I debated between three and four stars, but ultimately decided on four stars, mainly because the writing is so darn good. Also, being a fan of these types of books, I felt VanderMeer had created the bones of great story, thought the fleshing out of that story was highly problematic and ultimately took what could have been a fabulous book down to merely a good story. It could have been so much more, and that, my fellow readers, is what is so deeply disappointing here. I wanted this to be a five star review, not merely three or four stars.
The bones of the story are truly intriguing - a mysterious Area X along the "lost coast" (the location is never truly identified for us by VanderMeer because God forbid we name anything here because names carry something mysterious about them. Unfortunately, we are never really told what. Names and locations are meaningless? Too confining? To defining? Your guess is as good as mine) where something dramatic and alien and unexplainable has occurred. Little goes in or comes out of Area X - and what does come back out is never who or what we think it is.
As I said, VanderMeer is a good enough writer that he hooks the reader early on and doesn't let go. I read all three books in the series, one right after the other, even though, in my opinion, the series remains vastly overpriced. Yet he is a very good writer and I did not want to wait to get through the series until the prices came down for each book. The first book is definitely the strongest of the three, but my feeling is that if you are going to invest time and money in the first book, there isn't much point unless you are prepared to see it through to the end of the series.
Many reviewers have compared the books to the TV series "Lost." I think the comparison is apt in that the island in "Lost" is mysterious and replete with strange and unexplained phenomenon. But I think the analogy is even more apt than that. Many viewers of 'Lost" loved the ending, which I found sappy and saccharine, without any real answers to the questions I asked through-out the whole series. But many viewers became ,more attached to the characters than the storyline, so maybe they didn't care so much that no answers were really provided at the end. I did, however. I wanted real, concrete information to a show I had invested viewing over the course of many years. When I didn't get answers, I felt betrayed and let down.
I think many of the negative reviews of this series reflect this same kind of sensibility. VanderMeer has engaged in the cardinal sin of many writers - getting us hooked on a story, then disappointing many readers by failing to provide a concrete, satisfying conclusion with answers to our most important questions. Yes, you can leave some mystery, but too much unanswered is never a good thing.
I suspect that the author was striving to continue the mystery and lack of conclusive answers that the characters felt when confronting themselves, their motivations, each other, life, the unknown, etc. That the characters didn't fully understand themselves (ie, the mystery of their personhood) or the mystery of Area X, so why should we? I speculate here, but the author probably felt he was simply mimicking Area X in all of its grand mystery (and yes, mimicry plays a large role in the story and no, we are never really told why) and that his mimicry was important to the story.
But the problem is that such an approach is never truly satisfying to a large percentage of readers. What I was hoping for (but never got) was not so much an ending like the conclusion of "Lost" where there are no real answers but we feel so in love with the characters and their relationships with each other that we are not supposed to care our questions go unanswered, but more like the ending to the series "Battlestar Galactica" in which are questions are answered, but the answers are nothing that we really expected. I wanted a refreshing and unexpected surprise at the end. Something I didn't see coming.
You won't get that here. That is not to say that VanderMeer answers no questions about Area X - he does do that by the final book. That said, he just doesn't go far enough with many of those answers, nor are those answers in any way truly a wonderful and unexpected surprise.
Moreover, I failed to feel strongly attached to many of the characters, who seemed "lost" (no pun intended) within themselves. Control plays a strong role in book two, but fades almost entirely away in importance in book three. A lot of times you feel like shaking the characters and screaming "wake up," but they never do, but rather remain mired in their own confused and obscure states of being. Now I get the sense that VanderMeer wants use to revel in this as being a reflection of the utlimate meaning of the human condition, but frankly, it just feels unsatisfying and makes one feel frustrated with the characters. Many times they just meander through the story and their non-stop stream of consciousness fretting and lack of clarity does drag the story down at times.
Ending the story by stressing simply - aren't these characters fascinating in and of themselves and this is just the human condition, to remain an ultimate mystery to us - was deeply unsatisfying to me. Tell me what happens to Control. Tell me what happens to the Earth. Tell me the "why" of Area X. Tell me the "Why" of what happens to the biologist. Or what happens to Saul or the psychologist.
Give me something new and unexpected, but don't leave me in the dark, Mr. VanderMeer.
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A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE FROM ALEX GARLAND, STARRING NATALIE PORTMAN AND OSCAR ISAAC
The Southern Reach Trilogy begins with Annihilation, the Nebula Award-winning novel that "reads as if Verne or Wellsian adventurers exploring a mysterious island had warped through into a Kafkaesque nightmare world" (Kim Stanley Robinson).
Area X has been cut off from the rest of the continent for decades. Nature has reclaimed the last vestiges of human civilization. The first expedition returned with reports of a pristine, Edenic landscape; the second expedition ended in mass suicide; the third expedition in a hail of gunfire as its members turned on one another. The members of the eleventh expedition returned as shadows of their former selves, and within weeks, all had died of cancer. In Annihilation, the first volume of Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach trilogy, we join the twelfth expedition.
The group is made up of four women: an anthropologist; a surveyor; a psychologist, the de facto leader; and our narrator, a biologist. Their mission is to map the terrain, record all observations of their surroundings and of one another, and, above all, avoid being contaminated by Area X itself.
They arrive expecting the unexpected, and Area X delivers―they discover a massive topographic anomaly and life forms that surpass understanding―but it's the surprises that came across the border with them and the secrets the expedition members are keeping from one another that change everything.
- Print length208 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherFSG Originals
- Publication dateFebruary 4, 2014
- Dimensions5.05 x 0.55 x 7.45 inches
- ISBN-100374104093
- ISBN-13978-0374104092
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Popular Highlights in this book
There are certain kinds of deaths that one should not be expected to relive, certain kinds of connections so deep that when they are broken you feel the snap of the link inside you.Highlighted by 3,973 Kindle readers- That’s how the madness of the world tries to colonize you: from the outside in, forcing you to live in its reality.Highlighted by 3,853 Kindle readers
- The beauty of it cannot be understood, either, and when you see beauty in desolation it changes something inside you. Desolation tries to colonize you.Highlighted by 3,595 Kindle readers
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
An Amazon Best Book of the Month, February 2014: There is a comfort in familiarity, a foundation from which to definitively identify and label. But Jeff VanderMeer is not interested in putting his readers at ease. With Annihilation--the first volume of The Southern Reach Trilogy--he carefully creates a yearning for answers, then boldly denies them, reminding us that being too eager to know too much can be dangerous. The story follows an expedition of four women who are known only by their professions: the Psychologist, the Surveyor, the Anthropologist, and the Biologist--nameless pawns tasked with exploring, discovering, and (hopefully) delivering data about a portentous coastal territory called Area X. We are a bit like fifth members of that team (perhaps "the Reader"), learning at the same pace, guided by the observations of our narrator, the Biologist. Still the context remains blurry as VanderMeer twists each discovery into a deeper mystery. Through potent description and unrelenting tension, he achieves a level of emotional manipulation that should appeal to anyone who embraced the paranormal phenomena and maddening uncertainties of Lost. --Robin A. Rothman
From Booklist
*Starred Review* An expedition of four women is sent into an unknown region called Area X, beyond the borders of humanity: a psychologist, a surveyor, an anthropologist, and our narrator, a biologist. The purpose of the mission is to collect data about Area X and report back to the government, the Southern Reach, but circumstances begin to change when the group discovers a tower (or tunnel) that was previously unmarked on the map. Inside the structure, strange writing scrawls across the walls, and a spiral staircase descends downward, beckoning the members to follow. Previous expeditions ended badly, with group members disappearing or returning as shells of their former selves, but little is known about what actually occurred on those trips to Area X. A gripping fantasy thriller, Annihilation is thoroughly suspenseful. In a manner similar to H. G. Wells’ in The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), VanderMeer weaves together an otherworldly tale of the supernatural and the half-human. Delightfully, this page-turner is the first in a trilogy. --Heather Paulson
Review
“I'm loving The Southern Reach trilogy by Jeff VanderMeer. Creepy and fascinating.” ―Stephen King
“VanderMeer's dreamy narrative, shot through with echoes of Lovecraft, Orwell, and Kafka, is compulsively readable.” ―Tina Jordan, Entertainment Weekly
“Chilling.” ―Julie Bosman, New York Times
“VanderMeer masterfully conjures up an atmosphere of both metaphysical dread and visceral tension . . . Annihilation is a novel in which facts are undermined and doubt instilled at almost every turn. It's about science as a way of not only thinking but feeling, rather than science as a means of becoming certain about the world. . . . Ingenious.” ―Laura Miller, Salon
“A clear triumph for Vandermeer . . . a compelling, elegant, and existential story . . . The solitary voice of its post-humanist narrator is both deeply flawed and deeply trustworthy―a difficult and excellent balance in a novel whose world is built seamlessly and whose symbols are rich and dark.” ―Lydia Millet, LA Times
“A book about an intelligent, deadly fungus makes for an enthralling read―trust us.” ―Tara Wanda Merrigan, GQ
“[An] altogether fantastic book . . . Annihilation is a book meant for gulping--for going in head-first and not coming up for air until you hit the back cover.” ―Jason Sheehan, NPR Books
“Successfully creepy, an old-style gothic horror novel set in a not-too-distant future. The best bits turn your mind inside out.” ―Sara Sklaroff, The Washington Post
“If J.J. Abrams-style by-the-numbers stories of shadowy organizations and science magic have let you down one too many times, then Annihilation will be more like a revelation. VanderMeer peels back the skin of the everyday, and gives you a glimpse of a world where science really is stretching the bounds of our knowledge―sometimes to the point where we can't ever be the same . . . [Annihilation] will make you believe in the power of science mysteries again.” ―Annalee Nevitz, io9
“Fans of the Lost TV series . . . this one is for you.” ―Molly Driscoll, Christian Science Monitor
“What frightens you? According to many psychologists, our most widely shared phobia is the fear of falling. Jeff VanderMeer's novel Annihilation taps into that bottomless terror . . . VanderMeer ups the book's eeriness quotient with the smoothest of skill, the subtlest of grace. His prose makes the horrific beautiful.” ―Nisi Shawl, Seattle Times
“Much of the flora and fauna seem familiar, but that's what's so fascinating about the carnage that VanderMeer sets loose. He has created a science fiction story about a world much like our own.” ―John Domini, Miami Herald
“Annihilation feels akin to isolated sci-fi terrors of Alien . . . teases and terrifies and fascinates.” ―Kevin Nguyen, Grantland
“The plot moves quickly and has all the fantastic elements you'd ever want--biological contaminants, peculiar creatures, mysterious deaths--but it's the novel's unbearable dread that lingers with me days after I've finished it.” ―Justin Alvarez, The Paris Review
“It's been a long time since a book filled me with this kind of palpable, wondrous disquiet, a feeling that started on the first page and that I'm not sure I've yet shaken.” ―Matt Bell, author of In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods
“A tense and chilling psychological thriller about an unraveling expedition and the strangeness within us. A little Kubrick, a lot Lovecraft, the novel builds with an unbearable tension and a claustrophobic dread that linger long afterward. I loved it.” ―Lauren Beukes, author of The Shining Girls
“One of those books where it all comes together--the story and the prose and the ideas, all braided into a triple helix that gives rise to something vibrant and alive. Something that grows, word-by-word, into powerful, tangled vines that creep into your mind and take hold of it. Annihilation is brilliant and atmospheric, a novel that has the force of myth.” ―Charles Yu, author of How to Live in a Science Fictional Universe
“In much of Jeff VanderMeer's work, a kind of radiance lies beating beneath the surface of the words. Here in Annihilation, it shines through with warm blazing incandescence. This is one of a grand writer's finest and most dazzling books.” ―Peter Straub, author of Lost Boy, Lost Girl
“A dazzling book . . . haunted and haunting.” ―Kelly Link, author of Magic for Beginners
“The great thing about Annihilation is the strange, elusive, and paranoid world that it creates . . . I can't wait for the next one.” ―Brian Evenson, author of Last Days
“This swift surreal suspense novel reads as if Verne or Wellsian adventurers exploring a mysterious island had warped through into a Kafkaesque nightmare world. The reader will want to stay trapped with the Biologist to find the answers to Area X's mysteries.” ―Kim Stanley Robinson, author of the Mars trilogy
“After their high-risk expedition disintegrates, it's every scientist for herself in this wonderfully creepy blend of horror and science fiction . . . Speculative fiction at its most transfixing.” ―Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“A gripping fantasy thriller, Annihilation is thoroughly suspenseful. In a manner similar to H. G. Wells's in The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), VanderMeer weaves together an otherworldly tale of the supernatural and the half-human. Delightfully, this page-turner is the first in a trilogy.” ―Heather Paulson, ALA Booklist (starred review)
About the Author
Jeff VanderMeeris the author of Hummingbird Salamander, the Borne novels (Borne, The Strange Bird, and Dead Astronauts), and The Southern Reach Trilogy (Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance), the first volume of which won the Nebula Award and the Shirley Jackson Award and was adapted into a movie by Alex Garland. He speaks and writes frequently about issues relating to climate change as well as urban rewilding. He lives in Tallahassee, Florida, on the edge of a ravine, with his wife, Ann VanderMeer, and their cat, Neo.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Annihilation
A Novel
By Jeff VanderMeerFarrar, Straus and Giroux
Copyright © 2014 Jeff VanderMeerAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-374-10409-2
01: INITIATION
The tower, which was not supposed to be there, plunges into the earth in a place just before the black pine forest begins to give way to swamp and then the reeds and wind-gnarled trees of the marsh flats. Beyond the marsh flats and the natural canals lies the ocean and, a little farther down the coast, a derelict lighthouse. All of this part of the country had been abandoned for decades, for reasons that are not easy to relate. Our expedition was the first to enter Area X for more than two years, and much of our predecessors’ equipment had rusted, their tents and sheds little more than husks. Looking out over that untroubled landscape, I do not believe any of us could yet see the threat.
