Dave asked Jeff VanderMeer:

Which books/authors inspired your Southern Reach trilogy?

Jeff VanderMeer Honestly, most of it is out of personal experience. Influence is a weird thing in this case, since the real big influence is the natural world and my personal experiences in it. But I would have to say that the nonfiction of Rachel Carson as well as fiction by Michel Bernanos’s novella “The Other Side of the Mountain,” Leena Krohn, as well as Algernon Blackwood in stories like “The Willows.” Kafka is an influence on Authority, along with Le Carre. I’m really not sure about influences on the third book, Acceptance. I can’t think of any, but I’m also very close to it and a lot of influence just settles into the back of your mind in a subconscious way.

It would be wrong not to mention the movie Alien because although often called a horror movie it actually has a very smart script in terms of characters trying to do the intelligent thing but being undermined by betrayal. So I admired the way the main character was portrayed. The early movie of Cronenberg I binged on prior to writing Authority, and I dissected scene-by-scene Kubrick’s The Shining to help with Authority. I also recently saw a German film titled The Wall based on a novel, which would have been an influence had a I seen it earlier. A novel by a Catalan author, Cold Skin, shares some affinities about isolation and lighthouses, but I read it after I wrote the novels.

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