Wired.com presents the Geek's Guide to the Galaxy. And here is your host, David Barr-Kirtley.

Hello and welcome to episode 103 of Geek's Guide to the Galaxy.

This special Valentine's Day episode will include a panel on dating for

Geeks with guest geeks Eric Smith, Bones Rodriguez, and Marjorie Lou, as well as a special presentation of my short story,

Power Armor a Love Story. But first we've got an interview with a claims author and editor Jeff

Vandermeer. He's best known for his books set in the grotesquely surreal city of

Ambergris, such as City of Saints and Mad Men, Shriek in Afterward and Finch. His latest novel is Annihilation, the first book in the Southern Reach trilogy, about the troubled

attempts of a secret government agency to unravel the mysteries of Area X, a stretch of coastline

that's been invaded by some inscrutable other worldly power.

The film rights to the series have already sold to Paramount.

So Jeff Vandermere, welcome to the show.

Oh, thanks for having me. All right, and so your new book is called Annihilation, and you said that it was inspired by a dream.

So tell us about that dream.

Yeah, so it was quite an experience because it was one of those dreams where you don't actually know that you're sleeping, and everything seems ultra real.

So basically I was walking down the spiraling staircase in a tunnel and noticed that there were these

words on the wall that were kind of glowing.

And as I looked at them closer, I realized they were made of living material and eventually that they were getting fresher like whatever was writing them was very close by and then I saw kind of a shimmering light below around the corner and

realized that if I turned the corner I was going to see whatever it was.

At that point some part of my subconscious writer brain was like, okay, that's enough. We do not need to see this thing because if we see

this thing we're not going to write the story. And so literally it was I felt like my

subconscious was coming over and saying, hey Jeff, you're in a dream, let's get you out of here.

And I woke up and I immediately wrote this down, the dream, and then fell back asleep.

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