The Animals in That Country

"We get pandemic books every year. Station Eleven , our 2015 winner, was a pandemic book. If you add zombie pandemics… we get more than enough of those. So, the premise of The Animals in that Country is that there is a pandemic, but it’s a virus that enables humans to start to understand the speech of animals. But not in a Doctor Dolittle way, when we can just chat to them. It’s more like the Wittgenstein idea that ‘If a lion could speak, we could not understand him.’ So the characters can hear them, but they don’t always know what they are saying. And of course you don’t want to hear everything. It will drive you mad. People look at the Clarke Award shortlist every year and try to guess what the judges were thinking. They automatically think: that’s the space one, that’s the fun one, that’s the literary one. And I don’t think it’s unfair to say that this is the literary one, at least in terms of its origins, not as a statement of relative quality versus our other contenders. It’s coming from a publisher, Scribe (part of the Penguin Random House family), which doesn’t traditionally do a lot in the speculative fiction market. This is the first time they were submitting to us, and obviously they are thrilled this book was shortlisted. “If you’re going to travel via an Einstein-Rosen bridge, it can take a chapter of explanatory text or you can just say ‘the wormhole opened…’” The book has elements of pandemic, elements of the road trip—the need to get across country to find family members, other survivors who are accommodating the breakdown of society. We kind of know how societies are supposed to breakdown in zombie apocalypses or in environmental crises. We’ve seen it a million times before. But this one stood out because it’s nothing like those at all, and all the familiar tropes are up in the air. I think it was that breath of imagination that really appealed to the judges. How would you imagine animal speech? They also talked about the joy of the writing in this book. The imaginative feat of trying to understand how an animal might communicate, and what that communication might be. It’s the literary equivalent of imagining how a hyperdrive works; if you’re going to travel via an Einstein-Rosen bridge, it can take a chapter of explanatory text or you can just say ‘the wormhole opened…’. If you can take the reader on that journey and make it believable… well, that is what this book does. If you wish that animals really would speak to us, this is the guidebook for you."