Annihilation: A Novel: 1 (Southern Reach Trilogy)

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For weapons, we had knives, a locked conta I recognise about halfway through that what I'm feeling reminds me of how I felt as a teen, reading Edgar Allen Poe. Impatient for the movie, I decided to give Annihilation a read, feeling rather excited that it was part of a three-book trilogy.

Bogs and streams hid huge aquatic reptiles, and so we were careful not to wade too deep to collect our water samples. In Annihilation, the first volume of Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy, we join the twelfth expedition. I suppose I don't see it as leaving behind individual consciousness as being in greater harmony and collusion with the contamination we already experience but that is invisible to us, and to also thereby better understand that we do not in fact stick out from our landscape, but are part of it. 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. Reads like a classic Sci novel echoing HGWells and Wyndham and was surprised to find this was only published last century.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. The biologist is soon conscious of a "brightness" growing within herself which she attributes to the spores, and she leaves to explore a distant lighthouse while the surveyor stays behind to protect their campsite. What a brilliant and strange museum of dystopian artefacts he has there, and this tale assembled via outstanding prose, assured pacing, exquisite timing, all leading you slowly from science-suspense into a horror most profound. The tall pines, with their scaly ridges of bark, rose on both sides, and the shadows of flying birds conjured lines between them.

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. Beyond the marsh flats and the natural canals lies the ocean and, a little farther down the coast, a derelict lighthouse. 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. 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.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.

No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. I still didn’t like the anthropologist very much, but mostly in the context of the mission, not anything she had said to me. 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. 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. They are the 12th expedition; the previous expeditions have been fraught with disappearances, suicides, aggressive cancers, and mental trauma.The closer the nameless biologist comes to this realisation, the more she falls back on her scientific training – not in any petulant, pedantic way, but rather as a means of limiting the kinds of questions she needs to ask the world, and of her rapidly transmogrifying self. But I did not mind that a sense of camaraderie had begun to take hold, even if it would prove short-lived. 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. Sunlight came down dappled through the moss and leaves, created archipelagos of light on the flat surface of the entrance. 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.