‘Dead Astronauts’ Author Jeff VanderMeer On the Powerand Dangerof Climate Fiction – Esquire

As the prophet of climate fiction, Jeff VanderMeer occupies a singular space in literature. His novels and stories exist at the vanguard of art and activism, with each one not only pushing the formal boundaries of literary science fiction, but advancing the conversation about climate crisis. Through novels like Borne and the Southern Reach Trilogy (whose first volume, Annihilation, was adapted into a 2018 Natalie Portman movie), VanderMeer has become a pioneer of the New Weird, a genre that subverts cliches of speculative fiction to create something dark, terrorizing, and wonderful.

Dead Astronauts, his latest novel, returns to the post-apocalyptic world of Borne, where three dusty spacesuits fallen from the heavens and embedded in the terrain made for a memorable, mysterious image. Dead Astronauts is a prequel of sorts, following those three astronauts as they square off against a nefarious biotech corporation known only as the Company, which devastated Earths biome by releasing bioengineered creatures into the wild. This is a Mobius strip of a novel, with each chapter containing worlds upon nested worlds, all of them dreamlike and dark. In this shattered landscape, VanderMeer explores urgent ideas about capitalism, greed, and natural destruction. VanderMeer spoke with Esquire about animal sentience, mindfulness in nature, and the relationship between beauty and morality.

Esquire: One line that struck me was this line of dialogue from the foxs narration: Do you have the new phone yet that someone made continents away because they were forced to, and then someone else starved to death because when they mined the components they destroyed all the croplands and the forest? I thought that was such a stunning encapsulation of late-stage capitalism. How much do you think about systems and their interconnectedness when you write?

Jeff VanderMeer: I think this book is all about systems. With Borne, the prior book set in the same universe, I had a decision to make: do I just call it City and Company? Because of late-stage capitalism, I thought that Company was actually not too coarse a granularity. Were literally surrounded by Company. If Id been writing this novel twenty years ago, I probably would have tried to name the company and give it more characteristics, but in fact were surrounded thanks to late-stage capitalism with systems that are hard to interrogate or push back against, because theyre often invisible to us, or theyre so tentacular that its hard to get to the center of them.

This book is meant to interrogate that world we live in, even if its a future of that world, and also to get at ideas of resistance that are not the normal ones you find in fiction. I found the idea of failure really compelling. In part because of capitalism, weve come to see activism as our metric of success by the same kinds of ways we assess success in our personal lives. There are ways in which an ambitious failure can still push things forward. If youre fighting something that is just so pervasive, theres never going to be one clear victory. Its going to be all these different things, where people may feel theyve failed, but they may have actually done just enough to make a change that eventually leads somewhere.

Paramount/Moviestore/Shutterstock

ESQ: As we think about activism and capitalism, the layers go up and up. If you buy buttons for protestors to wear, for example, youre likely participating in a corrupt system wherever the buttons were manufactured. Even our best intentions are corrupted.

JV: Exactly. We as novelists participate in our own corruption all the time. Even in writing a novel thats pushing back against capitalism, you get an uneasy feeling when you get to the promotion stage of it--a feeling that youre actually being counterproductive to what youre seeking to do. Its a tricky thing, but I thought that getting out of my comfort zone with different narrative effects would at least make people uncomfortable in a way that could get them thinking outside the normal bubbles.

ESQ: This is a novel very much concerned with multiples and doubles. You have multiple Mosses, multiple ducks, multiple timelines. What interests you about that idea?

JV: What I found hilarious about it was that multiple versions means continuity doesnt really matter anymore. That was very compelling. In all seriousness, I like the idea of characters coming into contact with different versions of themselves, and what that might mean emotionally and metaphorically. There are a lot of different things I thought those echoes might achieve. Theres also a playful element there in thinking about all these different versions of these same characters. I did try to keep track of them to the point where it would actually be dysfunctioning continuity, but not seem like a continuity error that wasnt planned.

ESQ: Whats the process of world building like for you? Where does it start and how does it pick up steam?

