TOUR
April 24 @ 7:30 pm, DeKalb Public Library,309 Oak Street
(Sponsored by NIU STEM Outreach, with thanks to DeKalb Public Library and Anderson’s Bookshop)
April 26 @ 7:00 pm, Volumes Book Café, venue TBA
April 27 @ 7:00 pm, Grace-Trinity Church,1430 West 28th Street
Presented by Magers & Quinn Booksellers
May 1 @ 7:00 pm, 279 Harvard Street
(ticketed event)
May 5 @ 8:00 pm, Dixon Place, 161A Chrystie Street
(with Clare Vaye Watkins and Emily St. John Mandel)
May 7 @ 1:00 pm–�2:30 pm, 5015 Connecticut Ave NW
May 10 @ 7:00 pm, 4326 University Way NE
May 11 @ 7:30 pm, 1005 West Burnside Street
(***BONUS = Lighthouse)
May 15 @ 7:00 pm–�8:30 pm, Point Reyes Books,11315 Highway 1
(with SF in SF sponsorship)
May 16 @ 7:30 pm, 1231 9th Ave
(with Karen Joy Fowler)
May 17 @ 7:00 pm, ADDRESS
May 18 @ 7:00 pm, 453 South Spring Street
May 22 @ 7:00 pm,2421 Bissonnet St
May 24 @ 5:30 pm, 1123 Thomasville Road
May 27 @ 7:15 pm, venue TBD, sponsored by Burrow Press & Bookmark It
May 28 @ 1:30 pm–�3:00 pm, 420 W Kennedy Blvd
June 10 @ 2:00 pm–�4:00 pm, 126 South Broad Street
Later in 2017: Hub City Bookshop, World SF Convention in Helsinki, Decatur Book Festival, and others TBD.
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December 30, 2016
Nonfiction This Year: Scenes, Weird Florida, Black Clock, Black Mirror, Squirrels, and More
It’s been quite a year for me writing-wise. I’ve finished a couple of long novellas–“Bliss� and “The Journals of Doctor Mormeck”–made significant progress on two novels and something weird called “Nice Is Just Another World for Terrible,� and I wrote a fair amount of short fiction.
This in addition to selling the movie rights to my forthcoming novel Borne to Paramount and having The Big Book of Science Fiction, co-edited with my wife Ann, come out from Vintage. We also were able to fund a year of The Octavia Project through our VanderMeer Creative corporation and broker a deal with NYRB Classics to reprint David R. Bunch’s brilliant Moderan collection from the 1970s. And, finally, I served as the Trias writer in residence at Hobart and William Smith Colleges and we had many other adventures too numerous and various and splendid to go into.
But I did want to point out the nonfiction I published this year as I’m very proud of it. I’m very thankful to Sophie Gilbertat the Atlantic online, Caroline Kelloggat the Los Angeles Times, Justine Jordan at The Guardian, Emily Firetog at The Literary Hub, and everybody atElectric Literature (including Lincoln Michel and Halimah Marcus) for giving me a home to write about cool and interesting stuff. Also thanks to LARB for between me and philosopher Tim Morton.
