For curiophilia, a wild curiosity and a love of exotic treasure, a fascination with complex architecture, a taste for the strangeness in the apparently ordinary, is what drives him on, carrying a peculiar miscellany of equipment into corners of the universe no intelligence has explored before and returning with remarkable rarities, so valuable they have yet to find their true price or, indeed, connoisseurs. As one of a remarkable group of contemporary captains who follow their own psychic maps, Captain VanderMeer is a master of keel and sail and at the wheel can take his vessel anywhere he chooses, whether skimming over rocky shallows or plunging her prow aggressively into the crowded waters of the Further Depths. If our author’s response to his own experience was instinctively post-modern, this should be no reason for anyone’s surprise. To be sure, this density of narrative was a little demanding to the reader used to the single sentimental plot which passes for story in most modern tales, as if there were only one truth, and only one way of uttering it, one character of central interest, one view to which you should be sympathetic. The methods he chose were often grotesque, baroque and fantastical, as if he strove to mirror in his writing style the visions he had witnessed. His memoirs had been eagerly awaited by the cognoscenti of the ports from Jannquork to San Francisco but when they were published not everyone was satisfied the account was genuine. He sailed the Mirage Islands and the Ambergris Peninsula. In those earlier years, to which we all look back with longing, there was no captain more respected than VanderMeer. I strolled back to my place and was again absorbed in VanderMeer … I would miss his earthy explanations, but my presence made him uneasy. As I removed myself from his story, I heard him breathe heavily in relief. “So X was, after all, his muse, his love?” It’s all in the final story, if you’re not afraid to give it your full attention.” The big fans overhead fluttered and rattled and stirred the thick, damp air. “He knew Shriek himself and did his dirty work.” Schomberg grimaced with his habitual distaste for every villainy and moral weakness not his own. It was locally made and suspiciously piquant. “There was a woman involved, I take it?” I sipped my vortex water. Master of The Frog when he next came back to the Islands.”
“Captain VanderMeer? First mate of The Shriek until she hit that reef. He placed them in his box and took a sideways look at me before pretending to hide it under the table. “You’ll be familiar, of course, with VanderMeer.” Schomberg’s fat red fingers fondled the notes he had counted.
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