There were four of us: a biologist, an anthropologist, a surveyor, and a psychologist. I was the biologist. All of us were women this time, chosen as part of the complex set of variables that governed sending the expeditions. The psychologist, who was older than the rest of us, served as the expedition’s leader. She had put us all under hypnosis to cross the border, to make sure we remained calm. It took four days of hard hiking after crossing the border to reach the coast.
Our mission was simple: to continue the government’s investigation into the mysteries of Area X, slowly working our way out from base camp.
The expedition could last days, months, or even years, depending on various stimuli and conditions. We had supplies with us for six months, and another two years’ worth of supplies had already been stored at the base camp. We had also been assured that it was safe to live off the land if necessary. All of our foodstuffs were smoked or canned or in packets. Our most outlandish equipment consisted of a measuring device that had been issued to each of us, which hung from a strap on our belts: a small rectangle of black metal with a glass-covered hole in the middle. If the hole glowed red, we had thirty minutes to remove ourselves to “a safe place.” We were not told what the device measured or why we should be afraid should it glow red. After the first few hours, I had grown so used to it that I hadn’t looked at it again. We had been forbidden watches and compasses.
When we reached the camp, we set about replacing obsolete or damaged equipment with what we had brought and putting up our own tents. We would rebuild the sheds later, once we were sure that Area X had not affected us. The members of the last expedition had eventually drifted off, one by one. Over time, they had returned to their families, so strictly speaking they did not vanish. They simply disappeared from Area X and, by unknown means, reappeared back in the world beyond the border. They could not relate the specifics of that journey. This transference had taken place across a period of eighteen months, and it was not something that had been experienced by prior expeditions. But other phenomena could also result in “premature dissolution of expeditions,” as our superiors put it, so we needed to test our stamina for that place.
We also needed to acclimate ourselves to the environment. In the forest near base camp one might encounter black bears or coyotes. You might hear a sudden croak and watch a night heron startle from a tree branch and, distracted, step on a poisonous snake, of which there were at least six varieties. Bogs and streams hid huge aquatic reptiles, and so we were careful not to wade too deep to collect our water samples. Still, these aspects of the ecosystem did not really concern any of us. Other elements had the ability to unsettle, however. Long ago, towns had existed here, and we encountered eerie signs of human habitation: rotting cabins with sunken, red-tinged roofs, rusted wagon-wheel spokes half-buried in the dirt, and the barely seen outlines of what used to be enclosures for livestock, now mere ornament for layers of pine-needle loam.
Far worse, though, was a low, powerful moaning at dusk. The wind off the sea and the odd interior stillness dulled our ability to gauge direction, so that the sound seemed to infiltrate the black water that soaked the cypress trees. This water was so dark we could see our faces in it, and it never stirred, set like glass, reflecting the beards of gray moss that smothered the cypress trees. If you looked out through these areas, toward the ocean, all you saw was the black water, the gray of the cypress trunks, and the constant, motionless rain of moss flowing down. All you heard was the low moaning. The effect of this cannot be understood without being there. The beauty of it cannot be understood, either, and when you see beauty in desolation it changes something inside you. Desolation tries to colonize you.
As noted, we found the tower in a place just before the forest became waterlogged and then turned to salt marsh. This occurred on our fourth day after reaching base camp, by which time we had almost gotten our bearings. We did not expect to find anything there, based on both the maps that we brought with us and the water-stained, pine-dust-smeared documents our predecessors had left behind. But there it was, surrounded by a fringe of scrub grass, half-hidden by fallen moss off to the left of the trail: a circular block of some grayish stone seeming to mix cement and ground-up seashells. It measured roughly sixty feet in diameter, this circular block, and was raised from ground level by about eight inches. Nothing had been etched into or written on its surface that could in any way reveal its purpose or the identity of its makers. Starting at due north, a rectangular opening set into the surface of the block revealed stairs spiraling down into darkness. The entrance was obscured by the webs of banana spiders and debris from storms, but a cool draft came from below.
At first, only I saw it as a tower. I don’t know why the word tower came to me, given that it tunneled into the ground. I could as easily have considered it a bunker or a submerged building. Yet as soon as I saw the staircase, I remembered the lighthouse on the coast and had a sudden vision of the last expedition drifting off, one by one, and sometime thereafter the ground shifting in a uniform and preplanned way to leave the lighthouse standing where it had always been but depositing this underground part of it inland. I saw this in vast and intricate detail as we all stood there, and, looking back, I mark it as the first irrational thought I had once we had reached our destination.
“This is impossible,” said the surveyor, staring at her maps. The solid shade of late afternoon cast her in cool darkness and lent the words more urgency than they would have had otherwise. The sun was telling us that soon we’d have to use our flashlights to interrogate the impossible, although I’d have been perfectly happy doing it in the dark.
“And yet there it is,” I said. “Unless we are having a mass hallucination.”
“The architectural model is hard to identify,” the anthropologist said. “The materials are ambiguous, indicating local origin but not necessarily local construction. Without going inside, we will not know if it is primitive or modern, or something in between. I’m not sure I would want to guess at how old it is, either.”
We had no way to inform our superiors about this discovery. One rule for an expedition into Area X was that we were to attempt no outside contact, for fear of some irrevocable contamination. We also took little with us that matched our current level of technology. We had no cell or satellite phones, no computers, no camcorders, no complex measuring instruments except for those strange black boxes hanging from our belts. Our cameras required a makeshift darkroom. The absence of cell phones in particular made the real world seem very far away to the others, but I had always preferred to live without them. For weapons, we had knives, a locked container of antique handguns, and one assault rifle, this last a reluctant concession to current security standards.
It was expected simply that we would keep a record, like this one, in a journal, like this one: lightweight but nearly indestructible, with waterproof paper, a flexible black-and-white cover, and the blue horizontal lines for writing and the red line to the left to mark the margin. These journals would either return with us or be recovered by the next expedition. We had been cautioned to provide maximum context, so that anyone ignorant of Area X could understand our accounts. We had also been ordered not to share our journal entries with one another. Too much shared information could skew our observations, our superiors believed. But I knew from experience how hopeless this pursuit, this attempt to weed out bias, was. Nothing that lived and breathed was truly objective—even in a vacuum, even if all that possessed the brain was a self-immolating desire for the truth.
“I’m excited by this discovery,” the psychologist interjected before we had discussed the tower much further. “Are you excited, too?” She had not asked us that particular question before. During training, she had tended to ask questions more like “How calm do you think you might be in an emergency?” Back then, I had felt as if she were a bad actor, playing a role. Now it seemed even more apparent, as if being our leader somehow made her nervous.
“It is definitely exciting … and unexpected,” I said, trying not to mock her and failing, a little. I was surprised to feel a sense of growing unease, mostly because in my imagination, my dreams, this discovery would have been among the more banal. In my head, before we had crossed the border, I had seen so many things: vast cities, peculiar animals, and, once, during a period of illness, an enormous monster that rose from the waves to bear down on our camp.
The surveyor, meanwhile, just shrugged and would not answer the psychologist’s question. The anthropologist nodded as if she agreed with me. The entrance to the tower leading down exerted a kind of presence, a blank surface that let us write so many things upon it. This presence manifested like a low-grade fever, pressing down on all of us.
I would tell you the names of the other three, if it mattered, but only the surveyor would last more than the next day or two. Besides, we were always strongly discouraged from using names: We were meant to be focused on our purpose, and “anything personal should be left behind.” Names belonged to where we had come from, not to who we were while embedded in Area X.
* * *
Originally our expedition had numbered five and included a linguist. To reach the border, we each had to enter a separate bright white room with a door at the far end and a single metal chair in the corner. The chair had holes along the sides for straps; the implications of this raised a prickle of alarm, but by then I was set in my determination to reach Area X. The facility that housed these rooms was under the control of the Southern Reach, the clandestine government agency that dealt with all matters connected to Area X.
