Veniss Underground (23 page)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jeff VanderMeer grew up in the Fiji Islands and spent six months traveling around the world before returning to the United States. These travels have deeply influenced his fiction. He is a two-time winner (six-time finalist) of the World Fantasy Award, as well as a past finalist for the Hugo Award, the Philip K. Dick Award, the International Horror Guild Award, the British Fantasy Award, the Bram Stoker Award, and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. VanderMeer is the author of several surreal/magic realist novels and story collections, including
City of Saints & Madmen, Veniss Underground
, and
Shriek: An Afterword
. VanderMeer's most recent books have made the year's best lists of
Publishers Weekly, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Los Angeles Weekly, Publishers' News
, and
Amazon.com
. He is the recipient of an NEA-funded Florida Individual Artist Fellowship for excellence in fiction (1995–1996) and a Florida Artist Enhancement Grant (2004–2005). In 2001, Locus Online named him one of the ten best speculative fiction writers in the world.

VanderMeer's book-length fiction has been translated into ten languages, while his short fiction has appeared in several year's-best anthologies, been short-listed for
Best American Short Stories
, and been published in periodicals in more than twenty countries. His short story collection
Secret Life
was published in 2004 to widespread acclaim.

In addition to his writing, VanderMeer has run an award-winning publishing company for the past 15 years and edited or co-edited several anthologies, including the critically acclaimed
Leviathan
fiction anthology series and
The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases
.

VanderMeer's appearances in recent years include the Suncoast Writers Conference, the South Carolina Book Festival, the Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis, the Brisbane Writers Festival, and the New Orleans Independent Book Fair, among others.

He currently lives in Tallahassee, Florida, with his wife, Ann. He is 36 years old. Visit the Veniss Underground website at
www.venissunderground.com

OTHER BOOKS BY JEFF VANDERMEER

The Book of Frog

The Book of Lost Places

Dradin, In Love

Dradin, In Love & Other Stories (Greece)

The Exchange

City of Saints & Madmen

Secret Life

Why Should I Cut Your Throat

REVIEWERS PRAISE
VENISS UNDERGROUND

“A wonder-filled journey that echoes Dante's
Divine Comedy
,
the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, and the landscapes of Hieronymus Bosch. Not for the faint of heart, the story packs a strong emotional wallop.” —
Publishers Weekly
, Starred Review

“Operates at the borders of science fiction and fantasy, mingling the effects of both genres to create something unsettlingly original
. . . full of beautiful sentences, black humor and terrible wonders, an audacious riff on the legend of Orpheus and Eurydice.” —
San Francisco Chronicle

“[
Veniss Underground
's] milieu recalls Philip K. Dick, its passages of prose poetry Edgar Allan Poe, its wry fatalism Jim Thompson. Wow.” —
Booklist

“Not to be missed . . . defines with surgical clarity the strength of the human heart, even a broken one, and the weakness of the flesh, even enhanced.” —CNN.com

“Harrowing, horrific, hallucinatory and haunting . . .
Veniss
is astonishing, repellent, funny, exciting and ultimately moving.” —
Sci Fi Weekly

“A powerful meditation on the depths of a man's soul and the need to make both literal and figurative Kierkegaardian leaps of faith. . . . beneath the trappings of the fantastical, it is all together about the real.” —
New York Review of Science Fiction

“Rife with more startling biomorphic inventions than a dozen iterations of Cordwainer Smith's
A Planet Named Shayol
. A thrilling, poetic tale. You will have to prop up your dropped jaw more than once.” —
Asimov's Magazine

“Visual, in-your-face horrific, mixing wit and shadows like the best contemporary graphic
novels . . . VanderMeer's in another zone.” —
Locus

“There are so many layers to this seemingly spare novel that I'm still marveling at the elegance of the writing. For a glimpse of true literary genius, read
Veniss Underground
.” —
SF Site

“City-state Veniss is one of humanity's last redoubts against the polluted wastelands of the Earth, but it is corrupt and rotting from within.
Veniss Underground
is the Pandemonium that lies beneath it, a netherworld straight out of the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch. . . . This is an outstanding first novel brimming with startling ideas made unpleasant flesh by VanderMeer's deliciously decadent prose.” —
Scotsman

“Lyrical, beautifully descriptive, and often quirky.” —
SciFi Dimensions

“A fairytale fever dream . . . Jeff VanderMeer is a major talent to watch.” ***** —
SFX

“Frighteningly well-written and carries far more than would ever seem possible.” —
Vector

“A chilling and unsettling read . . . doubtlessly one of the most inventive and stylish writers to have emerged in recent years.” —
SF Revu

“A strange, enigmatic and wonderful tale. Highly recommended.” —
The Third Alternative

“A work of baroque grotesquery that draws on classical and psychological archetypes to weave a tapestry of great imaginative power and immense descriptive impact. . . . a veritable feast of fiction.” —
Alien Online

