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Borne is slated to be released in 2016. Sean McDonald, an executive editor and vice president at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, negotiated the deal with Sally Harding, a literary agent at The Cooke Agency.
Here’s more from The Hollywood Reporter: “Borne is set in the future, where a woman named Rachel, scavenging for usable detritus, stumbles upon a creature she calls the Borne, whose origins and composition are mysterious. Is it an animal or plant? A deity, or a cruel experiment?” (Photo Credit: Kyle Cassidy)
Here are the books that knocked my socks off in 2014. All of them would make great gifts; each of them was truly something that evoked that inexpressible delight of finding an author you are excited about. ÷ ÷ ÷ Prince of Fools (Red Queen's War #1) by Mark Lawrence Prince of Fools is essentially [...]
0 Comments on Best Fantasy/Sci-Fi of 2014 as of 12/10/2014 3:38:00 PM
Every week, we gather together a small pile of newly released titles that we agree should be on everyone's radar. We deem these titles our New Favorites (check out our recent picks here). Now that the year is winding down, we thought we'd take a look back at some of the standouts, in case you [...]
0 Comments on Our Favorite New Favorites of 2014 as of 11/25/2014 1:30:00 PM
Lush and Lovecraftian writing sends one into this otherworldly experience. An awesome beginning to the Southern Reach Trilogy! Books mentioned in this post Annihilation (Southern Reach Trilogy #1) Jeff VanderMeer Used Trade Paper $8.95
Latinos and other People of Color (PoC) are expanding their presence into more than the White House. The last frontier, what might prove to be the most resistant to our inclusion is speculative literature [fantasy, magical realism, science fiction, horror, fables and myth, and alternate histories]. Por qué?
Among others, two important, interplaying factors might explain the resistance to our inclusion.
Spec lit is BIG money for those within certain cliques
Sci-fi, fantasy and horror are all over the American screens of cable, network TV and movie houses. Good or bad, blockbusters or not, apocalypse or dystopia, a lot of stories are making chingos of dinero, and in certain cases, the road begins in spec-lit short stories or novels. For writers of those stories, the lucrative film-rights would have to be spread around, if POC enter this arena.
The young, including whites, are attracted to the cultures of POC
Forget about backwards caps and low-hanging baggies, reggae and reggaetón--if the spec stories of POC reach the screen, Anglo kids might find more to love than just wearing J-Lo T-shirts.
POC stories can include themes sympathetic towards immigrants, the Chicano Movement, monetary retribution to Native Americans and descendants of slaves, Puerto Rican independence, the Cuban Revolution, the disenfranchisement of mexicanos after Texas's secession and the Mexican American War, families' communal values (instead of Western-ethic individualism), pride in ancient indigenous cultures like the Aztec and Maya (Matt de la Peña's Maya character, Sera, not the savagery of Apocalypto). And that's not a complete list.
If such ideals and beliefs from the novels of POC reach the screen in the most popular genres of speculative fiction, imagine what rebellious, white (and other) teenagers might adopt as their own values. Like, Amy Tintera's Callum Reyes character--"the perfect solider who's done taking orders!" Or, to plug my work, what if teens identify with my fantasy novel's Chicano hero who won't accept "assimilation" and joins others to save and change their world? Nomás diciendo....
It's no longer fantasy to imagine a Latino in the White House (although it's harder to imagine he would be sympathetic toward immigrants, workers' rights and stopping military invasions.) A more frightening possibility to the white-male-dominated establishment is the horror of their children accepting and even advocating for POC in EVERYTHING!
To look at it from the perspective of the white male, spec-lit establishment, as hot as spec lit is now, the old writers feel like they are finally being recognized and rewarded, as never before. For POC to demand entry into this monetary wonderland at this point is just the WORST time!
Hollywood and its young audiences may not agree. Sci-fi, as well as other spec lit, needs new blood, themes and direction, which is what Project Hieroglyph is attempting. Change will come and Latino writers entering these genres can have a great effect on its direction. Vamos a ver.
This Friday, I'll be on NPR, expounding on Latino writers and Sci-Fi, courtesy of Producer Daisy Rosario, Latino USA. I'll let you know info as it comes in.