There we waited while innumerable readings were taken and various blasts of air, some cool, some hot, pressed down on us from vents in the ceiling. At some point, the psychologist visited each of us, although I do not remember what was said. Then we exited through the far door into a central staging area, with double doors at the end of a long hallway. The psychologist greeted us there, but the linguist never reappeared.
“She had second thoughts,” the psychologist told us, meeting our questions with a firm gaze. “She decided to stay behind.” This came as a small shock, but there was also relief that it had not been someone else. Of all of our skill sets, linguist seemed at the time most expendable.
After a moment, the psychologist said, “Now, clear your minds.” This meant she would begin the process of hypnotizing us so we could cross the border. She would then put herself under a kind of self-hypnosis. It had been explained that we would need to cross the border with precautions to protect against our minds tricking us. Apparently hallucinations were common. At least, this was what they told us. I no longer can be sure it was the truth. The actual nature of the border had been withheld from us for security reasons; we knew only that it was invisible to the naked eye.
So when I “woke up” with the others, it was in full gear, including heavy hiking boots, with the weight of forty-pound backpacks and a multitude of additional supplies hanging from our belts. All three of us lurched, and the anthropologist fell to one knee, while the psychologist patiently waited for us to recover. “I’m sorry,” she said. “That was the least startling reentry I could manage.”
The surveyor cursed, and glared at her. She had a temper that must have been deemed an asset. The anthropologist, as was her way, got to her feet, uncomplaining. And I, as was my way, was too busy observing to take this rude awakening personally. For example, I noticed the cruelty of the almost imperceptible smile on the psychologist’s lips as she watched us struggle to adjust, the anthropologist still floundering and apologizing for floundering. Later I realized I might have misread her expression; it might have been pained or self-pitying.
We were on a dirt trail strewn with pebbles, dead leaves, and pine needles damp to the touch. Velvet ants and tiny emerald beetles crawled over them. The tall pines, with their scaly ridges of bark, rose on both sides, and the shadows of flying birds conjured lines between them. The air was so fresh it buffeted the lungs and we strained to breathe for a few seconds, mostly from surprise. Then, after marking our location with a piece of red cloth tied to a tree, we began to walk forward, into the unknown. If the psychologist somehow became incapacitated and could not lead us across at the end of our mission, we had been told to return to await “extraction.” No one ever explained what form “extraction” might take, but the implication was that our superiors could observe the extraction point from afar, even though it was inside the border.
We had been told not to look back upon arrival, but I snuck a glance anyway, while the psychologist’s attention was elsewhere. I don’t know quite what I saw. It was hazy, indistinct, and already far behind us—perhaps a gate, perhaps a trick of the eye. Just a sudden impression of a fizzing block of light, fast fading.
* * *
The reasons I had volunteered were very separate from my qualifications for the expedition. I believe I qualified because I specialized in transitional environments, and this particular location transitioned several times, meaning that it was home to a complexity of ecosystems. In few other places could you still find habitat where, within the space of walking only six or seven miles, you went from forest to swamp to salt marsh to beach. In Area X, I had been told, I would find marine life that had adjusted to the brackish freshwater and which at low tide swam far up the natural canals formed by the reeds, sharing the same environment with otters and deer. If you walked along the beach, riddled through with the holes of fiddler crabs, you would sometimes look out to see one of the giant reptiles, for they, too, had adapted to their habitat.
I understood why no one lived in Area X now, that it was pristine because of that reason, but I kept un-remembering it. I had decided instead to make believe that it was simply a protected wildlife refuge, and we were hikers who happened to be scientists. This made sense on another level: We did not know what had happened here, what was still happening here, and any preformed theories would affect my analysis of the evidence as we encountered it. Besides, for my part it hardly mattered what lies I told myself because my existence back in the world had become at least as empty as Area X. With nothing left to anchor me, I needed to be here. As for the others, I don’t know what they told themselves, and I didn’t want to know, but I believe they all at least pretended to some level of curiosity. Curiosity could be a powerful distraction.
That night we talked about the tower, although the other three insisted on calling it a tunnel. The responsibility for the thrust of our investigations resided with each individual, the psychologist’s authority describing a wider circle around these decisions. Part of the current rationale for sending the expeditions lay in giving each member some autonomy to decide, which helped to increase “the possibility of significant variation.”
This vague protocol existed in the context of our separate skill sets. For example, although we had all received basic weapons and survival training, the surveyor had far more medical and firearms experience than the rest of us. The anthropologist had once been an architect; indeed, she had years ago survived a fire in a building she had designed, the only really personal thing I had found out about her. As for the psychologist, we knew the least about her, but I think we all believed she came from some kind of management background.
The discussion of the tower was, in a way, our first opportunity to test the limits of disagreement and of compromise.
“I don’t think we should focus on the tunnel,” the anthropologist said. “We should explore farther first, and we should come back to it with whatever data we gather from our other investigations—including of the lighthouse.”
How predictable, and yet perhaps prescient, for the anthropologist to try to substitute a safer, more comfortable option. Although the idea of mapping seemed perfunctory or repetitive to me, I could not deny the existence of the tower, of which there was no suggestion on any map.
Then the surveyor spoke. “In this case I feel that we should rule out the tunnel as something invasive or threatening. Before we explore farther. It’s like an enemy at our backs otherwise, if we press forward.” She had come to us from the military, and I could see already the value of that experience. I had thought a surveyor would always side with the idea of further exploration, so this opinion carried weight.
“I’m impatient to explore the habitats here,” I said. “But in a sense, given that it is not noted on any map, the ‘tunnel’ … or tower … seems important. It is either a deliberate exclusion from our maps and thus known … and that is a message of sorts … or it is something new that wasn’t here when the last expedition arrived.”
The surveyor gave me a look of thanks for the support, but my position had nothing to do with helping her. Something about the idea of a tower that headed straight down played with a twinned sensation of vertigo and a fascination with structure. I could not tell which part I craved and which I feared, and I kept seeing the inside of nautilus shells and other naturally occurring patterns balanced against a sudden leap off a cliff into the unknown.
The psychologist nodded, appeared to consider these opinions, and asked, “Does anyone yet have even an inkling of a sensation of wanting to leave?” It was a legitimate question, but jarring nonetheless.
All three of us shook our heads.
“What about you?” the surveyor asked the psychologist. “What is your opinion?”
The psychologist grinned, which seemed odd. But she must have known any one of us might have been tasked with observing her own reactions to stimuli. Perhaps the idea that a surveyor, an expert in the surface of things, might have been chosen, rather than a biologist or anthropologist, amused her. “I must admit to feeling a great deal of unease at the moment. But I am unsure whether it is because of the effect of the overall environment or the presence of the tunnel. Personally, I would like to rule out the tunnel.”
Tower.
“Three to one, then,” the anthropologist said, clearly relieved that the decision had been made for her.
The surveyor just shrugged.
Perhaps I’d been wrong about curiosity. The surveyor didn’t seem curious about anything.
“Bored?” I asked.
“Eager to get on with it,” she said, to the group, as if I’d asked the question for all of us.
We were in the communal tent for our talk. It had become dark by then and there came soon after the strange mournful call in the night that we knew must have natural causes but created a little shiver regardless. As if that was the signal to disband, we went back to our own quarters to be alone with our thoughts. I lay awake in my tent for a while trying to turn the tower into a tunnel, or even a shaft, but with no success. Instead, my mind kept returning to a question: What lies hidden at its base?
* * *
During our hike from the border to the base camp near the coast, we had experienced almost nothing out of the ordinary. The birds sang as they should; the deer took flight, their white tails exclamation points against the green and brown of the underbrush; the raccoons, bowlegged, swayed about their business, ignoring us. As a group, we felt almost giddy, I think, to be free after so many confining months of training and preparation. While we were in that corridor, in that transitional space, nothing could touch us. We were neither what we had been nor what we would become once we reached our destination.
The day before we arrived at the camp, this mood was briefly shattered by the appearance of an enormous wild boar some distance ahead of us on the trail. It was so far from us that even with our binoculars we could barely identify it at first. But despite poor eyesight, wild pigs have prodigious powers of smell, and it began charging us from one hundred yards away. Thundering down the trail toward us … yet we still had time to think about what we might do, had drawn our long knives, and in the surveyor’s case her assault rifle. Bullets would probably stop a seven-hundred-pound pig, or perhaps not. We did not feel confident taking our attention from the boar to untie the container of handguns from our gear and open its triple locks.
There was no time for the psychologist to prepare any hypnotic suggestion designed to keep us focused and in control; in fact, all she could offer was “Don’t get close to it! Don’t let it touch you!” while the boar continued to charge. The anthropologist was giggling a bit out of nervousness and the absurdity of experiencing an emergency situation that was taking so long to develop. Only the surveyor had taken direct action: She had dropped to one knee to get a better shot; our orders included the helpful directive to “kill only if you are under threat of being killed.”
I was continuing to watch through the binoculars, and as the boar came closer, its face became stranger and stranger. Its features were somehow contorted, as if the beast was dealing with an extreme of inner torment. Nothing about its muzzle or broad, long face looked at all extraordinary, and yet I had the startling impression of some presence in the way its gaze seemed turned inward and its head willfully pulled to the left as if there were an invisible bridle. A kind of electricity sparked in its eyes that I could not credit as real. I thought instead it must be a by-product of my now slightly shaky hand on the binoculars.
Whatever was consuming the boar also soon consumed its desire to charge. It veered abruptly leftward, with what I can only describe as a great cry of anguish, into the underbrush. By the time we reached that spot, the boar was gone, leaving behind a thoroughly thrashed trail.
For several hours, my thoughts turned inward toward explanations for what I had seen: parasites and other hitchhikers of a neurological nature. I was searching for entirely rational biological theories. Then, after a time, the boar faded into the backdrop like all else that we had passed on our way from the border, and I was staring into the future again.
* * *
The morning after we discovered the tower we rose early, ate our breakfast, and doused our fire. There was a crisp chill to the air common for the season. The surveyor broke open the weapons stash and gave us each a handgun. She herself continued to hold on to the assault rifle; it had the added benefit of a flashlight under the barrel. We had not expected to have to open that particular container so soon, and although none of us protested, I felt a new tension between us. We knew that members of the second expedition to Area X had committed suicide by gunshot and members of the third had shot each other. Not until several subsequent expeditions had suffered zero casualties had our superiors issued firearms again. We were the twelfth expedition.
So we returned to the tower, all four of us. Sunlight came down dappled through the moss and leaves, created archipelagos of light on the flat surface of the entrance. It remained unremarkable, inert, in no way ominous … and yet it took an act of will to stand there, staring at the entry point. I noticed the anthropologist checking her black box, was relieved to see it did not display a glowing red light. If it had, we would have had to abort our exploration, move on to other things. I did not want that, despite the touch of fear.
“How deep do you think it goes down?” the anthropologist asked.
“Remember that we are to put our faith in your measurements,” the psychologist answered, with a slight frown. “The measurements do not lie. This structure is 61.4 feet in diameter. It is raised 7.9 inches from the ground. The stairwell appears to have been positioned at or close to due north, which may tell us something about its creation, eventually. It is made of stone and coquina, not of metal or of bricks. These are facts. That it wasn’t on the maps means only that a storm may have uncovered the entrance.”