–M. Suddain’s Hunters & Collectors was one of the best novels of the year and horribly underrated. I . “On the one hand, it’s a galaxy-spanning space opera with intrigue, adventure and fascinating tech extrapolations. On the other, it’s a hilarious, almost Nabokovian account of a food critic’s gastronomic misadventures as he conducts a tour of restaurants on dozens of far-flung planets. Suddain manages the almost impossible task of balancing cosmic scope with slapstick, intricate wordplay and dialogue at times worthy of PG Wodehouse.�
–Elizabeth McKenzie’s The Portable Veblen was another favorite of mine this year and justly received awards attention and critical acclaim. I wrote about the novel . “With so light a touch and yet more serious and beautiful and relevant than many a weightier novel, “The Portable Veblen� has the feel of an instant, unlikely classic.�
–D.G. Compton’s dystopian SF novel The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe was reissued by New York Review of Books Classics and I wrote a new introduction for it. The Atlantic . “Yet Katherine Mortenhoe remains as relevant today as more obvious classics from the 1970s. This is largely because the novel stands apart from its times, but it is also because it displays an astonishingly easy intimacy and interiority. These are the hardest effects for a novelist to achieve, and all too often novels that critique media take on a metallic patina, a shell-like hardness as a result of this lack of fluidity.�
–Craig Pittman’s “Oh, Florida!�, a lovely compendium of everything strange about this state, prompted me to about what’s worth preserving about our wilderness and our uniqueness. “Then there was the time when, as a kid, my mom asked me to go retrieve a colorful buoy out on some mud flats in the Florida Keys and I sunk into the goo to my waist and had to be hauled out with a rope. And all too recently I opened my car trunk to an eruption of fungi after a thunderstorm and was so unnerved I drove off with my pant leg caught in the door and in the middle of driving started screaming because I thought some animal was in the car with me.�
–I got to view the third season of Black Mirror in advance . This was some of the most fun I had writing in 2016, especially in suggesting Darth Vader should run a vineyard. But also in just getting to immerse myself in a TV show and analyze it. I’d never written about TV before. “What the best of these episodes share is a dislocation caused by opening up the context, as if experiencing a telephoto lens that keeps widening our perspective far beyond expectation. With an eerie precision, our sense of the context and characters changes because the scriptwriters keep pushing inexorably outward, often past the point where a lesser show would end.�
–Visiting The Octavia Project over the summer led to an interview with one of the founders about the value of diversity and unique voices, . “Named after Octavia Butler, the Octavia Project uses girls� passion in science fiction, fantasy, fan-fiction, and gaming to teach them skills in science, technology, art, and writing, equipping them with skills to dream and build new futures for themselves and their communities.�
–Wanting to do some kind of tribute to the wonderful lit mag Black Clock, now deceased, I found myself also caught up in a mystery of bureaucracy and archiving when it turned out the online manifestation had been taken down and the physical back issues pulped. I . I also and Lit Hub .
–I retired a lecture this year, about scenes, based on part of my writing guide Wonderbook. Electric Literature was kind enough to , and it went on to become the fifth most popular article they published in 2016. Here is the Hand of Possibilities from that lecture…art by Jeremy Zerfoss.
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December 8, 2016
David R. Bunch’s Cybernetic Moderan Stories Acquired by New York Review of Books Classics
New York Review of Books Classics has acquired World rights to David R. Bunch’s out-of-print collection MODERAN, for publication in 2017. The deal was made by Jeff VanderMeer through VanderMeer Creative, acting on behalf of the Bunch estate, and the acquiring editor is Sara Kramer. Bunch’s highly original Moderan stories were prized by such iconic editors as Judith Merril, Harlan Ellison, and Cele Goldsmith. The stories were sometimes controversial with readers and published in both genre and literary magazines from the 1950s through 1970s.
In the Moderan universe, half-organic cybernetic human beings try to survive in a dystopian future in which the Earth has been mostly mined out and asphalted over. These hard-edged yet lyrical stories—as if Philip K. Dick had collaborated with e.e. cummings—are more topical today than when written in what they have to say about our relationship to the environment and each other.
“I’m very happy that my father’s legacy will live on with a new generation of readers and with such a prestigious publishing house,� said Phyllis Deckert, Bunch’s daughter. “We hope it signals a resurgence of interest in my father’s work in general.�
“It’s rare that a writer comes recommended to you as ‘singular,� ‘mind-blowing,� a ‘neglected master� and lives up to the hype,� said editor Sara Kramer. “But that’s just what happened in the case of David R. Bunch. Suffice to say we at NYRB Classics are pretty excited to have a part in introducing him and his Moderan stories to the wider world.�
Both the estate and VanderMeer Creative also are grateful to Matthew Cheney for his efforts in writing about Bunch online and in being an advocate for the reprinting of his works.
For more information or to contact the estate, please email [email protected]
For information on foreign language rights, please contact NYRB Classics.
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December 7, 2016
VanderMeer Creative and The Octavia Project
As announced yesterday, VanderMeer Creative is of The Octavia Project in Brooklyn. We are also providing a full-ride scholarship for one 2017 Octavia Project student to attend the teen SF/Fantasy writing camp, , that we have helped run for almost a decade. We think the sharing of ideas between the Octavia Project and Shared Worlds–one science-based with some fiction components and the other fiction-based with some science components–will be an interesting and useful thing.
