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Jacqueline
Jacqueline asked Jeff VanderMeer:

I LOVE that in annihilation you essentially didn't provide any physical description of the characters ! What informed that decision?

Jeff VanderMeer Thanks! Once I knew they were all women and wouldn't have names but refer to each other by their professions, I thought about the physical description thing. One thing I wanted is for the landscape to encroach on the characters, and not having physical descriptions of the people means that the descriptions of the setting they're moving through do indeed encroach. And then, secondarily, I was thinking about so many crappy descriptions of women in fiction and how I really also wanted these characters to be judged, so to speak, by what they did, their dialogue, and their interactions with the others. I think it's clear in the novel that the psychologist is probably taller and older than the others, but that's about it.
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More Answered Questions

John Sundman
John Sundman asked Jeff VanderMeer:

Was Ambergris inspired by or does it allude to the European "discovery" of South America in general, & the Amazon river in particular?

A. Cantatis
A. Cantatis asked Jeff VanderMeer:

Do you ever write characters with a particular actor in mind to play them? If so, whom did you use in the Southern Reach series? (I personally saw Control as Benjamin Bratt ;))

A. Cantatis
A. Cantatis asked Jeff VanderMeer:

In Annihilation, I noticed a lot of symbolic references to different levels of the psyche. Was this intentional, or am I reading too much into your story?

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Jeff VanderMeer
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