I found the psychologist’s faith in measurements and her rationalization for the tower’s absence from maps oddly … endearing? Perhaps she meant merely to reassure us, but I would like to believe she was trying to reassure herself. Her position, to lead and possibly to know more than us, must have been difficult and lonely.
“I hope it’s only about six feet deep so we can continue mapping,” the surveyor said, trying to be lighthearted, but then she, and we, all recognized the term “six feet under” ghosting through her syntax and a silence settled over us.
“I want you to know that I cannot stop thinking of it as a tower,” I confessed. “I can’t see it as a tunnel.” It seemed important to make the distinction before our descent, even if it influenced their evaluation of my mental state. I saw a tower, plunging into the ground. The thought that we stood at its summit made me a little dizzy.
All three stared at me then, as if I were the strange cry at dusk, and after a moment the psychologist said, grudgingly, “If that helps make you more comfortable, then I don’t see the harm.”
A silence came over us again, there under the canopy of trees. A beetle spiraled up toward the branches, trailing dust motes. I think we all realized that only now had we truly entered Area X.
“I’ll go first and see what’s down there,” the surveyor said, finally, and we were happy to defer to her.
The initial stairwell curved steeply downward and the steps were narrow, so the surveyor would have to back her way into the tower. We used sticks to clear the spiderwebs as she lowered herself into position on the stairwell. She teetered there, weapon slung across her back, looking up at us. She had tied her hair back and it made the lines of her face seem tight and drawn. Was this the moment when we were supposed to stop her? To come up with some other plan? If so, none of us had the nerve.
With a strange smirk, almost as if judging us, the surveyor descended until we could only see her face framed in the gloom below, and then not even that. She left an empty space that was shocking to me, as if the reverse had actually happened: as if a face had suddenly floated into view out of the darkness. I gasped, which drew a stare from the psychologist. The anthropologist was too busy staring down into the stairwell to notice any of it.
“Is everything okay?” the psychologist called out to the surveyor. Everything had been fine just a second before. Why would anything be different now?
The surveyor made a sharp grunt in answer, as if agreeing with me. For a few moments more, we could still hear the surveyor struggling on those short steps. Then came silence, and then another movement, at a different rhythm, which for a terrifying moment seemed like it might come from a second source.
But then the surveyor called up to us. “Clear to this level!” This level. Something within me thrilled to the fact that my vision of a tower was not yet disproven.
That was the signal for me to descend with the anthropologist, while the psychologist stood watch. “Time to go,” the psychologist said, as perfunctorily as if we were in school and a class was letting out.
An emotion that I could not quite identify surged through me, and for a moment I saw dark spots in my field of vision. I followed the anthropologist so eagerly down through the remains of webs and the embalmed husks of insects into the cool brackishness of that place that I almost tripped her. My last view of the world above: the psychologist peering down at me with a slight frown, and behind her the trees, the blue of the sky almost blinding against the darkness of the sides of the stairwell.
Below, shadows spread across the walls. The temperature dropped and sound became muffled, the soft steps absorbing our tread. Approximately twenty feet beneath the surface, the structure opened out into a lower level. The ceiling was about eight feet high, which meant a good twelve feet of stone lay above us. The flashlight of the surveyor’s assault rifle illuminated the space, but she was faced away from us, surveying the walls, which were an off-white and devoid of any adornment. A few cracks indicated either the passage of time or some sudden stressor. The level appeared to be the same circumference as the exposed top, which again supported the idea of a single solid structure buried in the earth.
“It goes farther,” the surveyor said, and pointed with her rifle to the far corner, directly opposite the opening where we had come out onto that level. A rounded archway stood there, and a darkness that suggested downward steps. A tower, which made this level not so much a floor as a landing or part of the turret. She started to walk toward the archway while I was still engrossed in examining the walls with my flashlight. Their very blankness mesmerized me. I tried to imagine the builder of this place but could not.
I thought again of the silhouette of the lighthouse, as I had seen it during the late afternoon of our first day at base camp. We assumed that the structure in question was a lighthouse because the map showed a lighthouse at that location and because everyone immediately recognized what a lighthouse should look like. In fact, the surveyor and anthropologist had both expressed a kind of relief when they had seen the lighthouse. Its appearance on both the map and in reality reassured them, anchored them. Being familiar with its function further reassured them.
With the tower, we knew none of these things. We could not intuit its full outline. We had no sense of its purpose. And now that we had begun to descend into it, the tower still failed to reveal any hint of these things. The psychologist might recite the measurements of the “top” of the tower, but those numbers meant nothing, had no wider context. Without context, clinging to those numbers was a form of madness.
“There is a regularity to the circle, seen from the inside walls, that suggests precision in the creation of the building,” the anthropologist said. The building. Already she had begun to abandon the idea of it being a tunnel.
All of my thoughts came spilling out of my mouth, some final discharge from the state that had overtaken me above. “But what is its purpose? And is it believable that it would not be on the maps? Could one of the prior expeditions have built it and hidden it?” I asked all of this and more, not expecting an answer. Even though no threat had revealed itself, it seemed important to eliminate any possible moment of silence. As if somehow the blankness of the walls fed off of silence, and that something might appear in the spaces between our words if we were not careful. Had I expressed this anxiety to the psychologist, she would have been worried, I know. But I was more attuned to solitude than any of us, and I would have characterized that place in that moment of our exploration as watchful.
A gasp from the surveyor cut me off in mid-question, no doubt much to the anthropologist’s relief.
“Look!” the surveyor said, training her flashlight down into the archway. We hurried over and stared past her, adding our own illumination.
A stairway did indeed lead down, this time at a gentle curve with much broader steps, but still made of the same materials. At about shoulder height, perhaps five feet high, clinging to the inner wall of the tower, I saw what I first took to be dimly sparkling green vines progressing down into the darkness. I had a sudden absurd memory of the floral wallpaper treatment that had lined the bathroom of my house when I had shared it with my husband. Then, as I stared, the “vines” resolved further, and I saw that they were words, in cursive, the letters raised about six inches off the wall.
“Hold the light,” I said, and pushed past them down the first few steps. Blood was rushing through my head again, a roaring confusion in my ears. It was an act of supreme control to walk those few paces. I couldn’t tell you what impulse drove me, except that I was the biologist and this looked oddly organic. If the linguist had been there, perhaps I would have deferred to her.
“Don’t touch it, whatever it is,” the anthropologist warned.
I nodded, but I was too enthralled with the discovery. If I’d had the impulse to touch the words on the wall, I would not have been able to stop myself.
As I came close, did it surprise me that I could understand the language the words were written in? Yes. Did it fill me with a kind of elation and dread intertwined? Yes. I tried to suppress the thousand new questions rising up inside of me. In as calm a voice as I could manage, aware of the importance of that moment, I read from the beginning, aloud: “Where lies the strangling fruit that came from the hand of the sinner I shall bring forth the seeds of the dead to share with the worms that…”
Then the darkness took it.
“Words? Words?” the anthropologist said.
Yes, words.
“What are they made of?” the surveyor asked. Did they need to be made of anything?
The illumination cast on the continuing sentence quavered and shook. Where lies the strangling fruit became bathed in shadow and in light, as if a battle raged for its meaning.
“Give me a moment. I need to get closer.” Did I? Yes, I needed to get closer.
What are they made of?
I hadn’t even thought of this, though I should have; I was still trying to parse the lingual meaning, had not transitioned to the idea of taking a physical sample. But what relief at the question! Because it helped me fight the compulsion to keep reading, to descend into the greater darkness and keep descending until I had read all there was to read. Already those initial phrases were infiltrating my mind in unexpected ways, finding fertile ground.
So I stepped closer, peered at Where lies the strangling fruit. I saw that the letters, connected by their cursive script, were made from what would have looked to the layperson like rich green fernlike moss but in fact was probably a type of fungi or other eukaryotic organism. The curling filaments were all packed very close together and rising out from the wall. A loamy smell came from the words along with an underlying hint of rotting honey. This miniature forest swayed, almost imperceptibly, like sea grass in a gentle ocean current.
Other things existed in this miniature ecosystem. Half-hidden by the green filaments, most of these creatures were translucent and shaped like tiny hands embedded by the base of the palm. Golden nodules capped the fingers on these “hands.” I leaned in closer, like a fool, like someone who had not had months of survival training or ever studied biology. Someone tricked into thinking that words should be read.
I was unlucky—or was I lucky? Triggered by a disturbance in the flow of air, a nodule in the W chose that moment to burst open and a tiny spray of golden spores spewed out. I pulled back, but I thought I had felt something enter my nose, experienced a pinprick of escalation in the smell of rotting honey.
Unnerved, I stepped back even farther, borrowing some of the surveyor’s best curses, but only in my head. My natural instinct was always for concealment. Already I was imagining the psychologist’s reaction to my contamination, if revealed to the group.
“Some sort of fungi,” I said finally, taking a deep breath so I could control my voice. “The letters are made from fruiting bodies.” Who knew if it were actually true? It was just the closest thing to an answer.
My voice must have seemed calmer than my actual thoughts because there was no hesitation in their response. No hint in their tone of having seen the spores erupt into my face. I had been so close. The spores had been so tiny, so insignificant. I shall bring forth the seeds of the dead.
“Words? Made of fungi?” the surveyor said, stupidly echoing me.
“There is no recorded human language that uses this method of writing,” the anthropologist said. “Is there any animal that communicates in this way?”
I had to laugh. “No, there is no animal that communicates in this way.” Or, if there were, I could not recall its name, and never did later, either.
“Are you joking? This is a joke, right?” the surveyor said. She looked poised to come down and prove me wrong, but didn’t move from her position.
“Fruiting bodies,” I replied, almost as if in a trance. “Forming words.”
A calm had settled over me. A competing sensation, as if I couldn’t breathe, or didn’t want to, was clearly psychological not physiological. I had noticed no physical changes, and on some level it didn’t matter. I knew it was unlikely we had an antidote to something so unknown waiting back at the camp.
More than anything, the information I was trying to process immobilized me. The words were composed of symbiotic fruiting bodies from a species unknown to me. Second, the dusting of spores on the words meant that the farther down into the tower we explored, the more the air would be full of potential contaminants. Was there any reason to relay this information to the others when it would only alarm them? No, I decided, perhaps selfishly. It was more important to make sure they were not directly exposed until we could come back with the proper equipment. Any other evaluation depended on environmental and biological factors about which I was increasingly convinced I had inadequate data.
I came back up the stairs to the landing. The surveyor and the anthropologist looked expectant, as if I could tell them more. The anthropologist in particular was on edge; her gaze couldn’t alight on any one thing but kept moving and moving. Perhaps I could have fabricated information that would have stopped that incessant search. But what could I tell them about the words on the wall except that they were either impossible or insane, or both? I would have preferred the words be written in an unknown language; this would have presented less of a mystery for us to solve, in a way.