You can read more about this great STEM program for teen girls at their site–as well as with Chana Porter at Electric Literature. Please consider donating to this amazing and useful organization. This is literally about nourishing the minds of our future scientists and creatives.
VanderMeer Creative, Inc., is the umbrella corporation for many of our creative activities, including our public events. All of our books are copyrighted to VanderMeer Creative and we maintain a robust backlist of e-books and physical books through our Cheeky Frawg imprint, including a devotion to translated and international fiction.
Through VanderMeer Creative, we also serve as agents for Michael Cisco and the estate of David R. Bunch, as well as for the iconic Finnish writer Leena Krohn (in some territories).
In the coming year, VanderMeer Creative will announce additional initiatives and fundingin keeping with core values of supporting creativity, innovative fiction, diversity in publishing, and international fiction–as well as environmental causes and the intersection of social justice and global warming issues.
The provides contact information and information on our upcoming public events.
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December 5, 2016
Announcing The Big Book of Classic Fantasy
(Image .)
As Ann and I announced on social media last week, we’re thrilled to have sold another behemoth of an anthology, The Big Book of Classic Fantasy, to editor Tim O’Connell at Vintage Books!! Tentatively scheduled for publication in 2018 and covering roughly the period 1850 up to World War II. Thanks to our agent, Sally Harding, and the Cooke Agency. This will be our fourth huge anthology project, following this year’s The Big Book of Science Fiction, The Time Traveler’s Almanac, and the World Fantasy Award-winning The Weird.
Will this anthology include not just your favorite classics from the English language, but also translations from all over the world? Yes. Will it include never-before-translated new stories? Yes. Will it include the best of the Decadents and the Surrealists in a fantastical vein? Oh yes, most certainly.We hope to widen our net on the translation side, focusing on areas of the world that have been underrepresented in prior anthologies.
As ever, you have to look at the evidence before you commit, but we’re confident there will be a few surprises.
We’re also very happy to have Dominik Parisien on board as an editorial consultant for this project. Dominikis the co-editor of stellar anthologies such as the current Starlit Wood.
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May I Suggest The Big Book of Science Fiction as a Gift for the Holidays?
May I suggest for the holidays the gift of a century of science fiction? Our Big Book of SF came out over the summer and was a huge hit–as the reviews below suggest! Over 100 authors and 750,000 words of fiction. Available from your local bookseller or .
“A stunning and satisfying retrospective. . . . This is a complex and fantastic project. . . . It’s handsome, huge, and amazingly well-curated; our editors, here, have done a fabulous job. . . . I couldn’t ask for more, truly. It’s diverse, wide-ranging, engaging, and fun; the stories are introduced well, juxtaposed better, and the overall effect is one of dizzying complexity and depth.� —Tǰ.dz
“A definitive volume of the genre. . . . This is a big book, and it’s an essential tome for readers who are dedicated SF fans or casual newcomers alike. Do they manage to redefine science fiction? I think so.� �The Verge
�The Big Book of Science Fiction is exactly what it says it is, nearly 1,200 pages of stories by the genre’s luminaries, like H. G. Wells, Arthur C. Clarke and Ursula K. Le Guin, as well as lesser-known authors. . . . [it] prizes diversity of all kinds, and translates work by several writers into English—some for the first time.� �The New York Times Book Review
“How big is big? In this case, we’re talking nearly 1,200 double-columned pages, dozens of representative short classics of science fiction, and newly translated work from around the world. There are surprises, too: Did you know that W.E.B. Du Bois wrote sf? That’s just one indication that the VanderMeers hope to establish a more culturally diverse science fiction canon.”�The Washington Post (10 Hidden Gems)
“An enormous anthology of science fiction put together by two of our sharpest purveyors of the genre. . . . This volume is a perfect mix of the classic and the unexpected.� �Flavorwire
