The Forbidden Planet International Blog Log

Some great news for those of us who love the writing which comes out of  a strange conjunction of parallel dimensions within the head of Jeff VanderMeer – he’s announced on his blog that he is going to be collaborating with artist Eric Orchard on a graphic novel adaptation of his novelette The Situation (which was published by Peter Crowther’s very fine PS Publishing, a small but very high quality purveyor of science fiction and fantasy (boasting some seriously well know writers), well worthy of your support). Now I will confess a complete personal bias here as I consider Jeff a friend, so obviously I have a bias here, but in my defence I was a huge admirer of his writing skill and imagination before that (put it this way, I have a lot of books and comics in my ‘to read’ pile; there is a handful of authors who when their new book comes out I will shove them all to one side to dive into their book – Jeff is one of them) and, in a comics climate which has seen a number of SF&F writers turn their hands to comics, I’ve been wanting to see him dipping his toes into the medium for some time.

(one of Eric Orchard’s cahracter sketches for Jeff VanderMeer’s The Situation, (c) Eric and Jeff, borrowed from Jeff’s blog)

The comics version of The Situation will appear online at Tor.com over the summer and Jeff comments that he and Eric are considering longer, book-lenght collaborations once they can resolve their current deadlines. In the meantime, if you haven’t been introduced to Jeff’s work then I highly recommend picking up his novel Shriek: an Afterword or the fascinating collection City of Saints and Madmen; there are hints of Borges in there, some almost familiar tastes mixed with something very different, new, alien, imaginary and real (or imaginary real?) delivered in an elegant, intelligent, well-thought out text which conjures images to the reader’s mind (both fantastical and fantastically grotesque) which linger long after finishing the book (as the best writers do, transplanting a part of an imaginary realm to live inside the reader’s head). And in a genre which can sometimes be, well, rather generic, Jeff, like China Mieville, stands out as offering readers something different, something fresh, something intriguing. Damn, I am looking forward to this new collaboration!