For that broadcast, here are cites I used:
Latino readers will become more of a significant book market. "Hispanics" make up nearly a quarter of public school students, according to the Pew Hispanic Center, and are the fastest-growing of the schools' population.
Will there be Latino authors in Big Book of Sci-Fi?
Jeff and Ann VanderMeer will be editing The Big Book of Science Fiction for Vintage, an 800-page, time capsule of the last 100 years of sci-fi. They will have an open reading period for reprints when you can submit links or electronic manuscripts of your own work or recommendations of rare or often overlooked stories you think deserve their attention.
Clearly, to cover a century, they can't just focus on the contemporary scene. They say, "As ever, we’re committed to including work from a diverse array of sources." It may be a few months before setting up the submission process, but they'll make sure it’s widely publicized. It will be up to Latino authors and fans to submit material so this doesn't become another Big White Book of Sci-Fi. Connect with Jeff to make your literary contribution, when it's time.
Es todo, hoy, (but wait to see what mañana brings)
Prepare yourself for another psychologically intense narrative in this second installment of the Southern Reach Trilogy. This time we are taken behind the scenes of the agency and learn many of Area X's secrets, only to discover how much more there is to uncover. Books mentioned in this post Authority (Southern Reach Trilogy #2) Jeff [...]
At Powell's, our book buyers select all the new books in our vast inventory. If we need a book recommendation, we turn to our team of resident experts. Need a gift idea for a fan of vampire novels? Looking for a guide that will best demonstrate how to knit argyle socks? Need a book for [...]
0 Comments on Ask a Book Buyer: China Mieville, Books for Tough Times, and More as of 9/27/2013 1:38:00 PM
Paramount Pictures and Scott Rudin Productions have optioned Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation and the other novels in his Southern Reach trilogy. Farrar Straus and Giroux will publish the first book in 2014.
The sale occurred “within hours” after Joseph Veltre at the Gersh Agency negotiated the book deal (on behalf of Sally Harding at The Cooke Agency) with Sean McDonald at FSG. Here’s more about the book, from the release:
It tells the story of a biologist who, in seeking answers to her husband’s tragic disappearance, volunteers for an expedition into an area sealed off as an environmental disaster zone, only to find a pristine wilderness – but in Area X the rules of nature seem to work a little differently.
Google has done gone and brokeGoogle Reader, removing the sharing function to encourage people to use Google Plus instead. This means the "Fresh Links" section over on the sidebar is no longer able to be refreshed, and I'll probably go back to occasionally doing linkdump posts. Here, for instance, are some links:
My latest Strange Horizons column, "Reading Systems", has been posted, as has my latest Sandman Meditations piece. (The Sandman pieces are going to be biweekly for the rest of the year rather than the regular weekly schedule because I'm just too busy to keep up with a weekly schedule right now, and I was getting really frazzled.)
Team VanderMeer has launched The Weird Fiction Review, an online journal about kumquats. Famed kumquat collected Neil Gaiman is interviewed, and there's an interesting selection of nonfiction, art, and fiction about kumquats. Don't believe me? Well, go over there and see for yourself!
Fandor has a great set of tributes to the great Derek Jarman. I'm working on something about Jarman's Caravaggio (25 years old this year!) and also a piece about Jarman for Rain Taxi, but I'm finding Jarman much harder to write about than I expected, and both pieces are vastly late. But I shall persevere!
Novelist Nnedi Okoraforhas won the World Fantasy Award for her novel, Who Fears Death.
Author Jeff VanderMeerdescribed the book: “[The novel] is a powerful combination of science fiction, fantasy, African folklore, and stark realism. It tells the story of Onyesonwu, a woman of extraordinary powers in a post-apocalyptic West Africa, a world of perils and mysteries, of lost technologies and brutal wars. Onyesonwu’s name means “Who fears death?”, and her birth is the result of rape used as a weapon in battle; this legacy affects the woman she becomes, and the novel portrays her education as a sorceress and her quest to bring order and peace to her life and world.”
