Few works change the game as immediately as Jeff VanderMeer’s 2014 novel Annihilation. The first entry in the author’s Southern Reach trilogy introduced readers to Area X, a strange and unspecified location that defies all attempts by scientists to document it. The novel follows what’s designated as the 12th attempt to explore Area X by four unnamed women, which ends in catastrophe.
With Annihilation and its sequels Authority and Acceptance, VanderMeer crafted the definitive work of climate change speculative fiction, a trilogy that married weird fiction and eco-horror for an unforgettable experience. And it’s about to get stranger, as VanderMeer revisits the Southern Reach this fall with Absolution.
To celebrate the 10th anniversary of Area X and the forthcoming Absolution, the original Southern Reach trilogy is being re-released with beautiful new covers and new introductions by literary luminaries. Below, you can read the first of these: Acclaimed author Karen Joy Fowler’s new introduction for Annihilation, a celebration of one of the most indelible and unknowable new settings to captivate us in some time.
To let understanding stop at what cannot be understood is a high attainment. Those who cannot do it will be destroyed on the lathe of heaven.
—Zhuangzi (as translated by Ursula K. Le Guin)
For most of my reading life, mimetic realism was the admired mode of literature among critics, reviewers, and professors. The various literatures of the fantastic, those tales which prioritize the writer’s imagination above lived experience, have been, for reasons unclear to me, suspect— either childish or escapist or lacking in subtlety or deficient in characterization. That they are often none of these things had little impact on their reception. Fortunately, this has changed.
My own attachment to the imaginary has been lifelong, but I was well into adulthood before I noticed that my pleasure was often largely a matter of setting. Fantastical stories are the only ones that can take place absolutely anywhere. Some of my favorite examples, encountered around the same time as this revelation: “Venice Drowned,” by Kim Stanley Robinson, a story set, as the title suggests, in a future when the city of Venice is completely underwater; “The Edge of the World,” by Michael Swanwick, which takes place in that imaginary spot where it was once feared that ships might sail over the edge and out of the world altogether; This Shape We’re In, by Jonathan Lethem, where the setting in a final surprise (spoiler alert) turns out to be the strangely large inside of the Trojan horse. Although these stories function beautifully in all other ways, it is the imaginative power of their locations that first sets off that humming in my brain.
Image: Picador
Area X is a relatively recent addition to this expansive and thrilling territory, a deeply textured and richly imagined world. At its most basic, the plot of Annihilation is not unfamiliar. A small group of explorers enters an unknown wilderness. Perilous adventures follow. Finding this setup in the opening pages, a reader might be forgiven for feeling some of the comfort of recognition. More than familiar, the plot is classic. Think King Solomon’s Mines, Lost Horizon, The Man Who Would Be King.
That sense of comfort will not last long. Said reader will soon become acutely aware that they are immersed in the terrain of someone else’s imagination. If, as John Gardner famously said, good writing is “a vivid and continuous dream,” Annihilation soon feels more like a hallucination.
In this, the first book of VanderMeer’s ambitious and masterful (four now and counting) project, what we actually know about Area X is not much. It has become separated from the rest of the world by an invisible border; all communication with those people previously living in the region has been lost, as have the people themselves.
Repeated efforts have been made to explore and map Area X. Several expeditions have already been sent in by the mysterious agency known as the Southern Reach. These previous expeditions came to disastrous ends. Why the Southern Reach persists in these attempts is unknown. Almost everything about the Southern Reach remains unknown for now.
*
One of the primary features of Area X is an old lighthouse, noted and mapped by previous expeditions. It appears to have once been the site of a dreadful battle. There is a second feature, which has not been previously noted nor mapped. This feature functions as a sort of mirror to the lighthouse, and our narrator persists in calling it a tower, although its top is at ground level and the stairs lead downward. The rest of the expedition refers to it as a tunnel, and this difference in perception sets the narrator at odds with her fellow travelers in ways that will only deepen.
The most compelling feature of the tower is written on its walls. Words appear there, sentences in English, which seem to be biological, fungal in nature. The sentences have a quasi-Biblical cadence, and the words almost make sense, but not quite. The tower seems to breathe and may be alive.
