‘ … then and only then would you be allowed to look to the future’: falling out of the Anthropocene with Jeff VanderMeer’s Hummingbird Salamander

This article offers a detailed close reading of selected key passages from Jeff VanderMeer’s 2021 novel Hummingbird Salamander, focusing on the ways in which this eco-thriller develops and extends VanderMeer’s ongoing concerns about ecology and anthropogenic climate change, which he has articulated across his career – including in his celebrated Southern Reach books. These readings negotiate key feelings and sensations of vertigo, falling, and sinking, which the article analyses and theorises further by exploring VanderMeer’s novel in conjunction with Timothy Morton’s work on dark ecology and non-human solidarity, with additional theoretical frames drawn from the respective works of Julia Kristeva, Jacques Lacan, Theodor Adorno, and others. This analysis in turn builds towards a concluding suggestion – drawing, in part, on the respective works of Dipesh Chakrabarty and Sara Ahmed – that considers these key feelings as affective extremes that allow us to encounter ecological awareness as an embodied experience, and thus better grasp the biospheric and planetary scales that may often seem incommensurable for us.