The announcement was made at the World Fantasy Convention in San Diego. We’ve included the other award winners below…
My previous post about The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction noted that it is in beta-text mode and so quite obviously incomplete. Among the lacks are entries on either Jeff or Ann VanderMeer. I am not a contributor to the encyclopedia nor am I in any way affiliated with it, but I do have a great interest in all things VanderMeer.
Earlier this year, I wrote a biography of Jeff for Fogcon, where he and Ann were honored guests. (Eric Schaller wrote the biography of Ann, which I hope he will allow me to reprint here, but he's not returning my calls or email at the moment, probably because I suggested that for Halloween he should dress his dog as a character from Twilight.)
I hope the information provided below will prove useful to the encyclopedists and any future scholars. My only goal in life is to be helpful. Jeff VanderMeer will, I expect, deny the accuracy of some of it, but I believe such denials only confirm the truths I am here able to provide to the world...
THE HOEGBOTTON GUIDE TO THE (MOSTLY EARLY) HISTORY OF JEFF VANDERMEER
compiled from notes found in the files of Orem Hoegbotton, including scrawls attributed to Duncan Shriek
edited and embellished by Matthew Cheney
At the tail end of America's revolutionary years, Jeff VanderMeer was born in Bellfonte, Pennsylvania, the county seat of Centre County and part of the State College, Pennsylvania Metropolitan Statistical Area. His birth seems to have caused some consternation at high levels of the U.S. government, but all the files have been classified until 2068; we do know, though, that his parents soon joined the Peace Corps and brought the child with them to the Fiji Islands. After their work there was completed, they returned to the U.S. via a circuitous route that allowed the impressionable young man to encounter Asia, Africa, Europe, Antarctica, and Long Island — experiences that would deeply influence his later fiction.
By late adolescence, VanderMeer was living in Florida, primarily on a houseboat off the coast of St. Petersburg, the fourth-largest city in the state and the second largest city in the Tampa Bay area. VanderMeer's actual activities during this time are unknown, though he has variously claimed that he was working as a merchant of dried squid, an icthyologist, and a decoy for the Witness Protection Program. Whatever he was doing, we know that he was writing, because it wasn't long before his first book, a monograph on herpetology titled The Book of Frog, was
0 Comments on A Contribution to VanderMeer Studies as of 1/1/1900
I, being endlessly excited by the topic, responded with a comment as long as the post itself. I didn't really mean to do that, and was embarrassed upon posting it to see just how much I'd written, but I was in a hurry and didn't have a chance to write concisely. But I wanted to offer a comment/question about translation -- specifically the fact that some great writing survives some really bad translation -- and see what folks did with it, if they did anything other than just groan and ignore me. Which might be the best response. Nonetheless, the post itself is worth considering...
I notice over at Ecstatic Days you left a comment about the translations of The Brothers Karamazov and how you read two of them. Which did you prefer? Which do you prefer for Dostoevsky translations in general? I emptied the Dostoevsky books I had from my library because they were Garnett translations and the Anglicization was really obvious.
The two Karamazovs that I've kept are the Oxford World's Classics translation by Ignati Avsey and the Andrew MacAndrew translation from Signet Classics. I've also read big chunks of one of the early ones, probably Garnett (it was 10+ years ago now...), and skimmed around in the Peavear & Volokhonsky, but though I enjoyed the P&V translations of Crime & Punishment, Gogol's stories, and Anna Karenina, I'm somewhat skeptical of their technique and the hype that surrounds them -- see, for instance, this, this, and this.
Here's part of an inked panel from the upcoming webcomic The Situation, written by Jeff Vandermeer and drawn by me. I' almost done all the initial art and can't believe it. I think it'll be a great comic and I hope it gets collected some day in book form. And boy, did I ever learn a lot while doing this book.
4 Comments on Scarskirt, Almost There, last added: 1/27/2011
Thanks Jed! I really pushed the expressiveness in this book, it was actually discussed in the meetings i went to about this project, that's what they wanted and I think I learned a lot from working this way.
Here are the inks for a book cover I did last year that just came out called Monstrous Creatures by the brilliant Jeff Vandermeer. You can learn more about it and see the final, colour cover over at Jeff's blog. And you can pre-order it here.
