June 12, 2002

Dear Peggy,

Thanks so much for asking me to contribute a review of Jeff VanderMeer's City of Saints and Madmen to Revolution Science Fiction. I find, however, that my ongoing litigation against Michael Swanwick (honestly, after hundreds of calls and emails, you'd think the man could at least remember my name!) effectively prevents me from taking on any new projects right now. I've taken the liberty, however, of collecting a few odds and ends apropos of the work in question—a collection of VanderMeeriana, if you will—which you can, if you like, string together into something halfway useful. Oh, and one other thing—I'd appreciate it if you could publish this piece under a pseudonym. This VanderMeer fellow seems to have some rather peculiar ideas about squid and fungi, and truth be told, I'd rather not have my name associated with his.

Regards,

Jeff Topham
(With apologies to F. Madnok for the following)

Copy from here onward.

I. An introduction to the Author

I met VanderMeer only once, in a squalid, smoke-filled bar in Kuala Lumpur. He was a wreck of his former self, his once-red hair and beard now turning white, his eyes wide as if he was staring right through the bar's wretched clientele of teenage prostitutes and heroin addicts into some other world that only he could see. I bought him a couple of gins, which he drank like water, and when I finally asked what was troubling him, his only response was to mumble something that went like this: "It's the light. It's different there. Different, do you see?"

­John Glenn, former U.S. Senator (D, Ohio) and first American in space.

As there has been some dispute over the authorship of the work in question, perhaps it would be useful to summarize the points of contention thus far. Most critics agree that The City of Saints and Madmen was written by a man named Jeff VanderMeer, a World Fantasy Award-winning writer who lives in Tallahassee, Florida. Others, more fancifully, insist that the book was actually written by a fugitive from an insane asylum, a man known only as X. This hardly clarifies matters, however, as it leaves us with the question of whether X is a figment of VanderMeer's imagination or if the exact opposite is true. Even more alarming is the possibility that both are the creations of yet another writer, who himself may have created the character of the author who invented him.

­Dr. Quentin Crisp, from his unauthorized biography Of Squid and Men.

VanderMeer's greatest prank was managing to sell an article on Ambergris to National Geographic, which the unsuspecting magazine (apparently believing Ambergris to be located somewhere off the coast of Madagascar) ran as a lavishly illustrated nine-page spread. The article recapitulated much of the history of Ambergris, including its settlement by pirates, their slaughter of the indigenous gray caps, and the subsequent horrors and bizarre fungal outbreaks that have plagued the city ever since. The article was so compelling in its vividness and detail and so nuanced in its exploration of the baroque complexities of the city's history, politics, and culture, that many readers apparently did not believe the retraction printed the following month, in which a shamefaced editor admitted that the magazine had unwittingly published an elaborate fiction. Some readers, however, persisted in asking a rather perplexing question: If Ambergris did not in fact exist, then where had VanderMeer gotten all the photographs?

­Dolores Bagley Higgleton, from her scandalous and hilariously obscene nonfiction study, An Unexpurgated Oral History of National Geographic.

II. What this Book, The City of Saints and Madmen, is Not

It is with great regret that I return this book to you and request a full refund. I had been led to expect heroic quests, bearded wizards casting spells, and a quest to save the world from ultimate evil. What do I get instead? A troubling race of diminutive, subterranean creatures who lurk like the threat of lunacy beneath the surface of every sane and wholesome thought. A very disturbing story about a failed missionary who becomes morbidly obsessed with a woman he has glimpsed briefly through a window. A bizarre monograph on the behavior of giant squid. Instead of magical forests and idyllic villages, I get motorcars and graveyards choked with rusting trains. Instead of heroes and villains, I get tormented artists, tattooed dwarfs, and the meandering thoughts of an elderly historian whose footnotes sprout on the page like mushrooms.

­An excerpt from a typical complaint letter received by Houghton Mifflin after an office prankster mischievously replaced the interior pages of 7,500 copies of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings with the entire text of The City of Saints and Madmen. Most of these "false" copies were subsequently pulped; the remainder are avidly sought after by collectors.

The book, of course, is far more than a simple repackaging of the trade paperback edition first published by Cosmos Books in 2001. The hardcover edition is nearly twice as long and incorporates such previously hard-to-find work as "The Cage" (a major new Ambergris story), F. Madnok's legendary self-published pamphlet "King Squid," the encrypted story "The Man Who Had No Eyes," which concerns

[Two lines redacted by the NSA in the interest of national security.]

as well as much other new material. Add to this a stylishly designed cover and interior as well as new artwork by several artists, and you have one of the most attractive and unusual volumes produced in the early 21st century. We actually have a copy here in the museum. It's catalogued as an autographed copy, but the only evidence of this that I can see is a long smudge across the front endpapers, as if the pages had been brushed by an ink-covered tentacle.

­Guyal of Sfere, curator of the Museum of Man.

