There are latticeworks and cathedrals of conversation that we’re unable to “hear.” We have fairly primitive sensory data coming in on all of this, and this means we misunderstand our environment from the moment we’re born. Plants, too, are communicating one to another and insects through pheromones. Microbial life, parasites, creatures in symbiosis, things that live in the air. Our environment contains much that’s invisible to our senses that permeates the landscape - that actually permeates us as well. One concerns the real world as we know it. Jeff VanderMeer: There are a few different answers to that question. What role did the setting play in conceiving of this trilogy? Do you think of it as a character, in the sense that it has mind and agency?

Certainly this is true of Area X, but the inscrutability of the Southern Reach building, the groupthink of its employees also sets up a kind of hostile, self-driven setting. Reading the Southern Reach trilogy, I’m consistently struck by the way in which location becomes a living - often hostile - presence in your work. Matthew Rossi: The Southern Reach trilogy is the second of your trilogies I’ve had the pleasure of reading (the first being the Ambergris trilogy full disclosure, I’m a fan). The final installment, Acceptance, was released by FSG on Saturday. The series is at turns a terrifying, hilarious, and philosophically profound look into the failure of people and institutions to respond to enormous tragedies. His most recent series, The Southern Reach Trilogy, explores the environmental and cultural consequences of a biocatastrophe in a place called Area X. Known as much for his work as an editor and literary critic as for his fiction, Jeff VanderMeer has long been a champion of the New Weird movement and of breaking through the invisible borders between literature and genre.

The ambergris trilogy