5 Comments on Monstrous Creatures, last added: 12/3/2010
Weeks ago, Mary Rickert emailed me to let me know about a lovely YouTube video created as a trailer for her forthcoming book Holiday. I completely forgot to post it. I haven't seen the book yet, but I know many of the stories in it, and I know Mary, so I have no hesitation in recommending it.
I just received my contributor's copy of Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded, and even though it doesn't have a picture of a steampunk reloading press, it's still a good book. The interior design is particulary striking, especially in the section to which I contributed some lesser-known information about an ancestor of mine, the "Secret History of Steampunk". (Also, I would like to take this opportunity to publicly deny all knowledge of the Mecha-Ostrich, despite the vicious rumors circulating about some sort of illicit scholarship I am said to have engaged in.) I thought the first Steampunk anthology was good fun, and I especially enjoyed Stepan Chapman's story in it; Steampunk II feels, on a cursory glance and glimpsing read, even richer and weirder.
Strange Horizons has now published my review of the movie Never Let Me Go. For some reason, I really struggled to write this review, partly because it was a struggle for me to figure out what I really made of it. Further complicating the attempt was the fact that I had no easy access to see the movie a second time to clarify things -- I had seen it over at Dartmouth as part of their mini version of the Telluride Film Festival, and the movie wasn't playing anywhere within 100 miles of me other than that. I really thought I was going to have to bail on the review, but then I decided to do what I always try to do in such cases: make the struggle part of the writing, because it would be dishonest to create a fluid and uncomplicated piece when my response was neither fluid nor uncomplicated. So that's what I did. (Some folks might be curious to reference that review with my 2005 blog post about the novel.)
Over at Gestalt Mash, Paul Smith has written about Hou Hsiao-Hsien's film Three Lives, and it's a review well worth reading, especially if you're not familiar with Hou's movies. I'm still learning to appreciate Hou's pacing, so can't call myself a real fan yet, but I liked some of Three Lives and some of Goodbye South, Goodbye. Of the films I've seen, my favorite (at the moment) is Millennium Mambo, which one of Hou's greatest supporters in the U.S, Jonathan Rosenbaum, called "one of the emptiest good-looking films by a major director that I can recall". Ahh well. I may be fated never to appreciate Hou fully, which is why I keep reading folks like Rosenbaum (and Paul Smith): it's clear to me there's a there there, but it takes me some work to find it. Worthwhile work, though.
I like challenges, and I usually attack them with vigor. #10bythen has been good to me this month...in fact, I just shipped off submission eleven. Granted, it was an old story which sat unloved in an editor's inbox for nearly two years before I pulled it...
In the past month, I've made submissions to The Zombie Feed, Clarkesworld, Fantasy, Gloom Cupboard (a poem!), Whidbey Writers Workshop Students' Choice Award, Pedestal Magazine, Three-Lobed Burning Eye, Scape, Trembles (another resurrected story), and Ghostology. I have three pieces of flash ready for editing, including a rather chilling (at least I think so), story inspired by Jeff VanderMeer's brilliant short, "The General Who is Dead", and bog mummies. I have two more short stories, about 3K each, which need editing, too. One is destined for submission to Kevin J. Anderson (Blood Lite 3), but I won't hold my breath that lightning will strike twice. The other is weird and haunting, but not horrific. Literary markets, here comes "The Emperor of Empty Spaces".
And, for the record, all of the markets to which I've subbed this month pay, at least a token sum. I don't like to make official decisions, but it looks like I've but my fiction where my thoughts are.
Thanks to Mercedes and all the #10bythen crew. I needed a kick in the pants, and October has been an awesome run of writing (so far). With five stories waiting in line, time to hit the edits, eh?
17 Comments on WIP Wednesday: I Have Conquered #10bythen, last added: 10/24/2010
Oh my. I'm going to castigated for that one. Only half joking.
I write a lot of soft SF, which is more about story and character than science, although the science allows you to drop your characters into interesting situations.