“Everything about this book is exciting. First, it’s huge—some 750,000 words fill its 1,200 pages. Second, it’s been compiled by one of sci-fi’s coolest power couples—she’s a distinguished editor (Tor.com,Weird Tales), he’s a superb writer (2014’s Southern Reach trilogy). And finally, it’s not just another survey of white men in science fiction (aka Phillip K.’s dicks). For every Wells and Dick and George R.R. Martin, there’s work by Le Guin, Butler, and Katherine MacLean—not to mention stories from all over the world, from China (Liu Cixin) to Argentina (Silvina Campo). Gift it to a friend, then buy one for yourself.”��Jason Kehe, Wired (This Summer’s Must-Read Books)
“Borges once imagined an infinite book with pages of infinite thinness. The Vandermeers approach that event horizon with this double-columned paperback of more than 1,200 pages, containing some 750,000 words in more than 100 stories. . . .A review of a few hundred words can only begin to suggest both the contents and quality of this excellent collection of short fiction. The Vandermeers sidestep territorial quagmires by defining sci-fi, simply and effectively, as fiction that depicts the future in a stylized or realistic manner. This definition allows them a wide range of choices. . . .This book could serve as a portal to years of pleasurable and thought-provoking reading.”�Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
“Science fiction anthologies are a dime a dozen, but there’s that one that comes across every now and again that is truly essential. This is the case for Ann and Jeff Vandermeer’s Big Book of Science Fiction, an anthology that goes back to the genre’s roots in pulp fiction, all the way up to the end of the 20th Century, picking the best stories from around the world (including a number never before translated into English) . . . We took one look at this massive anthology’s Table of Contents, and fell in love at first sight.”—io9
“Whether you’re a life-long fan of science fiction or layperson diving deepinto a new genre, this incredible anthologyoffers a comprehensive genre education between two covers. In more than 1,000 pages and upwards of 100 stories,the VanderMeers have compiled a truly representative history of SFfrom its early beginnings to its myriad modern incarnations.. . . This is an unparalleledachievement, and undoubtedly one of the most important books you’ll buy this year.� �Barnes and Noble Booksellers� Picks
“When it comes to massive and comprehensive anthologies focused on a specific strain of fiction, the editorial team of Ann and Jeff VanderMeer has set the bar remarkably high.� �LitHub
“Ann and Jeff VanderMeer are a powerhouse editing team; their recent anthology of weird fiction helped define a genre, and took a smart historical global view while doing it. This anthology does a similar feat to science fiction, with an expansive aesthetic and work from a host of writers, including W.E.B. DuBois, Cixin Liu, Ursula K. Le Guin, and George R.R. Martin.� �Vol. 1 Brooklyn
“These stories were chosen for continuing relevance and arranged to interplay like voices in a great conversation: shifting and offering new insights. . . . Throughout this collection, every piece of wrack, scavenger bird, and sorceress contains multitudes.� �Locus Magazine
“A fun and solid genre education.”�Library Journal (Starred Review)
“At 105 stories—taken from around the world and since the genre’s very beginnings to its recent heights—and more than 1,000 pages, this extraordinary anthology handily earns its billing as the ‘ultimate collection� of science fiction. . . . The VanderMeers, longtime SF/F editors (The Time Traveler’s Almanacand many others), provide a critical survey of the field as well as incisive biographies of the contributors.”�Publishers Weekly(Starred Review)
“If your readerly appetite is not quite novel-sized, you’ll definitely want to check out this month’s short fiction offerings. If you only choose one title, make it The Big Book of Science Fictionedited by Ann & Jeff VanderMeer.”�—Kܲ
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November 14, 2016
Views From the Trias House: An Introduction to the Fiction of Amelia Gray
This post is one of several about my experiencesin the Finger Lakes District in upstate New York while serving as the at Hobart and William Smith Colleges (Geneva).
Hobart and William Smith was lucky to have as a guest as part of the 2016-2017 Trias Reading Series, which I’m curating. Graygave one of the best readings I’ve ever seen and also spoke frankly to the students in my class about variety of writing-related issues. Below you’ll find the transcript of my introduction to the event, which is also an introduction to the work of Amelia Gray.The next guest in the series will be Ottessa Moshfegh in the spring. � Jeff V.
***
I first encountered Amelia Gray’s fiction when I saw her collection Gutshot in the Yale University bookstore—at the front counter, as a staff recommendation. Despite this, the cashier tried to dissuade me from buying the book.
