It was always tough with science fiction — the woodenness. As towering a feat of imagination as “Dune” was, you might not want to spend 600 pages’ worth of your time with the dialogue.
The grandeur of Frank Herbert’s conception was the thing, and with Arrakis, the desert planet, and its concerns with water resources, it was ahead of its time, published as it was in 1965.
I’d fallen away from the genre since college, but my own daughter pulled me back in, recommending Jeff VanderMeer’s shockingly good Southern Reach series, an outlier for its sophistication, its well-drawn characters, its explorations of the psychology of spycraft and the absurdities of government bureaucracy.
VanderMeer prefers the terms “speculative fiction” or “weird fiction” (and, true, “here be monsters,” at times in a Lovecraftian way). I heard him say this in an interview last week that’s available on the website of WXXI, a public radio station in Rochester, recorded on a day when he was about to speak at SUNY Geneseo for this year’s Walter Harding Lecture, named for an English professor who specialized in Henry David Thoreau. Fittingly, VanderMeer’s ecological, philosophical bent has earned him at least one national magazine comparison to Thoreau.
I thought better of the eight-hour drive. Nor could I hound my daughter to go, given her recent graduation from the place, but surely this was some kind of coup, landing one of the most innovative writers alive.
In “Annihilation,” the first of the Southern Reach books, as gripping as it is strange, you might say nature gets its revenge on humanity and our willful toxicity when a vast and malign area of “pristine wilderness” somehow takes hold over miles of terrain along the coastal Southern U.S. “Pristine” in this case involves the kind of cleansing that destroys the built environment and kills 1,500 people in the process. And it’s expanding.
This is Area X, the inverse of a Superfund site, and the Southern Reach is the compromised, outmatched government agency tasked with containment. The new label climate fiction (cli-fi?) is at least halfway applicable here.
VanderMeer, who lives in the Florida Panhandle, comes from a scientific family (his father an entomologist, his mother an illustrator of biological subjects), but with a healthy dose of technological skepticism. He writes drafts in longhand.
So in the interview it’s satisfying to hear him call out how “dumb” artificial intelligence is, which you may have discovered on your own with the new online search functions, and then go on to note a recent M.I.T. study that found that “90 percent of generative A.I. is worthless.” The latest bubble.
But VanderMeer seems more worried about the mass consumption of water just to cool the supercomputers, the sheer loss of groundwater.
Frank Herbert would be appalled.