Horror and SF are my favourite genres, and this goes back to your previous posts. I'm writing a lot more SF than horror because of the market opportunities.
You should try SF, you might like it. Apex Magazine? Dark Fantasy and horror/SF? Forgive me if you've already been published there.
The other nominees in the category are the sagacious Anil Menon, the acroatic Abigail Nussbaum, and the argute Adam Roberts -- lambent flames of intellect, each!
The nominees in the other categories are marvelous as well, and I do not envy the judges their judging, because I would never want to distinguish between such distinguished folks -- in all of the categories, the nominees are people I read with great pleasure and from whom I've learned a lot over the years.
Now I must go back to poring over lexical tomes, preparing to vanquish my rivals in the grand mudwrestling-while-reciting-the-OED event that will, I'm told, determine the true winner...
0 Comments on Ultimate Libation Avian Cranium Award Nominations as of 1/1/1900
When I came up with the idea for the Third Bear Carnival, I quickly knew one post I wanted: something by Ann VanderMeer, Jeff's wife, who first knew him as a very young and mostly-unpublished short story writer, and who was one of the first editors to publish him with any frequency. She was Ann Kennedy back then, and it's partly the stories that put her on the path to becoming Ann VanderMeer, because in Ann Jeff found his perfect reader and his perfect love.
It took a bit of convincing for me to get Ann to write about her relationship not only to her husband, but to his stories. Ann thinks of herself as an editor and not a writer, but she sent me a contribution back in July, and I've held onto it until now. Much as I love what everybody else has contributed to the Carnival over these past weeks, and grateful as I am to each them ... well, this one's special...
Ann & Jeff VanderMeer
VanderMeer Stories: A Personal Reminiscence by Ann VanderMeer
The earliest VanderMeer stories I read came from The Book of Frog, a self-published chapbook of stories that contained all manner of frogs and toads. In some stories the creatures were featured prominently, but in others, they were merely a whisper. I had to force the then young man of 20 (who was trying so hard to grow a beard) to allow me to purchase a copy (he wanted to give it to me).
“Nonsense,” I said. How will you ever be a full-time writer if you give your work away?” And then I bought five copies; perhaps one of the best investments I’ve ever made (and I am not just talking about how rare and valuable those copies are now).
I knew back then from reading those early tales that this was a writer to watch. He might find those stories sophomoric and simple, but there was a passion to the writing. And heart. And a great deal of playfulness.
He sent me stories for The Silver Web (a magazine I was publishing in the late 80’s early 90’s). One was a god-awful story about a high school girl going to her prom and some secret fantasy world hiding in her closet. I turned that one down quickly only for Jeff to tell me it was a test of my editorial taste. Yes, of course it was, I believe this. I did publish many of his stories during the years of The Web; “Heart for Lucretia” – a far future science fiction piece that fully illustrates the real sacrifice of sibling responsibilities, “Henry Dreams of Angkor Wat” – a surreal look at the horrors of the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia, “Black Duke Blues” – a story about a gifted musician in New Orleans (this one won him the Florida Individual Artist Grant) and “So The Dead Walk Slowly” – a zombie story long before zombies were popular. Each one more different than the last and yet so uniquely VanderMeer.
Jeff has always had a fondness for animals, as you can see from his fiction. From frogs he moved onto meerkats, then squid and now bears. He tells me that he doesn’t like talking animal stories and yet…his frogs talk. So do his meerkats. And in his latest new story, “The Quickening,” there is a talking rabbit. I think. At least, it seems to be talking (and it looks like a rabbit).
And this is his strength; writing fiction that has so many layers. When you read one of his stories you ar
1 Comments on Third Bear Carnival: Finale, last added: 8/27/2010
Wow. This is a beautiful summation which is not a "summation" but rather the promise of what was and is to come. I feel strangely fortunate to have so much left to read, to discover for the first time, even though it means that I do not comprehend on a deeper level what was said here about the stories; though I have I think read enough to know how both true and Of truth this post is.
I've got one very special post saved for tomorrow, but this post will end my own contributions to the Third Bear Carnival. To bring things to a close, I recorded a reading of a very short story hidden in the Afterword to the book, called "The Magician"... (It may take a few seconds to load and buffer.)