He asked me as I checked out, “Are you sure? Are you sure you want that? It’s really weird. Really weird.�
I thought about that for about half a second and said, “Yes. Yes. I want that. I want like five or six or seven copies of that.� Because I was pretty sure with that kind of endorsement I was getting the good stuff. The pure, undiluted stuff. No filler. Not cut with excuses or prevarication or pre-fab fabulation.
And I was right.
Amelia Gray is the real deal—an absurdist by nature who ranges from stories like “Fifty Ways to Eat Your Lover� that blow up our expectations of what a short story can be while having interesting things to say about both the body and relationships…to sly dark tales like “The Year of the Snake� that mythologize science and can be taken for the delights on the surface or for deeper things lurking beneath.
The disturbing “House Heart� could be read as a deconstruction of the Gothic ghost story, but saying that is inadequate and throws too much of a bone to those who like a story to “mean� something: the story gets under the skin, resists being analyzed in the sense that the weird rituals at its core seem familiar to modern life and yet alien. We cannot quite place the story on any map and by this we know, although Gray also engages in renovations, that this is innovation.
I would also humbly position her fiction, from my readings, as a triangulation of not just the absurd, but the surreal and the weird—because the world is absurd and surreal and weird. With each of those sensibilities existing in different proportions depending on the story.
As well as a psychological element, as if she’s tapped into something in the subconscious that creates an immediate reaction in the reader. I’m reminded strongly of another iconoclastic talent, the surrealist painter and writer Leonora Carrington, whose own dark tales combine these elements and were, when she wrote them, very unconventional—striking a chord with readers while existing outside of the mainstream.
Have I said yet that Gray’s fiction, like Carrington’s, is often is sly and funny in a sideways sense—once you become normalized to the unsettling images and the unusual, unique details that—wherever you are lucky enough to find them—are always, always a gift to the reader.
Alongside that absurdist sense of humor, inhabiting all of Gray’s fiction, is the proverbial restless curiosity and a quest, never self-conscious, to find ways to subvert reader expectations, to give the reader not what they expected but what they secretly needed. A bit of a jolt to the system.
And that is at least one reason why I love Gray’s work—because of the charged images at the core of so many of these stories, the images that linger in the mind and, connected to character, make even the dying man in the title story, “Gutshot,� sympathetic or humane or oddly relatable. That make a giant snake smashing through a town and dividing it into North Snake and South Snake have no need of rational explanation. That make a person living in the airducts of a house so riveting and horrifying at the same time.
And how despite being a curmudgeonly, jaded reader of the uncanny and the surreal and the absurd, I’m thankful that there are writers lke Gray who still manage to surprise me, to make me uneasy…to wake me up.
No wonder then that Gray’s fiction has been compared to the work of David Lynch—the ultimate compliment because it’s another way of saying “we don’t know where amongst the constellations to place this writer.�
No wonder that her fiction has been praised from coast to coast, by both the New York Times and Los Angeles Times—while appearing in some of this country’s most prestigious magazines, including The New Yorker, ѳɱԱ’s, and Tin House. No wonder that Gutshot recently won the $10,000 Young Lions Prize from the New York Public Library.
I’m delighted to ask you to please join me in welcoming Amelia Gray.
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November 4, 2016
Views from the Trias House: Readings by Amelia Gray, Dexter Palmer, and Jeff VanderMeer
I’ve been blessed a–blessed to curate a reading series in addition to all of the other wonderful opportunities. This fall, I kicked things off talking about the Southern Reach trilogy and sharing some of the inspiration for the novels (as well as reading). Then we had Dexter Palmer come in and read from Version Control, his great time travel novel from Vintage. And just this week, Amelia Gray came in and gave a corker of a reading to end the fall series of Trias readings. Both Dexter and Amelia dropped by my class to talk to the students and stayed long enough to have a sense of the area.
Expert on the Grotesque Nancy Hightower and photographer Kyle Cassidy also spoke to my class this semester, along with a Skype call by Julia Elliott. Those visits have been recorded so I can post transcripts shortly. In the meantime, please enjoy the video from all three fall events.
