An odd, paranoid, genius bruiser, she slides into the violent world of international corporate espionage like a caged animal returning to the wild with a sigh, then a frightening, guttural noise. Like your favorite Hollywood blockbuster, “Hummingbird Salamander” features ecoterrorists, evil corporations, a race to defuse doomsday weapons, gunfire, fisticuffs, action sequences and hair-raising escapes.Īs with the protagonist of “Annihilation,” Jane’s conventional exterior is a thin façade over a bolus of alienation and idiosyncratic obsessions. On the surface, his latest is a more standard effort, bound by the spy and detective genres. VanderMeer is best known for the weird literary science-fiction and elliptical environmental themes of his most famous novel, “ Annihilation” (2014). And Jeff VanderMeer‘s latest book, “ Hummingbird Salamander,” uses spy fiction to show how spy fiction can’t help us when the sky falls in. Claire Holroyde’s recent “ The Effort” gathers supergeniuses to divert an asteroid only to have humanity fail anyway. Ling Ma’s 2018 zombie plague novel “Severance” slows all the living dead tropes down as the world eats itself not in fury and terror, but with a kind of indifferent shrug. Literary fiction dealing with the same crises has often engaged with genre to a more pointed purpose - both to leverage its pulp excitement and to show how poorly it addresses real catastrophes. Empowering stories about defeating bad guys in heart-pumping firefights are ill-equipped to grapple with the bleak reality that we, as a species, are currently drowning ourselves in our own excrement.

When big-budget Hollywood action slam-fests like “ Avengers: Endgame,” “ Aquaman” or “ Charlie’s Angels” address environmental issues, they do so by framing ecoterrorists or (less often) greedy corporate polluters as supervillains who need to be punched out. In pulp genre narratives, ecological collapse is generally something you can fix with a well-placed bullet. If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from, whose fees support independent bookstores.

Jeff vandermeer