The Third Bear Carnival will come to an end later this week, and in honor of that, here's a contest. I have a copy of Jeff VanderMeer's Third Bear collection that includes a unique cartoon by Eric Schaller, drawn on 24 July 2010. This is the only copy of this cartoon that exists, at least as far as I know (most of Eric's cartoons are reproduced in bulk by the many small, innocent children he has imprisoned in a sweatshop deep beneath Dartmouth College). It is drawn on the title page of the book, which in all other editions is unillustrated.
Here's how you can win this unique copy of The Third Bear:
In the comments to this post, write a description/explanation of 100 words or less about The Fourth Bear. (Yes, we know all about the Third Bear now, but what is the Fourth Bear?) The deadline is this Friday, August 27, at 12pm Eastern Standard Time. Eric and I will then consult, and the entry that we agree is most interesting will be the winner. All results are final and utterly subjective.
Barring unforseen claims upon our time, or an inability to come to an agreement (and thus the need to institute a mud-wrestling match between ourselves), we will announce the winner here on Monday, August 30.
10 Comments on Win a Unique Third Bear!, last added: 8/27/2010
Walking the fine line between responsibility and entertainment, the Fourth Bear faces constant upheaval: while it is his job to keep the public informed, they seem to prefer pictures of kittens in hats and youtube clips of his failures to his more serious attempts to uncover duller, darker "truths." But he never tries very hard, and usually repeats information he receives from PR managers, or, when he's feeling whimsical, cabbies. Everyone hates the Fourth Bear.
The Fourth Bear could never walk quietly and chased away the food. He smelled a little funny and burped when hibernating. No one liked the Fourth Bear. When Socrates was mad, he made Plato hang out with the Fourth Bear. The Fourth Bear did not like Plato and mocked him: this explains all that is foul in Western thought. Friendless, he wandered north and one day hid aboard a Viking ship bound for Vineland. There he escaped and soon found himself among people who accepted him for who he was. He was revered, praised, shot, and made into a cloak.
Anonymous said, on 8/25/2010 5:28:00 PM
The Fourth Bear will kick your butt in public for a small fee, and whistle Dixie where the sun don't shine. Give him a kiss and he'll charge you five bits on the dollar, two rams on the wise-acre, or a case of whiskey from the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. Do what you want to do but, whatever you do, don't cross him. Otherwise you will win his love for life. And that, my friends, is a fate worse than the heat death of the universe.--Sam Hell
The furry wall moves in front of your eyes as you read look close at the panel in front of you. It matters not if it's the cover of the collection a comics panel or the screen of your chosen ereader. The moving carpet blurs and resolves into the toothy face of what is presumeibly a brown bear or maybe it is a grizzly bear and it seems to smile in a knowing manner that says yup you are really seeing this. The universe responds to masses of people believing the same thing at the same time and enough of you believed the existance of the fourth bear, and that it was hungry for your attention. You should be happy it was not the fourth squid. The bear still smiles that knowing smile As it opened it's mouth. Ummmm.
Anonymous said, on 8/25/2010 6:25:00 PM
If you are juggling and drop a ball, that is the fault of the First Bear. If you have shoes that once fit but are now too large, that is the fault of the Second Bear. If you wake to find you have eaten your left hand, bones and all, that is the fault of the Third Bear. If you have riches, love, and life, but are still not satisfied, that is the fault of the Fourth Bear. The four bears, together, they will ruin your life. --Tenser Tensor
Having a Roud Folk Song Index number of -300,000 the Fourth Bear can only be found in the little-known nursery rhyme:
One for honey Two for teddy Three for polar Four for Freddy
Supposedly written by an Elm Street resident (now in a mental institution) who can spontaneously manifest huge claw marks upon her person.
Alys said, on 8/26/2010 10:40:00 AM
The Fourth Bear is always there, waiting just out of sight, around the corner, behind you, where you’re not looking, to snatch the only custard doughnut, or the last piece of pie. She hoards these things, as dragons do gold, in her den. She sleeps on a bed of stale pastry, and eats it in her sleep. Sometimes, children have mistaken her for a witch. She keeps her teeth and claws polished clean, but her fur is sticky with chocolate and cherry jam and other substances best not inquired into.