“We should go back up,” I said. It was not that I recommended this as the best course of action but because I wanted to limit their exposure to the spores until I could see what long-term effects they might have on me. I also knew if I stayed there much longer I might experience a compulsion to go back down the stairs to continue reading the words, and they would have to physically restrain me, and I did not know what I would do then.
There was no argument from the other two. But as we climbed back up, I had a moment of vertigo despite being in such an enclosed space, a kind of panic for a moment, in which the walls suddenly had a fleshy aspect to them, as if we traveled inside of the gullet of a beast.
* * *
When we told the psychologist what we had seen, when I recited some of the words, she seemed at first frozen in an oddly attentive way. Then she decided to descend to view the words. I struggled with whether I should warn her against this action. Finally I said, “Only observe from the top of the stairs. We don’t know whether there are toxins. When we come back, we should wear breathing masks.” These, at least, we had inherited from the last expedition, in a sealed container.
“Paralysis is not a cogent analysis?” she said to me with a pointed stare. I felt a kind of itchiness come over me, but I said nothing, did nothing. The others did not even seem to realize she had spoken. It was only later that I realized the psychologist had tried to bind me with a hypnotic suggestion meant for me and me alone.
My reaction apparently fell within the range of acceptable responses, for she descended while we waited anxiously above. What would we do if she did not return? A sense of ownership swept over me. I was agitated by the idea that she might experience the same need to read further and would act upon it. Even though I didn’t know what the words meant, I wanted them to mean something so that I might more swiftly remove doubt, bring reason back into all of my equations. Such thoughts distracted me from thinking about the effects of the spores on my system.
Thankfully the other two had no desire to talk as we waited, and after just fifteen minutes the psychologist awkwardly pushed her way up out of the stairwell and into the light, blinking as her vision adjusted.
“Interesting,” she said in a flat tone as she loomed over us, wiping the cobwebs from her clothing. “I have never seen anything like that before.” She seemed as if she might continue, but then decided against it.
What she had already said verged on the moronic; apparently I was not alone in that assessment.
“Interesting?” the anthropologist said. “No one has ever seen anything like that in the entire history of the world. No one. Ever. And you call it interesting?” She seemed close to working herself into a bout of hysteria. While the surveyor just stared at both of them as if they were the alien organisms.
“Do you need me to calm you?” the psychologist asked. There was a steely tone to her words that made the anthropologist mumble something noncommittal and stare at the ground.
I stepped into the silence with my own suggestion: “We need time to think about this. We need time to decide what to do next.” I meant, of course, that I needed time to see if the spores I had inhaled would affect me in a way significant enough to confess to what had happened.
“There may not be enough time in the world for that,” the surveyor said. Of all of us, I think she had best grasped the implications of what we had seen: that we might now be living in a kind of nightmare. But the psychologist ignored her and sided with me. “We do need time. We should spend the rest of our day doing what we were sent here to do.”
So we returned to camp for lunch and then focused on “ordinary things” while I kept monitoring my body for any changes. Did I feel too cold now, or too hot? Was that ache in my knee from an old injury suffered in the field, or something new? I even checked the black box monitor, but it remained inert. Nothing radical had yet changed in me, and as we took our samples and readings in the general vicinity of the camp—as if to stray too far would be to come under the tower’s control—I gradually relaxed and told myself that the spores had had no effect … even though I knew that the incubation period for some species could be months or years. I suppose I thought merely that for the next few days at least I might be safe.
The surveyor concentrated on adding detail and nuance to the maps our superiors had given us. The anthropologist went off to examine the remains of some cabins a quarter mile away. The psychologist stayed in her tent, writing in her journal. Perhaps she was reporting on how she was surrounded by idiots, or just setting out every moment of our morning discoveries.
For my part, I spent an hour observing a tiny red-and-green tree frog on the back of a broad, thick leaf and another hour following the path of an iridescent black damselfly that should not have been found at sea level. The rest of the time, I spent up a pine tree, binoculars focused on the coast and the lighthouse. I liked climbing. I also liked the ocean, and I found staring at it had a calming effect. The air was so clean, so fresh, while the world back beyond the border was what it had always been during the modern era: dirty, tired, imperfect, winding down, at war with itself. Back there, I had always felt as if my work amounted to a futile attempt to save us from who we are.
The richness of Area X’s biosphere was reflected in the wealth of birdlife, from warblers and flickers to cormorants and black ibis. I could also see a bit into the salt marshes, and my attention there was rewarded by a minute-long glimpse of a pair of otters. At one point, they glanced up and I had a strange sensation that they could see me watching them. It was a feeling I often had when out in the wilderness: that things were not quite what they seemed, and I had to fight against the sensation because it could overwhelm my scientific objectivity. There was also something else, moving ponderously through the reeds, but it was closer to the lighthouse and in deep cover. I could not tell what it was, and after a while its disturbance of the vegetation ceased and I lost track of it entirely. I imagined it might be another wild pig, as they could be good swimmers and were just as omnivorous in their choice of habitats as in their diets.
On the whole, by dusk this strategy of busying ourselves in our tasks had worked to calm our nerves. The tension lifted somewhat, and we even joked a little bit at dinner. “I wish I knew what you were thinking,” the anthropologist confessed to me, and I replied, “No, you don’t,” which was met with a laughter that surprised me. I didn’t want their voices in my head, their ideas of me, nor their own stories or problems. Why would they want mine?
But I did not mind that a sense of camaraderie had begun to take hold, even if it would prove short-lived. The psychologist allowed us each a couple of beers from the store of alcohol, which loosened us up to the point that I even clumsily expressed the idea that we might maintain some sort of contact once we had completed our mission. I had stopped checking myself for physiological or psychological reactions to the spores by then, and found that the surveyor and I got along better than I had expected. I still didn’t like the anthropologist very much, but mostly in the context of the mission, not anything she had said to me. I felt that, once in the field, much as some athletes were good in practice and not during the game, she had exhibited a lack of mental toughness thus far. Although just volunteering for such a mission meant something.
When the nightly cry from the marshes came a little after nightfall, while we sat around our fire, we at first called back to it in a drunken show of bravado. The beast in the marshes now seemed like an old friend compared to the tower. We were confident that eventually we would photograph it, document its behavior, tag it, and assign it a place in the taxonomy of living things. It would become known in a way we feared the tower would not. But we stopped calling back when the intensity of its moans heightened in a way that suggested anger, as if it knew we were mocking it. Nervous laughter all around, then, and the psychologist took that as her cue to ready us for the next day.
“Tomorrow we will go back to the tunnel. We will go deeper, taking certain precautions—wearing breathing masks, as suggested. We will record the writing on the walls and get a sense of how old it is, I hope. Also, perhaps a sense of how deep the tunnel descends. In the afternoon, we’ll return to our general investigations of the area. We’ll repeat this schedule every day until we think we know enough about the tunnel and how it fits into Area X.”
Tower, not tunnel. She could have been talking about investigating an abandoned shopping center, for all of the emphasis she put on it … and yet something about her tone seemed rehearsed.
Then she abruptly stood and said three words: “Consolidation of authority.”
Immediately the surveyor and the anthropologist beside me went slack, their eyes unfocused. I was shocked, but I mimicked them, hoping that the psychologist had not noticed the lag. I felt no compulsion whatsoever, but clearly we had been preprogrammed to enter a hypnotic state in response to those words, uttered by the psychologist.
Her demeanor more assertive than just a moment before, the psychologist said, “You will retain a memory of having discussed several options with regard to the tunnel. You will find that you ultimately agreed with me about the best course of action, and that you felt quite confident about this course of action. You will experience a sensation of calm whenever you think about this decision, and you will remain calm once back inside the tunnel, although you will react to any stimuli as per your training. You will not take undue risks.
“You will continue to see a structure that is made of coquina and stone. You will trust your colleagues completely and feel a continued sense of fellowship with them. When you emerge from the structure, any time you see a bird in flight it will trigger a strong feeling that you are doing the right thing, that you are in the right place. When I snap my fingers, you will have no memory of this conversation, but will follow my directives. You will feel very tired and you will want to retire to your tents to get a good night’s sleep before tomorrow’s activities. You will not dream. You will not have nightmares.”
I stared straight ahead as she said these words, and when she snapped her fingers I took my cue from the actions of the other two. I don’t believe the psychologist suspected anything, and I retired to my tent just as the others retired to their tents.
Now I had new data to process, along with the tower. We knew that the psychologist’s role was to provide balance and calm in a situation that might become stressful, and that part of this role included hypnotic suggestion. I could not blame her for performing that role. But to see it laid out so nakedly troubled me. It is one thing to think you might be receiving hypnotic suggestion and quite another to experience it as an observer. What level of control could she exert over us? What did she mean by saying that we would continue to think of the tower as made of coquina and stone?
Most important, however, I now could guess at one way in which the spores had affected me: They had made me immune to the psychologist’s hypnotic suggestions. They had made me into a kind of conspirator against her. Even if her purposes were benign, I felt a wave of anxiety whenever I thought of confessing that I was resistant to hypnosis—especially since it meant any underlying conditioning hidden in our training also was affecting me less and less.
I now hid not one but two secrets, and that meant I was steadily, irrevocably, becoming estranged from the expedition and its purpose.
* * *
Estrangement, in all of its many forms, was nothing new for these missions. I understood this from having been given an opportunity along with the others to view videotape of the reentry interviews with the members of the eleventh expedition. Once those individuals had been identified as having returned to their former lives, they were quarantined and questioned about their experiences. Reasonably enough, in most cases family members had called the authorities, finding their loved one’s return uncanny or frightening. Any papers found on these returnees had been confiscated by our superiors for examination and study. This information, too, we were allowed to see.
The interviews were fairly short, and in them all eight expedition members told the same story. They had experienced no unusual phenomenon while in Area X, taken no unusual readings, and reported no unusual internal conflicts. But after a period of time, each one of them had had the intense desire to return home and had set out to do so. None of them could explain how they had managed to come back across the border, or why they had gone straight home instead of first reporting to their superiors. One by one they had simply abandoned the expedition, left their journals behind, and drifted home. Somehow.
Throughout these interviews, their expressions were friendly and their gazes direct. If their words seemed a little flat, then this went with the kind of general calm, the almost dreamlike demeanor each had returned with—even the compact, wiry man who had served as that expedition’s military expert, a person who’d had a mercurial and energetic personality. In terms of their affect, I could not tell any of the eight apart. I had the sense that they now saw the world through a kind of veil, that they spoke to their interviewers from across a vast distance in time and space.
As for the papers, they proved to be sketches of landscapes within Area X or brief descriptions. Some were cartoons of animals or caricatures of fellow expedition members. All of them had, at some point, drawn the lighthouse or written about it. Looking for hidden meaning in these papers was the same as looking for hidden meaning in the natural world around us. If it existed, it could be activated only by the eye of the beholder.