III. What this Book, The City of Saints and Madmen, is

In The City of Saints and Madmen we see the one of the early achievements of what has been called postmodern fantasy. VanderMeer flirts audaciously with his own narrative conventions in a way that foregrounds their artificiality, and the result is a wonderfully playful intertextuality in which the imaginary world of Ambergris becomes a text read in conjunction other texts, including the author's experience in creating this fiction and the reader's experience in reading about it.

­Bill Moyers, from the introduction to the nine-part PBS documentary VanderMeer.

In addition to oddities such as Duncan Shriek's The Early History of Ambergris and Frederick Madnok's King Squid, the collection also contains such major works as "Dradin, in Love," "The Transformation of Martin Lake," "The Strange Case of X," and "The Cage" (new to this edition). These stories are surreal, luxuriant, and grotesque, combining the existential darkness of Conrad with the rich imagery of the Symbolists and the macabre imagination of the Decadents. The protagonist of "Dradin, in Love" is a failed missionary who focuses his dimly-understood longings on the graceful figure of a woman glimpsed through an open window. Dradin does finally achieve his great epiphany, but when he does so, it is as harrowing a vision as any found in fiction. A similar darkness runs through "The Transformation of Martin Lake," in which a painter's surreal initiation into a realm of cruelty and death elevates his art from competence to genius. A fictionalized version of VanderMeer himself makes an appearance as the unnamed protagonist in "The Strange Case of X," which concerns a writer whose inability to separate fact and fiction has landed him in an insane asylum. The boundaries separating fact and fiction, however, prove to be tenuous at best, and a gleeful confusion between the two is one of the unifying themes of the collection. "The Cage" orchestrates its macabre and curiously unsettling imagery—a hideous fungal plague, the unearthly light in the eyes of a blind woman, and an empty cage— into a masterful vision of dread and unease.

­From the introduction to Cliffs Notes on VanderMeer's The City of Saints and Madmen.

Perhaps the most striking thing about the book—even more than its finely crafted prose and exquisitely dark imagery—was the fact that VanderMeer was able to mine veins of weird horror and slapstick comedy with equal skill. This has given rise in some circles to the (unconfirmed) theory that VanderMeer served only as editor on a project consisting of work by a number of different writers. How, after all, could the vision of one writer encompass the spiritual exhaustion of "Dradin, in Love," the creeping horror of "The Cage," and the screwball comedy of the Torture Squid books?

­Czech filmmaker Jan Svankmajer, commenting on his recent musical collaboration with The Residents, the nine-hour operatic adaptation of The Early History of Ambergris.

IV. Expounding with Brevity on the Peculiarities of this Book

The book, in many ways, is about exploring different ways in which to tell a story. You can begin reading The City of Saints and Madmen, for example, without even opening the cover, and in addition to the more traditional narratives, there are stories lurking in some very strange places. There is a story hidden in a series of footnotes. There is a story hidden in a bibliography. There is a story hidden in a list of numbers. There are a hundred stories—enough for a lifetime—lying embryonic in a glossary.

­Donatello Retief, conceptual artist whose performance of The Earwax Scandal resulted in a riot that shut down Milan for 16 hours.

Who but VanderMeer could transform a note on typography into something hysterically funny?

­Benguiat Bold, Typographer Emeritus (ret.).

The most notorious feature of The City of Saints and Madmen, of course, was its infamous encrypted story, "The Man Who Had No Eyes." Those readers who are aggrieved at being asked to undertake the rather burdensome (and extremely lengthy) task of decrypting the story can take comfort in the fact that VanderMeer must have suffered enormously in encrypting the thing in the first place. Curiously, it took some time before readers began to use the key to decrypt other writers' texts, often with startling results. The story obtained by applying the key to Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy, for example, won that year's Nobel Prize for Literature. Applying the key to the Marquis de Sade's masterpiece of erotic degeneracy, 120 Days of Sodom, resulted within a year in a working cold fusion reactor.

­Lt. Benny Profane, cryptographer.

V. Divulging An Accurate Scientific Theory that Explains a Number of Otherwise Puzzling Things

There remains the matter of VanderMeer's fascination with both the squid (phylum Mollusca, class Cephalopoda, order Teuthoidea) and the mushroom (kingdom Fungi, phylum Basidiomycota), two earthly organisms that powerfully evoke a sense of confrontation with something profoundly alien. These pages are littered with cephalopods and fruiting bodies, about which perhaps the less said the better.

­Vera Parsnip, from Chapter IX of Invertebrates in Literature.

In the end, any evaluation of VanderMeer's place in the history of literature must fall somewhere between Dupin's assessment of his fiction as "the greatest work ever produced in the history in the English language" and Maxwell's dubious assertion that VanderMeer composed his fiction almost entirely by cutting and pasting random clippings gleaned from a lifelong subscription to Ladies' Home Journal. What does seem certain is that in the early 2000s, VanderMeer was one of the writers who once again made reading, writing, and discussing fantastic fiction an enterprise full of excitement and possibility. Smart, funny, self-aware, wonderfully imagined, and beautifully written, VanderMeer's fiction served not only as a marvelous example of what fantasy could aspire to, but also what it could achieve.

­Sophia Mossmoon, CIA operative, jazz musician, chocolatier, and literary critic.