What do you think?
Rate this book
None of This Is Normal: The Fiction of Jeff VanderMeer
How the otherworldly worlds created by the author of the Southern Reach Trilogy speak to—and even affect—our own
If ever a moment and a writer were made for each other, that time is now and Jeff VanderMeer is that writer. Reaching more and more readers as his fantastic fiction delves deeper and deeper into the true weirdness of our day, VanderMeer presents a unique opportunity to explore the cultural frictions and fault lines in today’s—and tomorrow’sâ€� literary landscape.Ìý In the first book-length study of this provocative writer, Benjamin J. Robertson focuses on the three major series that have propelled VanderMeer to prominence (his Vennis fictions, Ambergris novels, and Southern Reach Trilogy) as well as his recent stand-alone novel Borne . Most salient for Robertson is how VanderMeer grapples with the transformation of human meaning and being in the contemporary moment. None of This Is Normal reveals how VanderMeer creates fictions that directly address our Anthropocene epoch, in which humanity must reckon with the unprecedented nature of its impact on the environment and with the consequent obsolescence of its methods of representing itself in this altered world.Ìý In Robertson’s reading it becomes startlingly clear that certain fiction, especially when willing to abandon humanist assumptions about history, has the power to not simply show us a world “out thereâ€� but to actively participate in that world. As realist fiction and even science fiction conventionally reduce the scale and complexity of the Anthropocene to human-sized dimensions, None of This Is Normal shows how VanderMeer’s work conjures what Robertson calls a “fantastic materialityâ€�: a reality that stands apart from us as a model of thinking, irreducible to our own.
If ever a moment and a writer were made for each other, that time is now and Jeff VanderMeer is that writer. Reaching more and more readers as his fantastic fiction delves deeper and deeper into the true weirdness of our day, VanderMeer presents a unique opportunity to explore the cultural frictions and fault lines in today’s—and tomorrow’sâ€� literary landscape.Ìý In the first book-length study of this provocative writer, Benjamin J. Robertson focuses on the three major series that have propelled VanderMeer to prominence (his Vennis fictions, Ambergris novels, and Southern Reach Trilogy) as well as his recent stand-alone novel Borne . Most salient for Robertson is how VanderMeer grapples with the transformation of human meaning and being in the contemporary moment. None of This Is Normal reveals how VanderMeer creates fictions that directly address our Anthropocene epoch, in which humanity must reckon with the unprecedented nature of its impact on the environment and with the consequent obsolescence of its methods of representing itself in this altered world.Ìý In Robertson’s reading it becomes startlingly clear that certain fiction, especially when willing to abandon humanist assumptions about history, has the power to not simply show us a world “out thereâ€� but to actively participate in that world. As realist fiction and even science fiction conventionally reduce the scale and complexity of the Anthropocene to human-sized dimensions, None of This Is Normal shows how VanderMeer’s work conjures what Robertson calls a “fantastic materialityâ€�: a reality that stands apart from us as a model of thinking, irreducible to our own.
- GenresNonfiction
208 pages, Paperback
Published November 13, 2018
3 people are currently reading
1,033 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
December 9, 2018
Fascinating even though I only understood maybe 65% of it!
December 16, 2018
Ben Robertson is an insightful, deliberate scholar of the Weird. As this is the first booklength effort to explore ways in and out and possibly in between the layers of reality inherent in both the works of Jeff Vandermeer and the academic literature on critical literary analysis, it isn’t possible to locate Robertson’s book in relationship to other Vandermeer analysis, but I consider it a useful and interesting entry point into the critical theory work on fiction and the environment and horror in the modern world.
May 23, 2019
Mr. Robertson occasionally flirts with coherence, but if you're looking for intelligible commentary on the writings of Jeff Vandermeer this book, unfortunately, is not it.
April 18, 2023
i truly just love that someone else cares enough about jeff vandermeer to think about it theoretically and critically
December 5, 2020
This was a smart but empty book. This is why people hate theory: when we take things as real as ecological collapse and turn it into an abstraction where our priority, it seems, is to avoid anthropocentrism because we don't want to be anthropocentric.
I don't want to be anthropocentric but I have fucking reasons for that that I would fucking share instead of taking my readers down the rabbit hole of formal experimentation for the sake of intellectual purity without drawing out the ethical and personal and political stakes. Referring to Trump's election as proof that we're facing a crisis of liberalism isn't fucking enough to make this book relevant.
Some real ivory tower bullshit.
Doesn't help that I spent time to read this for a paper during the point in the semester where every second of my time is precious to me.
I don't want to be anthropocentric but I have fucking reasons for that that I would fucking share instead of taking my readers down the rabbit hole of formal experimentation for the sake of intellectual purity without drawing out the ethical and personal and political stakes. Referring to Trump's election as proof that we're facing a crisis of liberalism isn't fucking enough to make this book relevant.
Some real ivory tower bullshit.
Doesn't help that I spent time to read this for a paper during the point in the semester where every second of my time is precious to me.
April 5, 2019
Not a genre I read. I won this book in a Good Reads giveaway or I would not have it. I plan on donating it to my local library. I'm sure there's someone interested in this kind of book. I rated it low but only because I didn't read it.
March 21, 2022
solid!
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
Can't find what you're looking for?
Get help and learn more about the design.