At the time, I was seeking oblivion, and I sought in those blank, anonymous faces, even the most painfully familiar, a kind of benign escape. A death that would not mean being dead.
Copyright © 2014 by Jeff VanderMeer
(Continues...)Excerpted from Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer. Copyright © 2014 Jeff VanderMeer. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Product details
- Publisher : FSG Originals; First Edition (February 4, 2014)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 208 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0374104093
- ISBN-13 : 978-0374104092
- Item Weight : 5.6 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.05 x 0.55 x 7.45 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #5,431 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #67 in Post-Apocalyptic Science Fiction (Books)
- #85 in Dystopian Fiction (Books)
- #477 in Literary Fiction (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
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About the author
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Called “the weird Thoreau” by the New Yorker, NYT bestseller Jeff VanderMeer has been a published writer since age 14. His most recent fiction is the critically acclaimed novel BORNE, which has received raves from the NYTBR, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, and many more. Paramount Pictures has optioned BORNE for film.
VanderMeer's Southern Reach trilogy was one of the publishing events of 2014, the trilogy made more than thirty year’s best lists, including Entertainment Weekly’s top 10. Paramount Pictures has made a movie out of the first volume of the Southern Reach, Annihilation, slated for release in 2018 and starring Tessa Thompson, Oscar Isaac, Gina Rodriguez, Natalie Portman, and Jennifer Jason Leigh.
His nonfiction appears in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, the Guardian, and the Atlantic.com. VanderMeer also wrote the world’s first fully illustrated creative-writing guide, Wonderbook. With his wife, Ann VanderMeer, he has edited may iconic anthologies. He lives in Tallahassee, Florida, with two wonderful cats. His hobbies include hiking, reading, and bird watching.
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Top reviews from the United States
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Reviewed in the United States on January 10, 2015
Reviewed in the United States on March 10, 2023
I finally have made my way to reading this book after being blown away by the movie of the same name. The book was pretty good and it felt like some of the things covered might be in the second book because they were not in this one. There's mention of a couple places within Area X that I wish had been explored in this book, but there are two more books in the series so they might be explored in those. This is a familiar story of going to an area or place where unexplained things occur and it is told well. I really only have one gripe about this book and it kind of bothers me that it is a gripe that I have because it fits the story. The team sent in to explore Area X are referred to by job title and not name. It fits the story and makes sense, but it makes it hard to connect with the characters. It's really only a minor gripe stemming from my desire to know the characters and may not bother other readers as it did me. Pretty good book. I'll be making my way toward the sequel eventually. I would recommend this if you like science fiction or a bit of weirdness to your stories.
Reviewed in the United States on June 16, 2023
This novel is so well developed and so entirely discombobulating that I will need some time to process it all. I might even read it again. It’s good, but weird, and leaves me with so many questions that I assume there are no answers to.
I found I needed to not read this at night because it unsettled me - and I normally don’t have that sort of problem with even the most troubling books. However, it was horror, or gore. It’s just profound and disturbing.
I found I needed to not read this at night because it unsettled me - and I normally don’t have that sort of problem with even the most troubling books. However, it was horror, or gore. It’s just profound and disturbing.
Reviewed in the United States on January 20, 2017
Apparently I purchased this book in 2014. I have no memory of the event (am guessing there was a good deal on it; I had bought the other two volumes in this series as well), but I was scrolling through my Kindle library the other day, looking for something to read, and for some reason, I stopped on this cover. And I have to say, I am glad I did. I read 80% of this book in a few hours one afternoon and finished it the next day. I have not been reading so much lately and that is an unheard of speed for me. I was really into this; I wasn't stopping and checking things online. So, the reading experience was right up my alley.
I will add a few other pieces of information before moving on to the substance of the review. This won a Nebula award. I am not always a fan of award-winning books (absolutely could not stand "Among Others" by Jo Walton, for example). But if you are looking for books with critical acclaim, this has it. Also, I am utterly unfamiliar with the television show "Lost" (other than knowing it exists) and other media references from some of the other reviews for this book.
I am not sure how to describe this book. It is part ecological monograph, part travel/adventure novel, part personal diary, part character study, even part mystery (not in the traditional sense of solving a murder or some such, but in a sense of people being thrown into an environment they're totally unprepared for and trying to get to the root of some strange phenomena).
There are four characters at the start of the novel but we really only get to know one of them, the biologist of an expedition into an anomalous area called the Southern Reach. This book is written from her perspective, in the manner of a personal diary or journal. (One could argue that her dead husband is a fifth character due to flashbacks and the like. We learn more about him than about the mission's anthropologist, at any rate.) Expeditions keep getting sent into this area and things keep going dreadfully wrong -- everyone murdered, or lots of suicides, or people returning completely changed (in terms of personality). We learn a few details of the early expeditions and of the 11th (this book is an account of the 12th), but say 4-10 are still unknown to us. I think I don't mind this. It probably would've been clutter for the author to develop and include seven additional specific outcomes, especially if they weren't directly relevant to the story of this expedition.
Early on, the biologist begins to suspect something is not as she has been led to believe. (The members of the expedition received extensive training before leaving on their trip, but serious gaps in the training come to light as the story moves along.) It seems that other members of the expedition are feeling the same, and it causes cracks in the cohesiveness of their unit (which was never super cohesive in the first place -- how can it be if you are not even sharing your names with each other?).
But, I don't want to get into too much plot summary. Anyway, this book doesn't have a plot in a traditional sense. There is a lot of exploration through a fascinating environment and I honestly just enjoyed reading the descriptions here, which is not often the case for me. There's not much dialogue though there is a fair amount of introspection and some flashbacks, of a sort. (The flashbacks are well done and serve to further the plot!) There is a climax but it's not the sort of confrontation you might expect at the end of a work of speculative fiction (where there are usually battles and such).
The atmosphere created was wonderful. In a creepy sort of way. I also really did like the focus on a single character. This book is a good character study (albeit in weird circumstances). What might cause a person to go on an expedition from which few return? And, the biologist is a good proxy for the reader. She doesn't have all the answers (or really any of them), she is discovering them along with the rest of us. What is it that the higher-ups back home want to know about the Southern Reach? Why are they so adamant that people don't remember how they got into Area X? At the end of this book, we have started forming the questions, and hopefully in future novels we will start getting answers.
Minor quibble, but at one point the biologist looks at some cells taken from a non-human mammal (a fox, I think) carcass and looks at them under a light microscope and says they are human. I don't think you could tell one mammal's cells from another using only a light microscope. You could tell cell types (neurons or smooth muscle or skin or whatever) if you were able to properly stain them. You could tell, say, a frog from a mammal (nucleated red blood cells in the frog but not in the mammal). But that is a minor point, and if there was some type of madness or neurodegenerative condition or residual effect of hypnosis affecting the biologist, it is possible she was reporting things that weren't true.
Overall, I enjoyed this book very much and am looking forward to starting the sequel, Authority, this weekend!
I will add a few other pieces of information before moving on to the substance of the review. This won a Nebula award. I am not always a fan of award-winning books (absolutely could not stand "Among Others" by Jo Walton, for example). But if you are looking for books with critical acclaim, this has it. Also, I am utterly unfamiliar with the television show "Lost" (other than knowing it exists) and other media references from some of the other reviews for this book.
I am not sure how to describe this book. It is part ecological monograph, part travel/adventure novel, part personal diary, part character study, even part mystery (not in the traditional sense of solving a murder or some such, but in a sense of people being thrown into an environment they're totally unprepared for and trying to get to the root of some strange phenomena).
There are four characters at the start of the novel but we really only get to know one of them, the biologist of an expedition into an anomalous area called the Southern Reach. This book is written from her perspective, in the manner of a personal diary or journal. (One could argue that her dead husband is a fifth character due to flashbacks and the like. We learn more about him than about the mission's anthropologist, at any rate.) Expeditions keep getting sent into this area and things keep going dreadfully wrong -- everyone murdered, or lots of suicides, or people returning completely changed (in terms of personality). We learn a few details of the early expeditions and of the 11th (this book is an account of the 12th), but say 4-10 are still unknown to us. I think I don't mind this. It probably would've been clutter for the author to develop and include seven additional specific outcomes, especially if they weren't directly relevant to the story of this expedition.
Early on, the biologist begins to suspect something is not as she has been led to believe. (The members of the expedition received extensive training before leaving on their trip, but serious gaps in the training come to light as the story moves along.) It seems that other members of the expedition are feeling the same, and it causes cracks in the cohesiveness of their unit (which was never super cohesive in the first place -- how can it be if you are not even sharing your names with each other?).
But, I don't want to get into too much plot summary. Anyway, this book doesn't have a plot in a traditional sense. There is a lot of exploration through a fascinating environment and I honestly just enjoyed reading the descriptions here, which is not often the case for me. There's not much dialogue though there is a fair amount of introspection and some flashbacks, of a sort. (The flashbacks are well done and serve to further the plot!) There is a climax but it's not the sort of confrontation you might expect at the end of a work of speculative fiction (where there are usually battles and such).
The atmosphere created was wonderful. In a creepy sort of way. I also really did like the focus on a single character. This book is a good character study (albeit in weird circumstances). What might cause a person to go on an expedition from which few return? And, the biologist is a good proxy for the reader. She doesn't have all the answers (or really any of them), she is discovering them along with the rest of us. What is it that the higher-ups back home want to know about the Southern Reach? Why are they so adamant that people don't remember how they got into Area X? At the end of this book, we have started forming the questions, and hopefully in future novels we will start getting answers.
Minor quibble, but at one point the biologist looks at some cells taken from a non-human mammal (a fox, I think) carcass and looks at them under a light microscope and says they are human. I don't think you could tell one mammal's cells from another using only a light microscope. You could tell cell types (neurons or smooth muscle or skin or whatever) if you were able to properly stain them. You could tell, say, a frog from a mammal (nucleated red blood cells in the frog but not in the mammal). But that is a minor point, and if there was some type of madness or neurodegenerative condition or residual effect of hypnosis affecting the biologist, it is possible she was reporting things that weren't true.
Overall, I enjoyed this book very much and am looking forward to starting the sequel, Authority, this weekend!
Top reviews from other countries
Books by Proxy | @proxyfish
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Subtle and Eerie Read
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 14, 2020
Rating: 3.5 Stars
Imagine, if you will, that you are lost within an alien landscape. You do not know whether you have left this earth or crossed through an alternative dimension, or whether you yet remain in a strange forgotten corner of the world. The only thing which connects you to the rest of humanity is a journal. A journal of a woman whose name you do not know, whose life is slowly unfolding as you turn the cracked and brittle pages, and whose fate will yet remain a mystery at its close.
Annihilation is a strange, disquieting and eerily beautiful novel which takes the reader on an expedition into Area X; where those who enter leave changed, if they leave at all. This is a tale of discovery and quiet observation, a preternatural mystery which should be slowly savoured until you are nothing but lost in the wilds of VanderMeer’s imagination.