PRAISE FROM AUTHORS FOR
VENISS UNDERGROUND

“In the hands of a brilliant writer like Jeff VanderMeer, writing fantasy can be a means of serious artistic expression . . . also playful, poignant, and utterly, wildly imaginative.” —Peter Straub, author of
lost boy, lost girl

“
Veniss Underground
is a darkly beautiful and genuinely nightmarish tale which takes the established ground of dystopian SF by storm and twists it into something utterly new. Jeff VanderMeer has little time for the conventions of a coherent futuristic world—instead, characters of almost mythic simplicity and power stalk a landscape that owes as much to Hieronymous Bosch and Salvador Dali as it does to SF mavericks like J G Ballard or Simon Ings. Cataclysmic external events rub shoulders with brooding personal self-examination and intense, dislocated moments of beauty and terror that are nothing short of dreamlike. Warning: do not take hallucinogenic drugs whilst reading VanderMeer's work—it simply won't be necessary. Yup, it's that good.” —Richard Morgan, author of
Market Forces

“A striking and unusual blend of wonders. Stark, intricate and gripping,
Veniss Underground
takes the reader on a moving journey through a world which is endlessly surprising.” —Ian R. MacLeod, author of
The Light Ages
“A nightmare vision that shows off VanderMeer's many virtues—his linking of characters and plot to the mythic core of his story, his idiosyncratic inventions which derive straight from the psyche, rather than from any generic inspiration, his ambitious style and his vivid descriptive powers. The denouement is as powerful as any I have read . . . (He) could well be creating one of the dominant literary forms of the 21st century.”
—Michael Moorcock,
Guardian Saturday Review

“
Veniss Underground
is a short, savage novel of glittering beauty, like a crystal knife found beneath one's fingernail upon waking one morning.
Veniss
tackles core questions about love, art, and the survival of the species in voice and tone somewhere on the ill-defined boundary between fantasy and SF. The novel is presented in three perspectives of increasing length, leading the reader by steady measures into a spasmodic hell resembling nothing so much as Bosch's
The Garden of Earthly Delights
. The language is glorious, the journey terrifying.” —Jay Lake, John W. Campbell Award winner, author of
Dogs in the Moonlight

“Jeff VanderMeer's mythic far-future novel
Veniss Underground
has the phantasmagoric palpability of a wrenchingly vivid dream. It pulls one along as a nightmare does, bestowing—or inflicting—a kaleidoscopic succession of horrific but awe-inducing images. These images, however, derive their power not solely from their imaginative detail, but also from their narrative influence on the flawed human characters who must contend with the mutating trials set before them in the multi-leveled city of Veniss. If other courageous purveyors of imaginative literature write ‘like angels,' then Jeff VanderMeer writes like a pitch-perfect seraph.” —Michael Bishop, author of
Brighten to Incandescence

“
Veniss Underground
is a magnificently phantasmagoric account of an epic journey of discovery. It is rare to find such intense visual imagery combined with such a fast-paced and far-reaching narrative, and the alloy is as hectically exciting as it is luminously brilliant.” —Brian Stableford, author of
The Omega Expedition

“Jeff VanderMeer has a talent for getting under the skins of his creations, be they themes, places, puppets or people, and under the skins of his readers. A sensitive and sophisticated mind extremely rare in any tradition of literature. Simply one of the very best writers we have.
Veniss Underground
is an advance on most imaginative fiction in the same way that a sleek whale, diving into unlighted depths or surfacing with explosive joy, is an advance on a dish of fat dead worms. The backbone matters. A novel of cool and hot language and ideas. A marvel.” —Rhys Hughes, author of
The Percolated Stars

VENISS UNDERGROUND
A Bantam Spectra Book / October 2005

Published by
Bantam Dell
A Division of Random House, Inc.
New York, New York

All rights reserved
Copyright © 2003 by Jeff VanderMeer

Part I of this novel appeared in
Interzone,
edited by David Pringle.
A brief excerpt of Part III appeared in
Indigenous Fiction,
edited by Sherry Decker.
All Giant Sand lyrics copyright © 1989, Howe Gelb. Reprinted by permission.

Bantam Books, the rooster colophon, Spectra, and the portrayal of a boxed “s” are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
VanderMeer, Jeff.
Veniss underground / Jeff VanderMeer.
p. cm.—(A Bantam spectra book)
1. Civilization, Subterranean—Fiction.                  2. Regression (Civilization)—Fiction.                  3. Animal experimentation—Fiction.                  4. Genetic engineering—Fiction.
5. Underground areas—Fiction.                  I. Title.

PS3572.A4284V46 2005
813'.54—dc22
2005045265

Published simultaneously in Canada

www.bantamdell.com

eISBN: 978-0-553-90199-3

v3.0