In the spring, the series continues with Ottessa Moshfegh, a recent finalist for the Man-Booker Prize. That promises to be another scintillating event. My deep and heartfelt thanks to Professor Melanie Hamilton, who runs the Trias program, and to Susan Gage, who is instrumental in making sure these events are a success.
You can find all of my posts about the writing residency experience .
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October 24, 2016
Views from the Trias House: Looking Back on the First Two Months
(At the Trias reception, talking to the provost, Dr. Titilayo Ufomata (l) and Dr. Meghan Brown (r), a HWS biologist.)
I must admit to being forever grateful to Hobart and William Smith Colleges in general and Provost Titilayo Ufomata and Professor Melanie Hamilton in particular for offering me the Trias Residency for 2016-2017. It has already been a life-changing experience and a major catalyst for energizing both my fiction and nonfiction. Ann and I have only been here eight weeks, but we already feel very connected to the Finger Lakes District and the college. Everyone we have met on faculty has been wonderful, and we’ve had great, substantive conversations about any number of topics from the literary to the scientific.
We’ve also enjoyed the comforts of the residency house, which include some great wildlife and bird viewing. One night, just for example, I walked outside to see a possum, then a raccoon, some deer, an and skunk! We’ve also had any number of woodpeckers, nuthatches, and other birds visit the front and backyard and had some fun observing always entertaining marmots. Clearly parties are going on outside of the Trias House that we’re not being invited to!
(Dexter Palmer’s class visit.)
In these two months, we’ve also done a lot! What, specifically? The following is just a partial list.As ever, much of this is a team effort. Ann and I work together and consult on a daily basis, and so anything I am able to accomplish while here is in fact due in part to Ann’s help and her counsel.
Taught the first half of a class taking the principles set out in Wonderbook about organic and mechanical ways to teach creative writing, including “mimicry� and “secrets� modules. This also included having the students rewrite the same Nabokov story from their unique point of view and provide an in-depth critique of the results, in preparation for the in-class critique sessions of their original stories in November-December.
to talk to my students and give a reading, while prepping for later visits by Amelia Gray, and Ottessa Moshfegh for the Trias Reading Series.
Gave a reading myself as part of the Trias series.
Hosted photographer Kyle Cassidy, who provided students with visual ideas for writing exercises and their fiction.
Brought biologist Gwynne Lim into class to talk about my novel Annihilation and Ursula K. Le Guin’s eco-story “Vaster Than Empires…�
Skyped with Julia Elliott about her fiction and the Southern Gothic.
Attended a fascinating faculty lecture on the impact of removing a dam outside of Seattle.
Gave a faculty lecture on Global Warming & Storytelling, based on my book in progress.
Talked to students at HWSviaa class visit to an English class studying Annihilation and another to an environmental sciences class (with Ann)
near Ithaca.
to observe HWS faculty and students studying freshwater shrimp.
Gave blood as part of .
(Comparing Tutuola and Metcalf for class discussion during our Month of Mimicry)
In the spirit of Peter Trias� generous funding of the Trias residency, our little contribution to that vision has been to donate a projector and screen to the Trias classroom and put a portion of my salary aside to buy books for my students that aren’t on the syllabus but of potential interest, ranging from my career guide Booklife to the great graphic novel Safari Holiday and works by Tove Jansson.
In terms of the writing that the residency is there to support, I’ve had a very fertile period of being creative in these two months. I’ve written the following:
A 30,000 novella entitled “The Journals of Doctor Mormeck� (about half of it finished here at the residency house).
A short-short titled “Marmot Mountain� for an anthology.
20,000 words on a new novel about an alt-history world where A. Crowley rules a Franco-Germanic empire with the reanimated head of Napoleon as his sidekick.
Four nonfiction articles for various publications including LitHub and the Atlantic’s web site.
A chapter of my nonfiction book on global warming and storytelling.
Coming up, there’s a lot on the agenda for the last sevenweeks of the semester.
The second half of my class, including guest visits, a month of freedom, and turning in their portfolios.
Continued work on my new novel.
Amelia Gray’s visit to HWS for a class visit and public reading.
Class and college visits by special guest Nancy Hightower, an expert on the grotesque in literature and art.