-
Annihilation follows the expedition of an unnamed protagonist, the biologist, as she journeys into Area X, a mysterious and extensive partition of land under an apparent imposed quarantine. Previous expeditions have entered but all have returned altered, if they returned at all.
Together with a psychologist, an anthropologist and a surveyor, the twelfth expedition makes its way into this strange and mystifying land only to find that danger is as likely to come from within as without; no one remains the same in Area X. With towers that spiral into the earth, strange cries in the night and creatures straight out of a fever dream, finding a way home might be the least of their problems.
-
Annihilation is a quiet flight of (science) fantasy across uncharted territory; a novel which slowly draws you into a world of sinister discovery. Area X is a vast and mysterious zone which takes on an almost alien appearance; its utter unfamiliarity creating a heady and foreboding atmosphere which weighs heavily throughout. VanderMeer’s writing is effortlessly engaging, leading the reader one step at a time into this strange, hypnotic and almost hallucinogenic world which, whilst not overtly involved, rides a line of tension from beginning to end.
Throughout the novel Area X appears overwhelmingly large, but despite this impression the narrative remains confined to a comparatively small zone which the expedition is reticent to leave. Whilst the necessity for staging the narrative in this relatively small area is somewhat apparent, my own imagination was straining at these invisible borders, desperate to discover more of the land and its utterly strange inhabitants. But if it was a ploy to make me want to read book two, it worked! VanderMeer has set me on a voyage of discovery which I am determined to see through.
Our unnamed protagonist is a thoughtful, analytical woman whose perspective of quiet observation and discovery make her an engaging character. Whilst this works in the favour of the biologist, we gain little perspective on the supplementary characters beyond her observations. Her tendency to watch rather than communicate means we never establish any meaningful connection to the other members of the expedition and care little for them when events conspire against them. This does, however, add to the air of mystery and tension; anyone is capable of anything, everyone is disposable and no one is safe.
VanderMeer’s first foray into Area X is a beautiful, subtle and incredibly atmospheric read which resonates with a sense of the unknown and the unknowable. His lyrical writing is saturated with the strange, forming a sinister and other-worldly tale which becomes increasingly difficult to put down. Whilst I would have preferred a little more action throughout the narrative and a more climactic, defined conclusion, the story remained absorbing throughout and the beauty of VanderMeer’s writing more than made up for it. This is a tale of quiet enjoyment. Of the strange. Of dreams and of nightmares.
-
If you like your science fantasy subtle and eerie, and wish to venture into the unknown, then Annihilation might just be the book for you. This is a novel which diverted all of my expectations and still managed to impress. Jeff VandeerMeer may be a new addition to my bookshelves but I imagine he’ll be there to stay.
Imagine, if you will, that you are lost within an alien landscape. You do not know whether you have left this earth or crossed through an alternative dimension, or whether you yet remain in a strange forgotten corner of the world. The only thing which connects you to the rest of humanity is a journal. A journal of a woman whose name you do not know, whose life is slowly unfolding as you turn the cracked and brittle pages, and whose fate will yet remain a mystery at its close.
Annihilation is a strange, disquieting and eerily beautiful novel which takes the reader on an expedition into Area X; where those who enter leave changed, if they leave at all. This is a tale of discovery and quiet observation, a preternatural mystery which should be slowly savoured until you are nothing but lost in the wilds of VanderMeer’s imagination.
-
Annihilation follows the expedition of an unnamed protagonist, the biologist, as she journeys into Area X, a mysterious and extensive partition of land under an apparent imposed quarantine. Previous expeditions have entered but all have returned altered, if they returned at all.
Together with a psychologist, an anthropologist and a surveyor, the twelfth expedition makes its way into this strange and mystifying land only to find that danger is as likely to come from within as without; no one remains the same in Area X. With towers that spiral into the earth, strange cries in the night and creatures straight out of a fever dream, finding a way home might be the least of their problems.
-
Annihilation is a quiet flight of (science) fantasy across uncharted territory; a novel which slowly draws you into a world of sinister discovery. Area X is a vast and mysterious zone which takes on an almost alien appearance; its utter unfamiliarity creating a heady and foreboding atmosphere which weighs heavily throughout. VanderMeer’s writing is effortlessly engaging, leading the reader one step at a time into this strange, hypnotic and almost hallucinogenic world which, whilst not overtly involved, rides a line of tension from beginning to end.
Throughout the novel Area X appears overwhelmingly large, but despite this impression the narrative remains confined to a comparatively small zone which the expedition is reticent to leave. Whilst the necessity for staging the narrative in this relatively small area is somewhat apparent, my own imagination was straining at these invisible borders, desperate to discover more of the land and its utterly strange inhabitants. But if it was a ploy to make me want to read book two, it worked! VanderMeer has set me on a voyage of discovery which I am determined to see through.
Our unnamed protagonist is a thoughtful, analytical woman whose perspective of quiet observation and discovery make her an engaging character. Whilst this works in the favour of the biologist, we gain little perspective on the supplementary characters beyond her observations. Her tendency to watch rather than communicate means we never establish any meaningful connection to the other members of the expedition and care little for them when events conspire against them. This does, however, add to the air of mystery and tension; anyone is capable of anything, everyone is disposable and no one is safe.
VanderMeer’s first foray into Area X is a beautiful, subtle and incredibly atmospheric read which resonates with a sense of the unknown and the unknowable. His lyrical writing is saturated with the strange, forming a sinister and other-worldly tale which becomes increasingly difficult to put down. Whilst I would have preferred a little more action throughout the narrative and a more climactic, defined conclusion, the story remained absorbing throughout and the beauty of VanderMeer’s writing more than made up for it. This is a tale of quiet enjoyment. Of the strange. Of dreams and of nightmares.
-
If you like your science fantasy subtle and eerie, and wish to venture into the unknown, then Annihilation might just be the book for you. This is a novel which diverted all of my expectations and still managed to impress. Jeff VandeerMeer may be a new addition to my bookshelves but I imagine he’ll be there to stay.
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Terence Blake
4.0 out of 5 stars
Annihilation is not nihilism but immanence.
Reviewed in France on March 9, 2019
THE BOOK is reminiscent of my two favourite science fiction films: STALKER and SOLARIS.
1) STALKER - because Area X was produced by an unknown Event creating a dangerous region, like the Zone, where ordinary reality's expectations, regularities, and laws are flouted in unpredictable ways, perhaps due to the action of alien beings or artefacts.
The difference between the two is that in STALKER the laws of physics are no longer reliable, whereas in ANNIHILATION it is the laws of biology that are twisted or violated.
2) SOLARIS - because there seems to be a vast intelligence that may be experimenting on us or trying to communicate with us by unusual or incomprehensible means, including the creation of replicas with incomplete versions of the memories of the originals.
Despite the constant sense of danger and the eerie deaths one never feels that the book is a tale of Horror, even if the characters themselves may have experienced horror. This is a different thing from us experiencing horror in reading it, which does happen but is not the dominant mood or emotion.
THE WEIRD: estrangement, uncertainty, instability, wonder and horror
What dominates is an affective tonality of weirdness comprising estrangement (Area X does not play by the same rules as ordinary reality), ontological and epistemological uncertainty (we do not know what is happening, identities themselves become dubious constructs), instability (a continuous variation of forms), and wonder (there is at least as much of the wondrous as of the horrifying).
A negative point associated with this weirdness is that the style is also often long-winded, despite much engaging and well-crafted writing.
THE FILM is in the limbo between an artistic work and a film of action. It attempts to represent as enunciated content the "weird" that characterises the level of enunciation. Despite general reservations that one may have about the value or the desirability of this sort of project of transposition, we should admit that the film does a good job.
1) Passage from style to content: the film is an enjoyable experience but nowhere near as good as the book. It may be a useful introduction to the book for those who have not yet read it, but for those who have read the book the film is disappointing.
Some elements that exist in the book at the level of the narrative style, for example the Heraclitean flux of interpretations are transposed or re-transcribed in the objects and events of the story (the body's organs enter into flux).
2) SENSATIONALISM: unfortunately certain transformations introduced elements of sensationalism that were absent from the book, such as the big bad bear, the crocodile, the military team, the recurrent interrogation scene, the comet strike.
3) Pedagogical explicitation: the film partakes of a movement of explicitation already seen in Villeneuve's ARRIVAL and BLADE RUNNER 2049, and also in ALTERED CARBON, where a demanding and initially confusing work is adapted pedagogically rather than transposed into an equally demanding form in a different medium.
Both the book and the film pose the question: how much epistemological and ontological flux can be contained in an art form?
How far can we go into immanence and annihilation and how much determinate form must we retain?
The book is able to integrate flux into very narrative technique and enunciative process, whereas the film has a more difficult trade-off between flux and form. This results in a new pulsation between the weird and the familiar, the enigmatic and the explicated, the shape and the flux, the form and the content, the unknown and the known. This sort of balancing act is a difficult exploit to carry off successfully.
The book is too intellectual, too enigmatic and frustrating for some and the film is too explicit and sensational for others. I personally prefer the book, but I am glad I saw the film.
1) STALKER - because Area X was produced by an unknown Event creating a dangerous region, like the Zone, where ordinary reality's expectations, regularities, and laws are flouted in unpredictable ways, perhaps due to the action of alien beings or artefacts.
The difference between the two is that in STALKER the laws of physics are no longer reliable, whereas in ANNIHILATION it is the laws of biology that are twisted or violated.
2) SOLARIS - because there seems to be a vast intelligence that may be experimenting on us or trying to communicate with us by unusual or incomprehensible means, including the creation of replicas with incomplete versions of the memories of the originals.
Despite the constant sense of danger and the eerie deaths one never feels that the book is a tale of Horror, even if the characters themselves may have experienced horror. This is a different thing from us experiencing horror in reading it, which does happen but is not the dominant mood or emotion.
THE WEIRD: estrangement, uncertainty, instability, wonder and horror
What dominates is an affective tonality of weirdness comprising estrangement (Area X does not play by the same rules as ordinary reality), ontological and epistemological uncertainty (we do not know what is happening, identities themselves become dubious constructs), instability (a continuous variation of forms), and wonder (there is at least as much of the wondrous as of the horrifying).
A negative point associated with this weirdness is that the style is also often long-winded, despite much engaging and well-crafted writing.
THE FILM is in the limbo between an artistic work and a film of action. It attempts to represent as enunciated content the "weird" that characterises the level of enunciation. Despite general reservations that one may have about the value or the desirability of this sort of project of transposition, we should admit that the film does a good job.
1) Passage from style to content: the film is an enjoyable experience but nowhere near as good as the book. It may be a useful introduction to the book for those who have not yet read it, but for those who have read the book the film is disappointing.
Some elements that exist in the book at the level of the narrative style, for example the Heraclitean flux of interpretations are transposed or re-transcribed in the objects and events of the story (the body's organs enter into flux).
2) SENSATIONALISM: unfortunately certain transformations introduced elements of sensationalism that were absent from the book, such as the big bad bear, the crocodile, the military team, the recurrent interrogation scene, the comet strike.
