12 March 2025
Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation, Book 1 of The Southern Reach Series.
Well, I truly stepped outside of my comfort zone with this one, perhaps as expected. VanderMeer is known for his “weird” fiction. Apparently, his work has been called “New Weird literary,” and he’s been dubbed by The New Yorker “The weird Thoreau”—not just for his weird literary style, but also for his Southern Reach Series with its deep focus on biology, ecology, and a sort of apocalyptic environmentalism.
I found Annihilation to be exactly that: weird. Weird but wonderful, and completely outside my wheelhouse to the point that as tastes go, I didn’t really like it, per se, although I can appreciate it profoundly.
In the book, a biologist (whose name we never learn) serves as a part of an expedition to a sort of abandoned, apocalyptic region called Area X. She is one of a group of four women: a biologist, an anthropologist, a linguist, and a psychologist. During this expedition, our protagonist, the biologist, witnesses as strange phenomena unravel to consume every member of her expedition, ultimately including herself.
In the process of this unraveling, VanderMeer proposes to the reader strange biological/evolutionary mutations and pokes at the concept of universal consciousness. This past week, I listened to a podcast with Donald Hoffman, who suggests that as humans we operate with our given senses in this world as though they are a “VR headset” designed to keep us alive but not to give us the truest experience of the universe because of our headset’s limitations (we only perceive a tiny fraction of what might be perceived of our surroundings). VanderMeer’s Annihilation represents a fictionalized version of that theory. Our protagonist, having inhaled some fungal spores early in the tale, begins to experience sensory inputs she cannot describe in human words—because they’ve never been sensed by humans before. Her VR headset has been upgraded, but her programming, the tools with which she might interpret those inputs, has not yet caught up.
The whole proposal is uncanny, and yes, weird. In Area X, all living organisms have begun to amalgamate: fungi to plants to insects to animals to humans. And their consciousness, once merged, is superior to any of those solitary entities in many ways, as evidenced by “the Crawler’s” capacity to take the biologist’s perceived consciousness from her, insert itself into it the way it chooses to be seen, and then give it back to her on its own terms.
Overarchingly, there is a message in this of the consequences of humans tampering with the earth—proposing, in its own way, the Gaia hypothesis: that the earth itself is a living organism that can change and evolve as a manner of self-preservation.
Did I appreciate this book? Absolutely. Did I also feel deeply uncomfortable while reading the book? Oh…yes. I suspect part of this is VanderMeer’s intent: the biologist’s experience in Area X offers us myriad mysteries, thousands of curiosities, and a plethora of unanswered questions. It prods at what we believe to be true down to the most fundamental of our assumptions about the way we perceive our world, our place in it, and the nature of our consciousness.
Will I read the others? I think not…if I’m being honest. VanderMeer’s “weird literary” universe leaves too many rules undefined, and my brain does not do well with such lack of structure. It’s the same reason I disliked watching Disney’s movie, Soul. In it, this concept of the afterlife or heaven was a place without any rules, laws, structure, and it frustrated my brain. Further, in Annihilation, I had difficulty understanding why the members of the expedition to Area X acted the ways they did. The engagement between characters I felt to be shallow and inexplicable, psychologically—or, perhaps I should say, socially.
This is why I enjoy gothic psychological realism. In the gothic there is a sense of mystery, but it is usually limited to one or two elements of the story (usually setting). In psychological realism, all of the characters’ behaviors are underscored by clear motive.
Still, I’d recommend this book to anyone—especially anyone interested in sci-fi, speculative fiction, and/or dystopian and apocalyptic narratives. Although I never had a sense that VanderMeer was going to offer the reader any explanations to solve any of the mysteries in the book, it was still engaging, especially in its portrayal of biology, mutation, ecology, evolution, consciousness, and a not-so-subtle environmentalism.
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