It’s a world that will feel eerily familiar if you happen to read the news or go outside occasionally. All the while, the world around Jane unravels as intersecting crises of climate change and mass extinction fuel megafires, disrupt ocean currents, and spark pandemics. As Jane attempts to unravel the mystery of the hummingbird, the salamander, and Silvina, the dead ecoterrorist who left Jane a treacherous trail of taxidermied clues, she becomes enmeshed in a web of wildlife traffickers, rogue government agents, and fossil fuel kingpins.
”Ī psychological thriller with an ecological bend, Hummingbird Salamander follows Jane Smith, a security researcher who abandons her banal suburban life after she receives a taxidermy hummingbird along with an enigmatic note suggesting the existence of a companion salamander. And it was a joy to be able to write language that wasn't intended for a scientific audience, but was saying the same thing in a different color palette. “When I read that first draft and, oh my gosh, my words are in this book and people are going to read it, I was nervous,” Brown told The Science of Fiction. Ultimately, Brown’s contributions had a major impact on the novel, with VanderMeer weaving snippets of her descriptions into the text and using the biological traits she created to drive the plot forward. But she took on the assignment gamely and wound up creating two fictional organisms - the naiad hummingbird Selastrephes griffin, and the road newt Plethowen omena - that, despite a few idiosyncrasies, are strikingly realistic. Subscribe to support The Science of Fiction!īrown had little experience writing fiction and even less making up species. It was different when acclaimed novelist Jeff VanderMeer, author of the bestselling Southern Reach trilogy and Borne, asked Brown to invent from scratch the animals that would be at the center of his new eco-thriller, Hummingbird Salamander. Sure, she helped her kid make a giant blue slug costume for Halloween one year, but he was the one who actually imagined the mythical monster. The biology professor at Hobart and Williams Smith Colleges spends most of her time teaching ecology to undergraduates and studying real organisms that inhabit freshwater lakes. Meghan Brown never imagined herself inventing fictional organisms.
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