Hummingbird Salamander by Jeff Vandermeer
Hardcover, 351 pages
Published April 2021 by MCD
One of the coolest things about the popularity of Jeff Vandermeer is that he built a readership despite writing books as strange as the Southern Reach trilogy and last year’s Dead Astronauts. While Annihilation had the benefit of a movie starring Natalie Portman, it is cool that an author known for thoughtful surreal politically aware eco-science fiction has a following. That all being said despite the title Hummingbird Salamander is Vandermeer’s most commercial and approachable book yet. Don’t misunderstand me it is plenty weird. As an unofficial vanguard of the new weird his is always an important voice even if the work is more grounded than we are used to.
One of the things that grounds the book a bit is its ‘Ten seconds in the future’ vibe and the very solidly likely climate disaster expressed in mostly subtle world-building. This was done with a surgical touch, not a hammer. There are a few paragraphs of exposition but done tastefully enough that they don’t feel like info-dumps. As an ecological alarmist who is also an activist and cli-fi writer myself I course could relate to those moments. Early on in the book, Vandermeer established a near future with multiple hotbed disasters happening everywhere.
I am not sure the average reader with relate to Jane Smith as the main character but I did. Take for example this powerful moment when the mystery at the heart of the novel starts to drive Jane and her husband apart.
“Here a woman could worry about her husband cheating on her while just two hundred miles inland there was a mass exodus of disaster refugees headed north to a Canada that might take them in. A “sanctuary” where aquifers and other water sources were drying up. In the Midwest, privatized security forces were brawling with protestors in the streets of small towns. Disease outbreaks had lead to mass slaughter of affected livestock. While stocks remained bullish about the future even as the window for reversing climate change had shrunk to an unreachable dot.”
I could relate to Jane Smith because for a long time I have struggled with the unshakable awareness of climate insanity and the attempt to live a balanced life despite the feeling of being like a lobster in a pot coming to a slow boil. At the heart of this story is Jane a security expert who has gifted her a key to a storage locker inside is a stuffed hummingbird from a well know radical environmentalist Silvina. The answer to this mystery is not as weird or surreal as I expected, but the journey is compelling.
The hummingbird is a classic Hitchcockian McGuffin. Jane becomes obsessed with Silvina and the mystery, it destroys her peace, her family and sends her around the globe for answers. In many ways, this is like an ecological Bond story. The story works, and has plenty of exciting twists and turns but for me, the book’s most interesting moments were the ways Vandermeer used the framework to discuss ideas.
Hidden between fight scenes and classic spy thriller excitement was an investigation that breaks down the life and death of eco-radical. The story tests the strength of Jane as she is tested by the ecological collapse which challenges her own ethics and sense of right or wrong. Vandermeer slips in moments of beautiful eco-philosophical ideas. Like this well crafted aside on the idea of progress…
“Progress’:a word to choke on, a word to discard and then pick up again, hurl it in the oven like coal, watch it spurl out its own name in black smoke from the chimney of the hunting lodge. I embrace it, and I repeat it, and yet I know no word I or any other human could use will ever be the right word.”
The dying ecology and the balance of nature is the back drop of the mystery, it is the drive of Silvina’s plan. The world needs to be pushed to these limits to inspire the madness, but I can’t be alone in understanding her position. Certainly, Jane Smith comes to believe playing family is meaningless in this future.
The story unfolds as Jane is reading Silvina’s journals, the world only growing darker as the killers and threats zero in on her. The timing of this in the narrative is all excellently paced. Bits and pieces of the plan are revealed as the threat becomes more clear. Silvina was an idealist who tried and failed to make a new way in a commune called Unitopia. This highlights the dilemma for many activists. All this work for change and the danger is only greater for my effort.
“No, in the end, easier to tear it down and start over. The soundless scream of social media these days. The system must be destroyed. It can’t be fixed. Unitopia must have begun to seem like a Band-Aid applied to a gaping chest wound.”
This leads to the darkest moment in the book in my opinion.
"Impossible to tell how fast society was collapsing because history had been riddled through with disinformation, and reality was composed of half-fictions and full-on paranoid conspiracy theories."
We could be and probably are already there at the end. It would be impossible to live in the internet age, certainly after four years of Trump to not see the danger of misinformation. This is a running subtext in the book, one of the coolest aspects of how the narrative unfolds is that we have two unreliable narrators at work here. Both Jane (if that is her name) and Silvina who has a very clear agenda. The science on the climate is there and reliable, but who to believe when humans are.
Cli-fi is a genre but it is nothing new science fiction has been addressing the coming ecological disaster almost as early as the 50s. I known I am a broken record promoting the efforts of British sci-fi master John Brunner, but it is impossible for writers working today to speculate about the future without addressing these issues.
From here on out in this review, I am going to get into themes that involve minor spoilers, I don’t think the experience of this book can be ruined. But to sum it up before getting into the ending I would say this is a book worth reading. It is not as surreal as some of Vandermeer’s earlier work but doesn’t go in thinking that this is like Metallica writing a pop song. Every page drips with the author’s intelligence, creativity, compassion, and unique view of the world. That is what makes Vandermeer and this book special. OK, Spoiler warnings were given…
As for the ending, important things happen that I want to talk about. As a an author of the new weird who wrote one of the greatest modern classics of genre mystery two things happened at the end I was not expecting.
First the end of the world, the progression of this element was darker than I expected but not sure why I didn’t see it coming. I liked that Vandermeer didn’t go overboard on describing or dwelling on this. Jane is mostly out and away from society. There are excellent moments of pure world-building I respected.
“Homeland security still exists?”
“Not by that name. Just their drones. Do you know how many secret drones lacerate the sky these days? They’ll outlast us all. Form their own civilization.”
I think one of the things that separates Hummingbird Salamander from other books in the Vandermeer canon is there is no hiding the mission statement as I saw it. Maybe I misreading this and I have not read or listened to any interviews that Vandermeer has given. The following statement from the closing pages of the book appears to this reader to be the mission made more clear than I thought we would get.
“I spent some time frozen, arguing with my thoughts.
Derangement or genius? Was it even possible? If I was a right, to create not a deadly pandemic or a biological bomb but a new, true seeing? Let the world in through your pores like a salamander, see all the colors of the flowers only a hummingbird could see.”
Can you see and feel the world like these animals? Can you step outside of your human flesh and connect to the earth and nature a different way? Hummingbird Salamander is asking you to do that, and that is why it is a powerful book.
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