The Situation

A novelette.

"The last raise had been a huge leech shaped like a helmet. It was meant to suck all the bad thoughts out of your head. It smelled like bacon, which seemed promising. I had invited Mord and Leer over to my apartment and we'd fried it up in a skillet. I'd gotten a week's worth of sandwiches out of it."

In a city where the future has betrayed the past, a nameless employee struggles to hold onto his job at the Company, fighting off the predations of the merciless Scarskirt and his former friends: a transformed Mord and helpless Leer. In addition, he has to deal with a Manager he calls "Damager" who puts him in ever more difficult situations:

"Up close, her eyes were like the glistening grit you find at the edges of drying asphalt. Her fingers on the desk seemed as long as the legs of a spiny crab. In the quiet, I could hear the leaf in her chest - just the slightest whispering shift of dead plant matter against plastic each time it touched the sides of her ribcage. I wondered if each time another piece disintegrated into the dust at the bottom of her chest cavity. 'Do you love me?' she always asked. I could remember a time and a world where such a question could never have been asked."

Is there a way out? Will he find it in time? What awaits him in the city beyond?

"Her knife sliced down, up, down, up, down as the fish tried to get away from her ever more slowly, spurting a thick green blood."

In The Situation, Jeff VanderMeer has written the most chilling, and the funniest, commentary on corporate office life since Kafka and Dilbert.

Amazon: Check Best Offer

Science Fiction

Release date: March 2008

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Jeff VanderMeer

When Jeff VanderMeer writes, the world gets stranger—but in a way that feels unsettlingly familiar. Known for blurring the boundaries between nature and the surreal, his work isn’t content to just entertain—it transforms. With Annihilation, the first book in the Southern Reach Trilogy, VanderMeer didn’t just capture imaginations—he redefined what ecological science fiction could look like. The novel’s hypnotic blend of decay, transformation, and unknowable forces led to a bestselling series and a major film adaptation by Alex Garland. But for longtime readers, Annihilation was just the latest evolution of a voice that has always thrived in the liminal.

Raised in the Fiji Islands and later rooted in Florida, VanderMeer’s early exposure to biodiversity left a lasting impression—one that pulses through his fiction. His landscapes are never just backdrops. Swamps breathe, fungi think, and ecosystems assert their will. In books like Borne and Dead Astronauts, he creates biopunk worlds where the environment is not merely a setting but a character, sometimes the protagonist, sometimes the threat.

VanderMeer is often associated with the term “New Weird,” but labels don’t sit comfortably on his work. He has said that the weird isn’t about monsters under the bed—it’s about the sense that reality is subtly off-kilter. That ethos shows up in everything from his fragmented narratives to his unreliable narrators, who often find themselves unraveling as quickly as the worlds around them.

His writing is equal parts beautiful and disquieting, with prose that is lyrical yet invasive—like vines reclaiming a ruin. He explores themes of identity, memory, ecological collapse, and the porous line between human and non-human. And while his novels have earned critical acclaim—including a Nebula Award nomination, a Shirley Jackson Award, and a spot on The New York Times Best Sellers list—it’s his ability to disturb gently, to awe without overexplaining, that leaves a lasting mark.

Outside of fiction, VanderMeer is also a vocal advocate for climate awareness and rewilding efforts, often tying his literary themes to real-world environmental action. He has written nonfiction about ecological issues, curated anthologies, and championed genre-bending literature that defies easy categorization.

In his own words: “We’re haunted by the idea that we are separate from nature. But we never have been.” That tension—between what we are and what we think we are—continues to animate his body of work.

Jeff VanderMeer doesn’t just write strange fiction. He writes fiction that makes the familiar feel strange again—and in doing so, reveals how fragile and miraculous our world truly is.

Photo: Kyle Cassidy