The Fourth Bear is a well educated art critic, who has become respected in both academic and mainstream culture. Recently, he has gotten some bad press for his scathing review of an otherwise popular exhibit, stating: ‘although visually pleasing, I have a hard time finding cranium-based art anything other than pedestrian and uninspired.’ The Fourth Bear later stated, through a content smile full of cocktail shrimp tails, that he does not wish to retract his review, and he’s sure the art community will judge the exhibit accordingly.
The Fourth Bear is a play from Geoffrey Von ZeeMire's post-elegant phase, written between his fourth resurrection and fifth suicide. As with most of his works, it is a tragedy. Although all copies of the script were incinerated during the Bat Smelting Rebellion, we do have a partial cast list:
Kenneth Squalor: Bemonocled. Bitter. Bearded.
Franzl Pottingash: Bile dampened. Brash. Braided.
Britannia Crisp/The Fourth Bear: Blunderbussty. Bright. Bare/Bear. Bear. Bear.
The Squelch: [no details given]
Efforts to revive the play based on these characters and the notes of Von ZeeMire's biographer have been met with assassination.
As part of a reviewing process that my friend Matt Cheney developed, I was part of a group each reading two stories from The Third Bear by Jeff VanderMeer. I chose the time when I had time travelling on a plane to read these stories. I found that a different setting (I usually read on my porch looking out over the hills in New Hampshire with the sound of birds in the background) physically took me out of my ordinary world, bound by gravity, into a unaccustomed world of different sights and sounds, which worked perfectly when I entered VanderMeer’s highly imaginative world.
In the first story, “Finding Sonoria,” a retired land surveyor, John Crake, discovers a stamp from the Republic of Sonoria from a collection he accumulated as a boy with the hope of traveling one day and discovering these distant countries. However, his stamps and his interest in travel waned as he grew older and settled for less, following a “path of least resistance.” John hires his friend Jim Bolger, an aging private detective down on his luck, to locate the Republic of Sonoria, which does not seem to exist on any map. The stamp and Sonoria become an obsession to each man. Jim, “in his little rotting house,” begins writing an imaginary history of Sonoria while John, “in the Murat Motel,” begins dreaming about Sonoria and finding a personal solace in his dreams that he is unaccustomed to having in reality.Despite their differences, the two men share “the same world, all because of a stamp.” How both men resolve this imaginary country in their lives raises a personal question how we individually resolve the mediocrity or restricting conditions in our own lives.
Before continuing with the next story, I peeked out the window of the jet I was seated in and saw large fields in the Midwest and small groups of homes and buildings, representing an unknown town. When I sit on my porch reading and a plane passes overhead, I take a moment and think about the people in that plane and sometimes wave, though I doubt if anyone in the plane could see me from that distance.It does not matter. I continue waving and I guess this action is more for me, claiming my own space, than for anyone else.
In the second story, “Three Days in a Border Town,” VanderMeer skillfully tells a story about a woman who is searching for her lost husband, a farmer named Delorn, who has been captured by a floating City that is “forever moving across the desert.”With the use of the pronoun, “you,” the reader becomes closely associated with the heroine, a border guard in a small
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Rebecca Salt, age fourteen, daughter of divorced middle class Jews from Long Island, was tired of being a Speller. She could still remember how things had felt before she got competitive, when Spelling was still a pleasure, when she had a sort of palpable sense of the l-u-x-u-r-i-a-n-c-e** of words and letters. She'd heard the symmetry between alphabet and language as a kind of ringing d-u-l-c-i-m-e-r, intricate and melodious. Sometimes the joy she took in words felt a-u-t-o-c-h-t-h-o-n-o-u-s, seeming to rise up in her from some ineffable, otherworldly source.