JV: Often its very character-based. Some people were frustrated with the Southern Reach trilogy because I was not willing to let characters know things that they wouldnt in real life know, which meant there couldnt be formal closure of plot by the end of the story. In this case, I think theres a semi-omniscient feel to some of the sections, so its a little different in that there does seem to be some authorial intrusion, but in general in Dead Astronauts and Borne, the idea is that the creatures and the biotech are the things that stand out as part of the setting. First of all, you pick whats going to be in the foreground. With prior novels, which needed intense history and world building, all that stuff was centered, and animals were in the backdrop. But here, that stuff is pulled forward, which speaks to the idea of symbolic imagery, because then those objects or animals have to resonate in a way that they wouldnt otherwise have to.

But really, its just by feel. You think about what a system like the Company would be in terms being so pervasive and seeming to have no centerthat helps with world-building. This novel was very organicnot that the others arent, but sometimes the material comes at you out of the blue, and large portions of this were like that.

ESQ: Speaking of the animals, we have to discuss the fox. In his narration, he rejects the construction of being a fox, saying that foxes dont agree with it. He muses, Do you ever wonder what it would be like not to live in the world of humans? How do you inhabit the minds of animals? What are your ways not just into the physical experience of being a fox, but the emotional experience?

JV: Obviously its impossible in the first place, but there are two things. One is that were often told as writers not anthropomorphize. In the current era, even pop culture anthropomorphizes animals in horrifying ways. There are all sorts of propaganda that literally have animals participate in their own objectification, which helps us avoid thinking of them as individuals. The other thing is that I always have a situation where the animals have been modified in some way. I have this idea in my head that they maintain the attributes of the animal, but they are in some sense an artificial construct, or have been somehow altered. Thats the way in for me. Even the fox, who is openly, blatantly rebellious, is still caught in the system. The fox never buys into these ways in which we in fiction want to have animals forgive us for what we do, or to overlook what we do to the animal world and how we exploit it. I did have to inhabit a different persona, because the fox is very extreme, but that was very liberating. Fiction should be a laboratory where you can express dangerous ideas.

Fiction should be a laboratory where you can express dangerous ideas.

ESQ: The fox also says, Humans were garlanded by us and yet never saw us. How do we get back to a place of seeing the animal world around us? How do we develop compassion and empathy for that world?

JV: I think its really important that we are literally in contact with it on a daily basis. On my social media, I talk about birds a lot; one reason I do that is because there are a lot of them in our yard, but also because theyre the kind of animal that a lot of people see. If people can actually begin to see the individual bird, can begin to disallow birds to become just part of the landscape, then thats one way of doing it. Before we wound up with this yard, I had no knowledge of plants whatsoever, and when I would hike, I was always looking for birds and animals. Now that I know the plant life, even our yard seems much more overwhelmingly alive. Suddenly the plants are no longer part of the landscapetheyre in the foreground.

I do think it is tough, because a lot of us are removed from that. Theres a lot of propaganda that tries to make us be at a remove. We cant get back to a pre-industrialized situation, even though there are activists that want to do thatwhich is problematic in some ways. Its a tough thing. I actually had somebody in an environmental class say, Im from a huge city, where we never see any animals. Why should I care about nature? I didnt really have a good answer except that we need it to survive. Its ethically and morally wrong to exploit all this life in the way that we do.

Axelle/Bauer-Griffin

ESQ: That connects to something you highlight in this book about how we rather erroneously center the human experience as the beating heart of life on earth, and thats just not true.

JV: I think it would be much improved if we were to decentralize. There was a point where we seemed to be decentralized. Once we realized that the earth was not the center of the solar system, that the sun wasnt revolving around us, that had a huge convulsive effect on how humans thought of themselves. Unfortunately, that hasnt continued, but it would be in our own best interest to decentralize ourselves and to see ourselves as part of a larger picture.

ESQ: Maybe things like the death of the bees will help nudge people toward that realization.

JV: I do think more and more people are seeing this. I was shocked when I started talking about our yard, posting photographs and talking about the process. I thought for sure I was going to lose thousands of followers. In fact, I gained thousands of followers. Every week, I get people emailing me or tweeting me about how theyve changed their feelings about their yard. I think there is a moment here where people are understanding that there are things you can doand its not one of those problematic privilege things, either. You literally can help the planet just by not raking your leaves and not mowing. You can make a difference just by putting out one pot of wildflowers. Its very scalable.

