Q&A: A WIRED Book Club Conversation With Sci-Fi Writer Jeff VanderMeer

With no disrespect intended, I’m completely an anti-Freudian, and I work very hard to destabilize any of those kinds of readings. It’s the obvious place that people can go, but I don’t really know that it brings much to the understanding of what’s going on.

Then what were you trying to accomplish?

I was thinking more about destabilizing the idea of the lighthouse as a safe place, as a bringer of light, and working with the idea of subterranean areas as often being seen as hiding secrets or being where people hide out who are not part of normal society—things like that. I really thought of Annihilation as a book where, whether you’re going up into the lighthouse or going down into the tower, you’re really going down steps. You’re destabilized the whole time.

There’s also the mouse-washing scene. What is that?

The practical concern with a character like Whitby is that I, as the author, may see him as sympathetic, but the reader may see him as batshit nuts. I wanted to find something that would make it clear that he is still trying to cling to some semblance of humanity, that he still cares. And it just came into my mind: Whitby’s out there washing the mouse. I do have to say when I put the mouse in the desk drawer, I didn’t actually know if the mouse would come back into play. I think my wife said something like, “If you have a dead mouse in a desk drawer in a second book, you have to have something about the mouse in the third.” Also, I’d never seen a mouse-washing scene in fiction before, so it was a little bit of a challenge.

What about Lowry’s phone?

There are all kinds of intrusions of Area X into the Southern Reach. In Authority, all the incidental dialog, in corridors and in the bars, is repurposed from Annihilation. I wanted to convey the idea that the Southern Reach is already contaminated, and I thought the cellphone was an interesting literalization of that.

Why shouldn’t people bring tech into Area X?

I thought it would be really interesting to explore the idea of an entity that finds our advanced tech easier to hack into. Honestly, we see this in the real world. We’re really happy to have refrigerators that are beginning to think for themselves, yet that also means that we’re much more accessible. We’re much more able to be surveilled by our own appliances.

Are there any other Easter eggs you can reveal?

It may be obvious that Control’s mother pops up a bit more, is maybe controlling a bit more than you might think. I would also say look very carefully at, as I call him, Piano Hands Jim, who is not actually what he seems in the third book. In fact, I’m writing a short story that features him as a main character. He’s actually Control’s mother’s man on the spot, way back in the day, for the creation of Area X.