A trip with some of my students to the Toronto International Book Festival, where I’ll be participating on programming and the students will have unique opportunities to sit down with agents, editors, and authors like Emma Donoghue.
Observation of songbird banding on the shores of Lake Ontario.
At least two days of helping out with raptor surveying at the Montezuma state park.
Visits with additional environmental science classes.
Participating on a panel about ecology and global warming.
Working with the environmental sciences department to create, for the spring semester, an interdisciplinary series of creative writing and nonfiction exercises related to developing a deep understanding of landscape and place.
Prep-work for mentoring three or four students in the spring and coming back on a couple of trips to host Moshfegh’s reading and some other activities.
In addition, we’ve had the opportunity to hike at about a dozen state and national parks in the area and visited many, many fascinating towns to familiarize ourselves with the area. We even had the opportunity to experience a grape festival. Here are a few photographs from the experience thus far.
The grape festival in Naples was a particular highlight of our visits to towns across the Finger Lakes District. Not to mention munching on grapes while taking it all in. One of the great features of the area are robust downtowns, eccentric shops, scenic views of various lakes, and a lovely confluence of wilderness and rural farming areas. From many places around here you can see many more stars in the sky than where we live in Florida.
Watkin’s Glen State Park might be considered touristy due to its popularity, but as pictured we found it relaxing and incredibly beautiful. I hope to post about our hiking adventures in depth soon, including our recommendations as newcomers to the area. But for now, I can just say that we’ve had marvelous adventures the past two months at the Sterling Nature Center, Chimney Bluffs State Park, Howland Island, Taughannock Falls State Park, Finger Lakes National Forest, Robert H. Treman State Park, and the High Tor Wildlife Management Area, among others.
It’s hard not to mention again some of the truly extraordinary adventures we’ve had thus far. Including owl banding, which you can read , and joining an expedition out on the lake with the HWS research vessel, which you can read .
We’ve had the good fortune of encountering a lot of great bookstores, but perhaps the book event of most note was having a quick chance to browse at the Ithaca library book sale a couple of weeks ago. We could have picked up much more, but I settled on these wonderful old ornithology titles–very eccentric, with all kinds of interesting asides.
We’ve also enjoyed visiting many crafts stores and collectives throughout the region. We acquired this original piece from Stomping Grounds here in Geneva, but have encountered wonderful arts and crafts in manyplaces, such as Skaneateles, Ithaca’s Commons, and Seneca Falls. The crafts collective in Skaneateles is highly recommended in particular.
The Corning Museum of Glass has been the highlight of our museum experience thus far. Almost overwhelming, but always stunning.
The Trias House’s proximity to campus has meant our walks at dusk have been delightfully mingled with chance encounters–as when we stumbled upon a concert by PWR BTTM last week. A great power-pop-rock band we had not heard of before. On the more planned side, we also enjoyed a student production of the D&D play She Kills Monsters.
Us, by the shores of Lake Ontario, in September.
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October 19, 2016
Views from the Trias House: Introducing Dexter Palmer’s Version Control
(All photos by the HWS staff photographer)
This post is one of several about my experiencesin the Finger Lakes District in upstate New York while serving as the at Hobart and William Smith Colleges (Geneva).
Dexter Palmer read from Version Control, his latest novel, as part of the Trias Reading Series at HWS on October 6. This was my introduction, which focuses on Version Control, which I believe is one of the best novels of 2016.
Good evening. Welcome to the second installment of the 2016-2017 Trias reading series, which I am so lucky to get to curate. Thanks very much to Melanie Hamilton and everyone at Hobart and William Smith for their support and many kindnesses. And, of course, thanks to Peter Trias.
Tonight we have a marvelous writer reading from his new novel from Vintage—followed by a Q&A and a signing session.
Our guest tonight, Dexter Palmer, holds a Ph.D. in English Literature from Princeton University, where he completed his dissertation on the novels of James Joyce, William Gaddis, and Thomas Pynchon (and where he also staged the first academic conference ever held at an Ivy League university on the subject of video games).
