Acceptance: A Novel (The Southern Reach Trilogy) (35 page)
Read Acceptance: A Novel (The Southern Reach Trilogy) Online
Authors: Jeff VanderMeer
The questioning is over. Area X is done with you, has taken every last little thing out of you, and there’s a strange kind of peace in that. A backpack. The remains of a body. Your gun, tossed into the surf, your letter to Saul, crumpled and tumbling across the dried seaweed and the sand.
You are still there for a moment, looking out over the sea toward the lighthouse and the beautiful awful brightness of the world.
Before you are nowhere.
Before you are everywhere.
Dear Saul:
I doubt you will ever read this letter. I don’t know by what means it might get to you or if you could even understand it now. But I wanted to write it. To make things clear, and so that you might know what you meant to me, even in such a short time.
That you might know that I appreciated your gruffness and your consistency and your concern. That I understood what those things meant, and it was important to me. That it would have been important even if all the rest of this had not occurred.
That you might know that it wasn’t your fault. It wasn’t anything you did. It wasn’t anything other than bad luck, being in the wrong place at the wrong time—the same way it always happens, according to my dad. And I know this is true because it happened to me, too, even though I chose a lot of what’s happened to me since.
Whatever occurred back then, I know you tried your best, because you always did try your best. And I am trying my best, too. Even if we don’t always know what that means or how it will play out. You can get caught up in something that’s beyond you, and never understand why.
The world we are a part of now is difficult to accept, unimaginably difficult. I don’t know if I accept everything even now. I don’t know how I can. But acceptance moves past denial, and maybe there’s defiance in that, too.
I remember you, Saul. I remember the keeper of the light. I never did forget about you; I just took a long time coming back.
Love,
Gloria
(who lived dangerous on the rocks and pestered you true)
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Many thanks to my patient and brilliant editor, Sean McDonald, who made it possible for me to write these books knowing someone really truly had my back. Thanks to everyone at FSG for making the experience of publishing this trilogy so wonderful, including Taylor Sperry, Charlotte Strick, Devon Mazzone, Amber Hoover, Izabela Wojciechowska, Abby Kagan, Debra Helfand, and Lenni Wolff. Thanks to Karla Eoff, Chandra Wohleber, and Justine Gardner. Thanks as well to Alyson Sinclair for her excellent work on the publicity side and to Eric Nyquist for great cover art. Thanks again to my stalwart agent, Sally Harding, and the Cooke Agency. I’m also indebted to my publishers in Canada, the U.K., and in other countries for showing such imagination and energy in publishing the Southern Reach trilogy. Blackstone Audio has also been a delight to work with, and in particular Ryan Bradley. Many thanks to the brilliant Bronson Pinchot and Carolyn McCormick for great audiobook performances. Additional thanks to Clubber Ace, Greg Bossert, Eric Schaller, Matthew Cheney, Tessa Kum, Berit Ellingsen, Alistair Rennie, Brian Evenson, Karin Tidbeck, Ashley Davis, Craig L. Gitney, Kati Schardl, Mark Mustian, Diane Roberts, and the Fermentation Lounge. Appreciation for owl observations to Amal El-Mohtar and to Dave Davis for many kindnesses.
In thinking about and writing these books I’ve been grateful for ideas encountered in the Semiotext(e) Intervention Series, and in particular
The Coming Insurrection
, which had a tremendous influence on Ghost Bird’s thinking throughout the novel and is quoted or paraphrased on pages 241, 242, and 336. I’m also grateful for the works of Rachel Carson and Jean Baudrillard; Taschen’s
The Book of Miracles
; Philip Hoare’s
The Sea Inside
; David Toomey’s
Weird Life
; Iris Murdoch’s novel
The Sea, The Sea
; the works of Tove Jansson (especially
The Summer Book
and
Moominland Midwinter
);
Tainaron
, by Leena Krohn; the nature poetry of Pattiann Rogers;
The Derrick Jensen Reader
, edited by Lierre Keith; Richard Jefferies’s
After London
; and Elinor De Wire’s
Guardians of the Light
. Finally,
The Seasons of Apalachicola Bay
, by John B. Spohrer, Jr., was like a revelation to me while writing
Acceptance
—a heartfelt, gorgeous, and wise book that kept me grounded in the places that made the Southern Reach trilogy personal.
Other research meant visiting, revisiting, or remembering landscapes that spoke to me in a way useful for the fiction: St. Marks National Wildlife Refuge, Apalachicola, rural Florida and Georgia, Botanical Beach Provincial Park and the Pacific Rim National Park Reserve on Vancouver Island, the coast of Northern California, and the Fiji Islands, which gave me a certain starfish.
I should also like to thank the many wonderful and creative booksellers I’ve met while on tour this year—you’ve been inspiring and energizing—as well as the enthusiastic readers willing to follow me on this somewhat strange journey. I really appreciate it.