Apart from these two prominent features, most of Area X is now wilderness, a bewildering wilderness in which anything and everything seems possible. Despite the narrator’s disorientation, shared now by the reader, the text is profoundly immersive. VanderMeer’s descriptions are detailed— sounds and sights, beasts and plants, all made terrifically vivid in his images and prose.
And everything here is of equal interest—the ruins of houses, the appearance and activities of insects, the waterways, dolphins, staircases, stones. The text requires a sort of bright attentiveness on the part of the reader, an energy of engagement to match the energy of the writing. As a narrative strategy, the specificity of detail serves to ground the reader in a story otherwise filled with uncertainties. We may not know what exactly is happening, how or why, but we will always know where we are.
The overall impression of Area X is one of breathtaking abundance. The landscape is simultaneously beautiful and dangerous, as nature always is. But here this very fecundity is threatening; it threatens to overwhelm. Area X is in a process of a renewal that seems to include the erasure of all remaining artifacts of human impact. Area X is now putting its mark on those humans who enter it rather than the other way around. Its mark may or may not be deadly. But it is always transformational.
*
The archetypal power of images such as the lighthouse and the tower, along with the lack of proper names for the band of explorers, may tempt a reader toward allegory. I think this is a fool’s game. Not that a referential decoding can’t be made to work, but that so many other decodings will also work. Trying to find a key will neither enhance nor clarify the text. Nevertheless, two things do stand out to me as essential parts of this work.
The first, clearly a major concern of the book, is the proper relationship of humans to nature. Humans are used to walking masterfully through the world. There are other apex predators, of course, and nature is under no obligation to keep us safe. We are also prey to bacterial onslaughts, cancers, and other illnesses, threats. The dangers are both large and small. But the fact that so many animals flee at the sight of us has allowed us to indulge in a sense of our own primacy. We are used to being seen. We are used to seeing ourselves as powerful. We are used to feeling that we are above rather than inside the natural world. In Area X, none of this will work. This is a landscape that refuses to indulge in anyone’s pretensions.
A second essential issue in the book lies in its pervasive uncertainty. Uncertainty is the hallmark of every element of this story— not just in the unpredictable and puzzling world of Area X but also in the social dynamics of the human relationships on both sides of the border. The narrator’s thoughts and perceptions are suspect even to herself. She appears to be operating in good faith, trying to be a reliable guide, except she cannot be sure of either who she used to be or who she has become. She cannot be sure that she sees the same things others see. She cannot even, with confidence, be certain that she is seeing what she thinks she is seeing.
The words on the tower walls are one manifestation of this uncertainty. The reader waits in vain to see their meaning revealed, to see the perfectly comprehensible words communicate a perfectly comprehensible whole. The question of whether they are even intended as communication likewise remains open.
*
The project of understanding our world is less advanced than we might imagine, for all the years we’ve been about it. Even our own bodies remain mysterious to us. No other book captures this fact so well—that we live within an understanding of circumstances that is partial at best and mistaken at worse. Despite all our efforts, our observations, our ongoing experiments— even when carried out with care and rigor—the world remains largely unknowable to us. We can create logical, plausible, even predictive narratives, but these are merely hypotheses. To think we have attained, or someday might attain, a complete clarity, much less bend the world to our will, vastly overestimates our powers. To expect certainty is just another example of human hubris.
And yet sometimes, often even, action is required of us. We know that we do not know enough. And we know that we must act anyway.
This is a clear imperative regarding the climate crisis, but it is also a fair assessment of the enduring, eternal human condition. Decisions have always been made with incomplete information and history is littered with examples of actions based on beliefs that were not so much incomplete as preposterous.
To live amid uncertainty is inevitable. To acknowledge it is to live as a grown-up. Annihilation is a book for grown-ups.
Our climate crisis is an unstated but evident subtext throughout this fantastic and fantastical book. The best way for humans, as individuals and even more so in aggregate, to live in concordance with the rest of the world is perhaps the major question of our time and likely to remain so. And so Annihilation, which speaks so powerfully and memorably to this very issue, is likely to remain a book fitted exactly to the current moment for decades of moments to come.
Excerpted from ANNIHILATION: A Novel by Jeff VanderMeer. Originally published in 2014 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 10th Anniversary paperback edition, MCD / Picador 2024. Copyright © 2014 by VanderMeer Creative, Inc. Introduction copyright © 2024 by Karen Joy Fowler. All rights reserved.
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