Six years into the rote of shuffling flash cards in every free moment, gasping out words as she ran out the door to school, eschewing the playground to snatch more time at recess and lunch, her evenings collapsing into a formless mass of homework seeping into study… well, six years into it she found herself waxing e-l-e-g-i-a-c about the days when words had seemed to sing and spin. It seemed almost s-a-c-r-i-l-e-g-i-o-u-s to admit it, but she regretted the k-n-a-c-k for words that had bound her to this labor.
"The Quickening" is the one story original to The Third Bear, and it's a story that fascinates me because it is entirely composed of ambiguities. I like ambiguities in fiction -- they respect the reader by assuming an intelligent audience that wants to be an active participant in the meaning and import of the tale. (Speaking of awareness of the audience, I should note that this post will probably make most sense to people who have read the story. Yet another reason for you to get the book!)
First, I want to suggest the narrator is unreliable and that this is a story about memory and imagination. Let's create a corpus -- here are all the uses of the words "memory" and "remember" in the story:
My parents had died in an automobile accident when I was four. I had a confused memory or two of life with them that involved the snow in Minnesota and bulky, uncomfortable coats, but nothing more. (21)
It was a summer day, I remember. (22)
I remember thinking that his face shone oddly in the same way as Sensio's as he suffered his humiliation bound to the post. (24)
At first, we talked mostly at night, when I thought Aunt Etta couldn't hear us. I'd forgotten the strange ways in which that old bungalow could carry sound, or I'd just decided to risk it. I can't remember. (26)
"Remember, it's just an animal," Aunt Etta said to me, during that first meal after she discovered me talking to Sensio. This was back when she thought she might flatter Sensio into cooperating with her plans. I know she was wearing something else, but in memory she is wearing the same outfit as she did to the photo shoot. (28)
That was just the first of three fancy dinners, each more tense than the last. In memory, they are all mixed together, but they each had their own characteristics… (30)
I imagine I was screaming at her, although I can't remember making a sound. (32)
The circus woman, whose name I can't remember, sat on the couch and looked out at the orange orchards in the distance while I brought Sensio in and put him on the wicker chair to her left. (33)
I remember feeling a perverse pleasure at being a kid, at not being expected to put forth the effort. (33)
"She liked you, Sensio," I remember telling him. "She'd definitely help us." As if I were an adult, or had any money, or any sense. (36)
I know I should think of Aunt Etta every day. I know I should be kinder to her memory. I know I should be sorrier about what happened. (41)
The structure of the story itself is also relevant to this movement through memory. The narrative consists of basically two parallel, alternating structures: Structure A is a loose and nonlinear collection of memories and thoughts; Structure B is a mostly linear description of the events during the photography shoot and then immediately afterward.
Given how many times Rachel-as-narrator refers to memory and remembering, and even sometimes says she knows something is not as she remembered it, but she is presenting what is remembered anyway, there is no reason to trust her representation of events as factual within the world of the story. Instead, the events are what she prefers to remember.
But that's not all. How we remember the past affects who we are in the present. The meanings of past events are not incontrovertible. It's no coincidence that Aunt Etta hires a photographer to capture her
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In honor of the publication of Jeff VanderMeer's new short story collection, The Third Bear, I've asked a group of writers to read a couple of stories each and create some sort of response over the next few weeks. Some of those responses will be analyses of the story, others will be personal essays, at least one will be a work of visual art, and, who knows, some folks might be inspired to create stories of their own, or poems, or movies, or stained glass windows. I've given them no limits or guidelines other than it has to be something they can either post to their own blog or I can post for them here.
I will keep updating this post with links to each entry in what I'm calling the Third Bear Carnival. If you happen to have a copy of the book, or even just of some of the stories in the book, feel free to create something of your own and link to it in the comments to this post (I'll add relevant links to the main set whenever I have the chance).
Many of the writers just received the book last week, so the Carnival is likely to be slow to start, but once we get going, I think some marvelous things will appear...
Author Jeff VanderMeer has inked with Macmillan for a new novel.
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Novelist Nnedi Okorafor 
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Fandor has a great set of tributes to the great Derek Jarman.
Okay: shall check out.
but I'm finding Jarman much harder to write about than I expected, and both pieces are vastly late. But I shall persevere!
I look forward to both pieces!