3) Pedagogical explicitation: the film partakes of a movement of explicitation already seen in Villeneuve's ARRIVAL and BLADE RUNNER 2049, and also in ALTERED CARBON, where a demanding and initially confusing work is adapted pedagogically rather than transposed into an equally demanding form in a different medium.
Both the book and the film pose the question: how much epistemological and ontological flux can be contained in an art form?
How far can we go into immanence and annihilation and how much determinate form must we retain?
The book is able to integrate flux into very narrative technique and enunciative process, whereas the film has a more difficult trade-off between flux and form. This results in a new pulsation between the weird and the familiar, the enigmatic and the explicated, the shape and the flux, the form and the content, the unknown and the known. This sort of balancing act is a difficult exploit to carry off successfully.
The book is too intellectual, too enigmatic and frustrating for some and the film is too explicit and sensational for others. I personally prefer the book, but I am glad I saw the film.
F
4.0 out of 5 stars
Gripping, different, immersive
Reviewed in Australia on August 9, 2023
This is a very different take on what the reader would consider to be an alien invasion.
And it's an hypnotic, spiralling descent into hell.
Evocative, mysterious, terrifying, it's impossible to put it down.
Little spoiler here:
-----
the reader doesn't get all the answers, and that's what I loved as well. You fill the gaps with your own imagination and make up the rest.
-----
Also, I'll argue that you don't need to embark into reading the trilogy. As weird as it sounds, this book has its own end and it's perfect.
This is a very good, almost dreaming little novel.
And it's an hypnotic, spiralling descent into hell.
Evocative, mysterious, terrifying, it's impossible to put it down.
Little spoiler here:
-----
the reader doesn't get all the answers, and that's what I loved as well. You fill the gaps with your own imagination and make up the rest.
-----
Also, I'll argue that you don't need to embark into reading the trilogy. As weird as it sounds, this book has its own end and it's perfect.
This is a very good, almost dreaming little novel.
Em
4.0 out of 5 stars
4/5 stars
Reviewed in Germany on July 30, 2019
So.
I first read this book in 2018 after I watched the film adaptation of "Annihilation". I enjoyed the film so much that I just HAD to find out if there was a book it was based on. Turns out it was. Turns out it is a trilogy.
Now, I'm the kind of person that gets intimidated by book series. It just always seems too big a commitment. And I know I never finish the things I start. A trilogy really doesn't seem like a good idea. I'd enjoy the first book and then I HAD to read the rest, because I couldn't possibly live with the knowledge of more. More story. More world. But I wouldn't read it, because it would kind of scare the hell out of me and then I'd just end up judging myself. That's the kind of person I am.
Turns out I loved the plot so much that I still bought the first two novels in the Southern Reach Trilogy and read "Annihilation" as soon as it arrived. I'd buy the third only if I finished the previous books. And then I didn't read anything for a year.
But I'm getting back into the swing of things and I'll be reading for as long as I can before busy adult life comes a'knockin. I re-read "Annihilation" and it was a bit weird, because the thrill of not knowing was obviously lost. But I still enjoyed it. So much. It didn't lose its catch. I went back to the Southern Reach and over the border and I was still captivated by this honestly quite frustrating confusion. What does it all MEAN?? It doesn't make sense. None of it makes sense. There's so much crazy in it. It doesn't make any sense. You couldn't come up with it if you tried. I love it so much. It's insane to me how people can just have a wild imagination like this. I'm tipping my imaginary hat to Mister VanderMeer. What the heck.
There's a lot of nature and somewhat science-y stuff in "Annihilation", but in the simplest way. I understand why some people find it boring, but as someone who dropped Biology class first chance they got let me tell you that it is worth it. The characters apart from their role in the expedition don't have much personality. The biologist, who is speaking to us, seems inconsiderate and uncompassionate to any one reader who isn't. There's a reason I'm not giving this 5 stars. While I absolutely believe that the stripping of their personalities works and the slow progression of the story does make it better in a way, enhancing the eerie feeling, never knowing when something is going to happen and whatever that something might be, it did make me struggle to read at times. It forced me to concentrate more than I was willing to and that did take the fun out of it whenever that happened. It's not perfect, but it damn near is.
But now that I addressed the only negative, let's get back to the fun stuff.
With "Annihilation" you don't need to know anything. You can't need to know anything. None of it makes sense and I love it SO MUCH. Which is weird, because it means I'm not in control, I can't be the smart one and I always want to be in the know, you know? Have I said that I loved it already?
It's described as horror, but when applying my own definitions I do think it would fit the thriller genre. It's just super thrilling. And I do see I'm contradicting myself with just having said it made me struggle continuing and mentioning a slow pace, but that only appeared a few times and all the other I was hooked, on the edge of my seat, throwing my hands in the air. Horror is meant to horrify. There's a sense of fear to it. I was never scared reading "Annihilation". I was confused, excited, tense. Not in fear.
If you want to read a book that frustrates you, but you're kind of glad about it, a book that is science fiction (emphasis on capital Science Fiction, fictional science, scientific fiction, what the heck), read this. Now. And then read "Authority".
I first read this book in 2018 after I watched the film adaptation of "Annihilation". I enjoyed the film so much that I just HAD to find out if there was a book it was based on. Turns out it was. Turns out it is a trilogy.
Now, I'm the kind of person that gets intimidated by book series. It just always seems too big a commitment. And I know I never finish the things I start. A trilogy really doesn't seem like a good idea. I'd enjoy the first book and then I HAD to read the rest, because I couldn't possibly live with the knowledge of more. More story. More world. But I wouldn't read it, because it would kind of scare the hell out of me and then I'd just end up judging myself. That's the kind of person I am.
Turns out I loved the plot so much that I still bought the first two novels in the Southern Reach Trilogy and read "Annihilation" as soon as it arrived. I'd buy the third only if I finished the previous books. And then I didn't read anything for a year.
But I'm getting back into the swing of things and I'll be reading for as long as I can before busy adult life comes a'knockin. I re-read "Annihilation" and it was a bit weird, because the thrill of not knowing was obviously lost. But I still enjoyed it. So much. It didn't lose its catch. I went back to the Southern Reach and over the border and I was still captivated by this honestly quite frustrating confusion. What does it all MEAN?? It doesn't make sense. None of it makes sense. There's so much crazy in it. It doesn't make any sense. You couldn't come up with it if you tried. I love it so much. It's insane to me how people can just have a wild imagination like this. I'm tipping my imaginary hat to Mister VanderMeer. What the heck.
There's a lot of nature and somewhat science-y stuff in "Annihilation", but in the simplest way. I understand why some people find it boring, but as someone who dropped Biology class first chance they got let me tell you that it is worth it. The characters apart from their role in the expedition don't have much personality. The biologist, who is speaking to us, seems inconsiderate and uncompassionate to any one reader who isn't. There's a reason I'm not giving this 5 stars. While I absolutely believe that the stripping of their personalities works and the slow progression of the story does make it better in a way, enhancing the eerie feeling, never knowing when something is going to happen and whatever that something might be, it did make me struggle to read at times. It forced me to concentrate more than I was willing to and that did take the fun out of it whenever that happened. It's not perfect, but it damn near is.
But now that I addressed the only negative, let's get back to the fun stuff.
With "Annihilation" you don't need to know anything. You can't need to know anything. None of it makes sense and I love it SO MUCH. Which is weird, because it means I'm not in control, I can't be the smart one and I always want to be in the know, you know? Have I said that I loved it already?
It's described as horror, but when applying my own definitions I do think it would fit the thriller genre. It's just super thrilling. And I do see I'm contradicting myself with just having said it made me struggle continuing and mentioning a slow pace, but that only appeared a few times and all the other I was hooked, on the edge of my seat, throwing my hands in the air. Horror is meant to horrify. There's a sense of fear to it. I was never scared reading "Annihilation". I was confused, excited, tense. Not in fear.
If you want to read a book that frustrates you, but you're kind of glad about it, a book that is science fiction (emphasis on capital Science Fiction, fictional science, scientific fiction, what the heck), read this. Now. And then read "Authority".
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Davie Kleinfeld
4.0 out of 5 stars
Gave me the heebie jeebies not felt since coming down from a 3 day bender!
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 25, 2021
It was watching the film, which i enjoyed and recommend as an intelligent and understated bio-sci-fi, that drew my attention to the book. I didn't think watching the movie first negatively impacted on my experience of the book. In fact, I would say it enhanced it because I often struggle to lift words from a page and covert them into imagery in my mind; with the visual context already set (the movie is beautifully shot BTW), all my effort could be focused on the narrative, and what a chilling narrative it is!
I managed to slot into the journalistic style within a couple pages. It is cleverly pitched, being personal but remaining strictly objective, a balance difficult to make up, so credit to the author. Also due credit is how rapidly the tension between the characters begins - no preamble required (perhaps knowledge of the movie helped?). Further genius of the writing is how the author established convincing mistrust, and a certain dislike, between the characters so early on without context or basis; bit like entering a room with four people already there where your senses are immediately triggered that something isn't right but you don't know why.
Without giving too much away the book continues on this track keeping you hooked on wanting to see around the next page like the protagonist wants to see around the next corner - the reader and character are paralleled - are you her? Is she you? Then add in some personal dilemmas and game theory to boot - would you tell the team that you depend on your survival, but don't trust, about that thing? Timing becomes everything but is difficult to know when the right time is in a rapidly developing situation. Things that really matter one minute become opaque in the fog of time and escalating situation.
Skin crawling stuff of paranoia and fear; like siting in a room shivering away wondering what just happened, what's in store and if you're still human... basically like coming down after a 3 day drinking session!
For me the only shortfall of the book was the lack of any conclusion, and I feel like I am about to be mugged by buying the next two books in pursuit of some truth that doesn't exist.
I managed to slot into the journalistic style within a couple pages. It is cleverly pitched, being personal but remaining strictly objective, a balance difficult to make up, so credit to the author. Also due credit is how rapidly the tension between the characters begins - no preamble required (perhaps knowledge of the movie helped?). Further genius of the writing is how the author established convincing mistrust, and a certain dislike, between the characters so early on without context or basis; bit like entering a room with four people already there where your senses are immediately triggered that something isn't right but you don't know why.
Without giving too much away the book continues on this track keeping you hooked on wanting to see around the next page like the protagonist wants to see around the next corner - the reader and character are paralleled - are you her? Is she you? Then add in some personal dilemmas and game theory to boot - would you tell the team that you depend on your survival, but don't trust, about that thing? Timing becomes everything but is difficult to know when the right time is in a rapidly developing situation. Things that really matter one minute become opaque in the fog of time and escalating situation.
Skin crawling stuff of paranoia and fear; like siting in a room shivering away wondering what just happened, what's in store and if you're still human... basically like coming down after a 3 day drinking session!
For me the only shortfall of the book was the lack of any conclusion, and I feel like I am about to be mugged by buying the next two books in pursuit of some truth that doesn't exist.
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