I first “met� Dexter Palmer when the New York Times assigned me his first book The Dream of Perpetual Motion for review. I loved the novel, which was sophisticated, smart, so well-written, and very different in how it mixed retrofuturism with nods to Shakespeare’s The Tempest and The Wizard of Oz. That novel appeared on several year’s best lists and was one of Kirkus’s Books of the Year.
His new work, Version Control, is beyond what anyone might expect for a second novel. It’s a tour de force about scientists and one of the best novels about time travel that I’ve ever read. As Melanie has said in the lead-up this event. “Palmer is a novelist with an abundance of things to say � about life, about time, and about the essence of the universe. Luckily, withVersion Control, he also has the chops and eloquence to make those things sing. Palmer’s book is about practically everything, from race to media to scientific method, to the terrible vagaries of love.�
As the son of an entomologist and research chemist, who grew up amid the triumphs, failures, and politics of a fire ant research lab, I was struck by just how well Palmer captures the sometimes messy lives of scientists and how well he portrays some of the challenges and subjective aspects of science that the general public often glosses over.
And, as the co-editor of an anthology of a century’s worth of time travel stories, I can tell you that reading Version Control was an eye-opening experience, too. What Palmer has achieved with his tale of time distortions and of the variant paths that life can take is a work that has an extraordinary clarity given the complexity of the issues and attention given to the characterization.
It is as Palmer told my class today, in part accomplished by a structure that’s like a performance with spinning plates, making sure to keep more and more plates spinning on rods, building to a crescendo of so many plates spinning you’re sure it’ll all come crashing down, beyond anyone’s control…but then slowly, slowly, with the same consummate skill, fewer and fewer spinning, until everything comes to a complete stop without a single plate broken…and yet, at the end, you’re somewhere different than you were before.
Only a novelist with an amazing amount of talent and control could achieve some of these effects. Perhaps it is no coincidence that Palmer has spent a great deal of time studying the so-called “encyclopedic� fiction writers like Pynchon and Gaddis and Joyce. Writers whose works seem both long enough and generous enough to contain the entirety of the world.
Well, Palmer in this novel does it in ways that are both striking and strikingly invisible, the reader carried along by the power of a narrative that is immersive, ambitious, and deeply humane.
What’s more in creating a work that his editor half-jokingly referred to as “grand unified theory of failure,� Palmer pushes back against as he puts it “the requirements of narrative to resist writing about failure� and the default in much science fiction, where the science always works and results are always positive in a sense…even though this approach is exactly one that gives real scientists fits…since failure—since trying and retrying and being patient are some of the hallmarks of good scientific process.
None of this would work if at the same time Palmer’s novel wasn’t so beautifully layered, so carefully thought out in ways that allow the novel’s characters to have purpose, significance, and depth. That Version Control ALSO contains a powerful examination of and satire of our Information Age is what makes the novel a tour de force in my opinion. The ways in which an electronic version of the president becomes the concierge to people’s lives, even in restaurants, and the spot-on commentary on the intrusive element of apps on our daily experience—expressed through a dating site integral to the novel’s plot—allows Palmer to juxtapose our basic humanity against the potential dystopia of the tools we allow to make decisions for us. The persona we exhibit online versus the private self, ever more eroded.
At the center of the novel, too, is a complex, often tangled, relationship between a husband and wife—and between the members of a lab devoted to creating a time machine. Life is messy, and doesn’t always have the kind of resolution or results we would like—just like experiments in the laboratory. The final triumph of the novel is that it leads the reader not to what they expect but to what they didn’t expect but very much needed. This takes a rare discipline and a quiet daring.
The result, then, is both profoundly moving and prescient. Very few novels that tackle the subject of modern technology can expect to have much of a half-life. But Version Control seems up-to-the-minute and yet also timeless.
It’s no surprise then that Version Control earned the coveted “quadruple crown”—starred reviews in the Library Journal, Publishers Weekly, Booklist, and Kirkus. While also receiving praise from Buzzfeed and the Washington Post, among others. As NPR wrote in their review “Every word is worth savoring”—while expressing astonishment that the author could deal with so many big ideas while writing a novel that’s also such a page-turner and so personal with regard to its characters.
Please join me in giving a warm welcome to Dexter Palmer.
Professor Melanie Hamilton, Dexter Palmer, and JV.
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