I brought my Festival of the Freshwater Squid into the real world. However, then things changed, or, rather, I changed them by switching the context, ruining the paradigm. (And preparing me for the absolute onslaught of miniature lighthouses, crawlers, and tower-tunnels sent to me in the mail when Annihilation became a hit.)

Because as repetitious as some of it might be, how can you not be flattered that your fiction has made such an impact? People I didn’t know had read my book and been so energized by it they had taken time out from doing good deeds, robbing banks, or going to get groceries. To keep receiving squid and be happy about it. Squid became my burden, some inert talent, even. The third, Finch, consigned the squid to the dustbin of history, possibly because my enthusiasm had dulled due to the events involving squid and my festival in the intervening years.įor a long time, in addition to being a novelist, I bore witness to squid sightings, especially the kind where some floppy decomposing beast is breaking up along some distance shoreline. The first two, City of Saints & Madmen and Shriek: An Afterword feature squid prominently. I wrote three books set in an imaginary city called Ambergris, now reprinted by MCD/FSG in one mammoth hardcover, aptly titled Ambergris. Squid also were a familiar element from a childhood growing up in the Fiji Islands. When I began to write fantasy inspired by Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, and Angela Carter, I fixated on squid and on fungi for this strangeness, which seemed to me a way of describing the odd beauty all around us, while also adding something unusual to the fiction. I’ve always loved squid-not in the culinary sense, but in the sense of a being that seems alien and conveys some sense of the vast wonder of Earth’s biosphere. Time enough has passed for the dull ache of hurt to have faded and a plate of calamari set before me not to trigger a deep sense of my own failings… “Reflected Light” by Rachel E.Of those traumatic events surrounding the Festival of the Freshwater Squid, I must now finally write, dear reader.“The Martian Agent, A Planetary Romance” by Michael Chabon.“The Selene Gardening Society” by Molly Brown.“The Steam Man of the Prairie and the Dark Rider Get Down: A Dime Novel” by Joe R.“Benediction: Excerpt from The Warlord of the Air” by Michael Moorcock.“Introduction: The 19th-Century Roots of Steampunk” by Jess Nevins.

“Preface: Steampunk: “It’s a Clockwork Universe, Victoria”” by Ann & Jeff VanderMeer.

It was nominated in 2009 for a World Fantasy Award. Steampunk (2008) is an anthology of steampunk fiction edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, and published by Tachyon Publications.

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