Can anyone tell me about Jeff Vandermeer's work?
His Southern Reach Trilogy seems kind of interesting to me, but I also see he's done a Steampunk story or two somewhere which raises red flags.
Do you recommend him? Is there anything worthwhile, aesthetically or philosophically in there?
I do not recommend. He takes an interesting concept and makes it boring.
Boring how?
Any other criticisms?
It's weird fiction, otherwise known as Lovecraftian, but more modern, not as verbose as H.P.L. I'd say it's decent, I have only read Annihilation.
Absolutely this. Annihilation plays with H.P. Lovecraft/Arkady concepts and does nothing new with them, and then Authority rolls around and has a better plot but does nothing with the style that Annihilation was playing with.
It's, somehow inexplicably, elevated genre-trash and I don't even know how I found myself reading two of these unremarkable books.
It's meh. He takes a bunch of interesting concepts and goes exactly nowhere with them.
Read Blindsight if you really want to have your sodium-potassium pumps activated.
Yeah I was wondering if it was genre-trash.
But the thing is, I kind of like genre-trash as a thing itself... Like I get a strange rush from Warhammer books, garbage movies like Mortal Kombat, disposable gabber mixes, etc... like it's baseness and trashness is a part of its exhilarating texture and weirdness.
Like I'm thinking I can maybe enjoy this as genre-trash, but shouldn't expect this to be, like, high art ? Lesser stuff can fit into my overall personal canon when it's a passable, weird-enough play on some genre, and thus partakes in an interesting aesthetic entity larger than itself... like with a lot of dance music.
Southern reach is by no means exhilarating. It's one of those novels that strains to be mysterious and spooky but only manages to be vague and ineffably boooooooring.
It reads like what a genre-trash writer thinks high literature is supposed to be like.
You're probably right. I'll give the first one a shot but not expect much.
>sodium-potassium pumps activated.
lol
> Lesser stuff can fit into my overall personal canon when it's a passable, weird-enough play on some genre
yes, absolutely, but this is not weird-enough or interesting. it just sucks, imo
Damn, that's a shame because I'm looking for more 'weird' stuff to read.
Like Warhammer books are genuinely, perversely weird in just how fucking interestingly ludicrous they are.
My highest recommendation for this book is that I read it in one sitting and was very entertained. Don't expect the most exquisite prose or anything.
Also as far as a trilogy I found the whole thing satisfying after accepting it was more an exploration of mood than an explicit story. Characters develop but the questions get implied answers and nothing more.
Looking forward to the film adaptation of this by the director of Ex Machina.
His best work was Shriek, the schlocky genre stuff downplayed and mystery dialed up to ten. Finch was a big letdown from that, especially as a direct sequel.
The Southern Reach Trilogy followed the same pattern, with the first book being very good at suspense and mystery and the second building on that, but then the third just becoming silly.
The second and third books were also jarring due to obvious forced diversity (Hispanic, check! Lesbian, check! Black girl, check! Asian, check! Gay man, check!)
Well that sounds okay.
Exploration of mood is more than enough for me, usually, if done well enough. And I prefer hanging questions to answers.
Hm. Yeah, seems like he might be at best a 'fun' read if I dig the tone, but that diversity shit is a bad sign. I think if anything an artist or writer should RESIST diversity unless absolutely necessary for the work, otherwise it always seems to diminish it as art. Any lessening of a quality of the work for the sake of pandering or politics is pretty unforgivable.
I've read online that his weird fiction anthology is pretty decent. It's called The Weird if I recall correctly.
>stop pandering to politics
>no diversity at all
I mean I don't really care about liberals needing a diverse character list lol but what you said is so contradictory
No, I meant I'm fine with diversity but not forced / false diversity.
It's just really obvious when something has this forced diverse group or people depicted in unrealistic ways. It really diminishes things.
I am pretty tolerant about diversity, but that doesn't sound very good and I totally expect Vandemeer to fuck up the job of depicting believable and diverse characters.
I really enjoyed the first book, got through the second, and never finished the third. I don't get the shit people are saying about them never explaining anything(which I see in countless reviews and even here). I didn't even finish the final novel(it really does seem boring) and thought that everything was already getting over explained. The first is a great stand alone piece of weirdness.