Finally, I’m humbled and my heart made glad by my wife, Ann, who was my partner in all of this. She encouraged me, listened to me, helped me work out knots in drafts in progress, took other work off of my desk, went well beyond the call of duty or anything in the marriage vows to allow me the time and space to write these novels. It wouldn’t have been possible without her.
ALSO BY JEFF VANDERMEER
FICTION
Authority
Annihilation
Dradin, in Love
The Book of Lost Places
(stories)
Veniss Underground
City of Saints and Madmen
Secret Life
(stories)
Shriek: An Afterword
The Situation
Finch
The Third Bear
(stories)
NONFICTION
Why Should I Cut Your Throat?
Booklife: Strategies and Survival Tips for the 21st-Century Writer
Monstrous Creatures
The Steampunk Bible: An Illustrated Guide to the World of Imaginary Airships, Corsets and Goggles, Mad Scientists, and Strange Literature
(with S. J. Chambers)
Wonderbook: The Illustrated Guide to Creating Imaginative Fiction
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jeff VanderMeer is an award-winning novelist and editor. His fiction has been translated into twenty languages and has appeared in the Library of America’s
American Fantastic Tales
and multiple year’s-best anthologies. He writes nonfiction for
The Washington Post
,
The New York Times Book Review
, the
Los Angeles Times
, and
The Guardian
, among others. He grew up in the Fiji Islands and now lives in Tallahassee, Florida, with his wife.
PRAISE FOR THE SOUTHERN REACH TRILOGY
“Chilling.”
—
JULIE BOSMAN,
The New York Times
“VanderMeer masterfully conjures up an atmosphere of both metaphysical dread and visceral tension …
Annihilation
is a novel in which facts are undermined and doubt instilled at almost every turn. It’s about science as a way of not only thinking but feeling, rather than science as a means of becoming certain about the world … Ingenious.”
—
LAURA MILLER,
Salon
“Successfully creepy, an old-style gothic horror novel set in a not-too-distant future. The best bits turn your mind inside out.”
—
SARA SKLAROFF,
The Washington Post
“An enthralling read—trust us.”
—
TARA WANDA MERRIGAN,
GQ
“If J. J. Abrams–style by-the-numbers stories of shadowy organizations and science magic have let you down one too many times, then
Annihilation
will be more like a revelation. VanderMeer peels back the skin of the everyday, and gives you a glimpse of a world where science really is stretching the bounds of our knowledge—sometimes to the point where we can’t ever be the same … [
Annihilation
] will make you believe in the power of science mysteries again.”
—
ANNALEE NEWITZ,
io9
“[I] finished the entire thing in less than a day, knowing it finally for the strange, clever … altogether fantastic book that it is.”
—
JASON SHEEHAN,
NPR
“Its deepest terror lies in its exploration of … the human heart, and the terror that can grow from the ways in which we are untrue to each other, and to ourselves.”
—
JARED BLAND
,
The Globe and Mail
(Toronto)
“Fans of the
Lost
TV series … this one is for you.”
—
MOLLY DRISCOLL,
The Christian Science Monitor
“What frightens you? According to many psychologists, our most widely shared phobia is the fear of falling. Jeff VanderMeer’s novel
Annihilation
taps into that bottomless terror … VanderMeer ups the book’s eeriness quotient with the smoothest of skill, the subtlest of grace. His prose makes the horrific beautiful.”
—
NISI SHAWL,
The Seattle Times
“Much of the flora and fauna seem familiar, but that’s what’s so fascinating about the carnage that VanderMeer sets loose. He has created a science fiction story about a world much like our own.”
—
JOHN DOMINI,
The Miami Herald
“
Annihilation
feels akin to [the] isolated sci-fi terrors of
Alien
… [It] teases and terrifies and fascinates.”
—
KEVIN NGUYEN,
Grantland
“In much of Jeff VanderMeer’s work, a kind of radiance lies beating beneath the surface of the words. Here in
Annihilation
, it shines through with warm blazing incandescence. This is one of a grand writer’s finest and most dazzling books.”
—
PETER STRAUB,
author of
Lost Boy, Lost Girl
“Original and beautiful, maddening and magnificent.”
—
WARREN ELLIS
“A tense and chilling psychological thriller about an unraveling expedition and the strangeness within us. A little Kubrick, a lot Lovecraft, the novel builds with an unbearable tension and a claustrophobic dread that linger long afterward. I loved it.”
—
LAUREN BEUKES,
author of
The Shining Girls
“A dazzling book … Haunted and haunting.”
—
KELLY LINK,
author of
Magic for Beginners
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
18 West 18th Street, New York 10011
Copyright © 2014 by VanderMeer Creative, Inc.
All rights reserved
First edition, 2014
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
VanderMeer, Jeff.
Acceptance / Jeff VanderMeer. — First edition.
pages cm. — (Southern Reach Trilogy; 3)
ISBN 978-0-374-10411-5 (pbk.) — ISBN 978-0-374-71079-8 (ebook)
I. Title.
PS3572.A4284 A82 2014
813'.54—dc23
2014016962
