The taxidermy in Hummingbird Salamander felt like it contained an echo thematically of Dead Astronauts, so there is one scene with a taxidermied fox has a blue tint to its fur from chemicals.ĭoes this mean the new novel has any connection to the Southern Reach or to the Borne universe? Absolutely not. It was Sjon who allowed me to repurpose the blue fox, very kindly. In a sense I’m haunted by not just my own creation but also Sjon’s The Blue Fox. I will also admit that I’m still haunted by the blue fox in the Borne Universe books, especially Dead Astronauts. Jeremy chose a page of text from Annihilation to peek out, which will only be obvious to the most devoted Southern Reach fan (and, now, to you…). Others hid messages simply because the artist who designed them, Jeremy Zerfoss, has worked with me for a while and knows my other work.įor example, the image of the cover of Furtown has a half-burned page showing beyond the cover. Some of those images are out of order on purpose, for plot reasons.

There’s a strong visual element in how each part ends with an image. Most notably, some readers have picked up on little easter egg nods to my Ambergris universe in the third Southern Reach novel, Acceptance (“refraction of light in a prison”, et al).įor Hummingbird Salamander, the hidden references are mostly of a different sort. Since then, I’ve sometimes hidden things in other books, but certainly not in the tangled profusion of that first effort. It’s many years and many books since City of Saints & Madmen, which is just riddled through with literary allusions and hidden references to any number of other texts. Warning: Spoilers regarding hidden easter eggs in the novel

Hummingbird salamander review