Jeff VanderMeer painted a grotesque picture of climate change. Now he’s back for more

You know how in the Star Wars prequels, you learn how midi-chlorians sort of explain Jedi powers? Or how The Silmarillion explained all the history and lore of the Lord of the Rings trilogy? Don’t expect those types of concrete answers from the new novel Absolution.

“I’ve never really been into the idea of ‘lore,’” said author Jeff VanderMeer in an interview.

Absolution is the follow-up to VanderMeer’s wildly popular 2014 Southern Reach trilogy. Starting with Annihilation, the books told the story of Area X — a bit of land cut off from the rest of the continent, where nature has taken over. It’s lush with vegetation and wildlife, and it’d be beautiful except that weird and bad things tend to happen to people who enter. They get sick. They die. Or, they turn into creepy crawly creatures.

The atmospheric novels got rave reviews. Annihilation was adapted into a movie by director Alex Garland. And VanderMeer became a poster child for weird horror fiction that dealt directly with climate change. The new book, Absolution, with its eerie alligator experiments and grotesque depictions of skin suits, won’t change that. But VanderMeer isn’t too keen on being labeled a “climate-fiction” writer. “It’s hard for me to see climate fiction as a speculative endeavor,” he said. “It seems useful to try to avoid that categorization to some degree so that people can see novels for the totality of what they are.”

In the original trilogy, the Southern Reach is the government agency tasked with exploring Area X. It’s probably not a major spoiler to say that it doesn’t go well. And you find out that the Southern Reach is a bit of a mess. Actually, VanderMeer says a lot of his writing is about systems and institutions going haywire. He traces his interest in the theme back to an old day job doing software implementation, working for “a lot of companies that were like Lord of the Flies with middle management. And then dealing with government agencies, seeing just how ritualistic they were.”

It’s easy to make the allegorical jump from the Southern Reach trilogy to our institutional problems in dealing with (and causing) climate change. A bunch of critics and academics did. “It’s certainly thinking a lot about toxicity, forms of pollution, contamination and mutations,” said Alison Sperling, assistant professor of English at Florida State University. Sperling specializes in environmental fiction and has seen the field try and grapple with the utility of climate fiction. She often sees the question, “Can climate fiction save the planet?” And while she gets the motive, it’s not the right question for her.

“Weird fiction and weird eco-fiction, like [VanderMeer’s] kind of quite explicitly refuses to offer certain forms of answers or certain ways we’re supposed to respond. It serves as a refusal of that,” Sperling said.

Absolution continues to refuse to offer any answers. You obviously don’t get to the end of the book and suddenly realize the solution to climate change. You barely even get any answers to “What the heck is Area X, anyway?” But the answers aren’t the point. It’s how terrifying the questions are.