ESQ: You write, Chen cared nothing for beauty that declared itself, for the beauty that had no morality. When we talk about nature, particularly when we talk about what we stand to lose through climate change, we often talk about it in terms of beauty. Take the coral reefs, for examplepeople always cite them as something beautiful, as something we stand to lose. They dont talk about the creatures that depend on the reefthey talk about the aesthetics of the reef. Is that the wrong approach to this conversation, to think of nature as categorically good and beautiful?

JV: Its a difficult question. The reason its a difficult question is because we have done such a terrible job of researching and observing animal sentience. It was just a couple of years ago that we realized birds have the capacity to be twice as intelligent as we thought they were, because they have more neurons per micro-inch in their brains than we do. We realized that fish dream and that theyre social animals. Theres so much about the world we dont actually know. Im not advocating that all creatures have an intelligence and an awareness similar to ours, but at the same time, were learning that a lot of the things that we think of as consciousness are actually not really about free will. That combination of things is really important in terms of thinking about how connected we really are and how aware, in their own way, other animals are.

ANNIHILATION (The Southern Reach Trilogy)

Unfortunately this is something that scientists have had to buy into, too, which is to say that to convince people that somethings worth saving, they have to find the thing thats cute or beautiful. Thats often been to the detriment of animals that are not cute or beautiful. Were not seeing the full system. I understand the impulse of rescuing the frog from the snake, but my sympathy is partially with the snake. I think thats part of our disconnect from naturethere are things in nature that can be seen as brutal, but are really just part of the process. Of course, we do a lot of brutal things, ourselves.

ESQ: Elsewhere in the novel you write, No one should feel responsible for the whole world. Is that the direction you see us moving in, or our children and grandchildren?

JV: Obviously social media can be really good about spreading the word and helping people connect, but it also freezes you, because theres too much bad news coming in even when theres good news. I do think people are beginning to feel like they need to do more, like they need to do everything. You see these debates with regard to individual behavior versus changing systems. I tend to think its a combination of both, depending on the situation. You have to evaluate where individual action will make the most sense in terms of boycotts, and where you can systematically change the actual systems we live under. However, people just take on too much and get frozen. Ive been thinking about climate scientists, who suffer PTSD and depression almost constantly now. You have to find some way to get past that, to keep moving, to keep doing stuff. For me, as someone who isnt a climate scientist but still monitors this subject, its definitely working in my yard every day that gets me past that point and trying to just focus on the moment, which is something I think weve lost touch with, living in the moment.

I think weve lost touch with living in the moment.

ESQ: How can we regain touch with living in the moment?

JV: I think nature is a big part of that. Being out in nature is very restorative in terms of living in the moment, especially if you have the opportunity to hike in unfamiliar terrain. It reboots your senses. Its hard not to be in the moment unless youre the most careless person in the universe. I think its a mindfulness that we have to relearn, that we have to consciously think of. You have to consciously say, Okay, Im going to leave all the accoutrements of technology behind if I go to a public park or walk around my neighborhood. Im going to try in this moment to see the things that Ive rendered invisible.

ESQ: We now have a word for the genre you write in: climate fiction. As we continue to negotiate what the genre can do and be, what do you see as the purpose of climate fiction? Is it art, activism, or some of both?

JV: I think you see a lot of artists grappling with this in different mediums. You think, If Im trying to get across a message and if I go too far away from what you might call commercial modes of fiction, then I begin to potentially lose readers. Then again, if I convey my message in very commercial narrative strategies, then Im also losing something, because Im unable to effectively convey the complexity of what it is that Im trying to convey.

People are misconstruing climate fiction with science fiction. Because were actually living through it, climate fiction should be anything that grapples with the climate crisis, including contemporary fiction that has no speculative element whatsoever, as well as poetry and other forms. Everyone should realize that if you want to grapple with this, you dont have to write science fiction. In actual fact, I think it can be very effective if theres a small element of climate change within a novel that otherwise has nothing to do with it. That intrusion can be very jolting. If youre writing message fiction in some form, the person youre trying to convince is not the climate change denier, but the person who thinks nothing is going to happen for 30 years. Youre trying to make someone think differently who doesnt do anything to push the narrative in the right direction.

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'Dead Astronauts' Author Jeff VanderMeer On the Powerand Dangerof Climate Fiction - Esquire