Annihilation

I'm not sure how I feel about this book. It was very well written - lots of beautiful, detailed descriptions. But...nothing happened in it. It reminded me of the movie The Happening - a little eerie and spooky, but nothing actually happens.

This is the first book in a trilogy so maybe that's why nothing happened. But it didn't even end on a cliffhanger. The ending was just meh.

I read the description for the 2nd book in the series and that sounds really interesting. So I guess I will keep plugging away.

"That's how the madness of the world tries to colonize you: from the outside in, forcing you to live in its reality."

This book is balls to the wall crazy. I loved it. I stayed up way too late reading it because I had to find out what happened. From the very beginning the entire situation is sketchy for the reader and the characters; it is even implied that the act of reading is dangerous. Four women, a psychologist, a surveyor, an anthropologist, and a biologist (the narrator) go into what is known as Area X, an area cut off from civilization by some unknown Event. We learn none of the women's names, but we do quickly learn that all is not what it seems within the Area and regarding the motives of the expedition members. Reading this I immediately felt like I was playing Myst for the first time, or watching the opening scenes of

Lost. You're just thrown into a situation where up is down, tunnels are towers, and you can't even trust your own brain.

Does the madness of Area X colonize the biologist? By the end of the book she is certainly changed, and I can't wait to see what she does in the sequels. I would say that something colonizes her, even if she isn't mad (which is a matter for debate).

The writing is engaging and perfectly evokes the uneasiness and eventual dread felt by the main characters. VanderMeer’s introduction of Area X and its elements is expertly crafted to allow readers’ fear of the unknown to kick their imaginations into overdrive as the characters face frightening circumstances. A science fiction title that is grounded in realism and doesn’t rely on fancy, futuristic settings and technology, feeling very accessible for new readers of the genre.

4.5 stars

It was a wonderful read. I loved every bit of it.

Annihilation follows four women of the twelfth expedition to Area X, a strange and unique wilderness, which is being studied by the Southern Reach ( a govt agency ). These four women try to understand this wilderness, landscape and record their findings.

But slowly the wilderness, the madness, the fear of unknown crawl upon these women. It effects their reality, their relationships and nothing goes as the plan of expedition.

Cleverly written , very different and great read!

Happy Reading!!

I was riveted by this the entire way through. A very fascinating, weird book.

It was to weird and eerie, and nightmarish. You could feel the protagonist losing her mind, but I don't know if it started during or before the book even started, or if any of it was real.

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.

2022 review:

What I'm most drawn to about

Annihilation is the atmosphere. From the opening line, the reader is plunged into a lush, verdant area where the few remnants of human infrastructure have almost fully been reclaimed by nature. It teems with wildlife, and our narrator catalogs everything from large boar to the smallest beetles. The nature writing is beautiful, with Vandermeer’s prose (almost poetry at times) evoking textures and scents that are fully immersive. And yet, the setting is infused with a pervasive sense of dread, of

wrongness. From “an iridescent black damselfly that should not have been found at sea level” to a dolphin whose eye looks almost human, from a downward tunnel that the narrator insists is a

tower to mounds of moss that take humanoid form, the flora, fauna, and geography of Area X are as deeply unsettling as they are beautiful. This is the tension that propels the story forward—and propel it does, for

Annihilation is an absolute page-turner.

The novel’s framing device is that we are reading the journal of the unnamed biologist (which itself invokes fascinating questions of narrative reliability). As she journeys further into Area X, she seamlessly recalls her past—with none of the disruptiveness or frustrating sense of delay that often come with flashbacks—as a biologist, each memory rendered beautifully and providing greater insight into her character. For, at its core,

Annihilation is a character study about a woman whose inability to be vulnerable and let even her husband in eventually led to the dissolution of her marriage. This, I think, is what the novel is

about: the places and moments of transition and how we change (through our environment, through our experiences, through our interactions with other people) while remaining ourselves. This is what the biologist was so resistant to until she encountered Area X.

Something I completely missed in my first two readings: VanderMeer all but definitively explains what Area X is by sharing the biologist's hypothesis at the end of the novel. She writes,

What do I believe manifested? Think of it as a thorn, perhaps, a long, thick thorn so large it is buried deep in the side of the world. Injecting itself into the world. Emanating from this giant thorn is an endless, perhaps automatic, need to assimilate and to mimic. Assimilator and assimilated interact through the catalyst of a script of words, which powers the engine of transformation. Perhaps it is a creature living in perfect symbiosis with a host of other creatures. Perhaps it is “merely” a machine. But in either instance, if it has intelligence, that intelligence is far different from our own. It creates out of our ecosystem a new world, whose processes and aims are utterly alien—one that works through supreme acts of mirroring, and by remaining hidden in so many other ways, all without surrendering the foundations of its otherness as it becomes what it encounters.

. Perhaps this explanation was simply too alien for me to recognize or find satisfactory earlier. It certainly doesn't explain everything. But it does satisfactorily provide an answer to the main question of the novel.

Some favorite passages:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Sunlight came down dappled through the moss and leaves, created archipelagos of light on the flat surface of the entrance.

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.

They did not have the will or inclination to clean the kidney-shaped pool, even though it was fairly small. Soon after we moved in, the grass around its edges grew long. Sedge weeds and other towering plants became prevalent. The short bushes lining the fence around the pool lunged up to obscure the chain link. Moss grew in the cracks in the tile path that circled it. The water level slowly rose, fed by the rain, and the surface became more and more brackish with algae. Dragonflies continually scouted the area. Bullfrogs moved in, the wriggling malformed dots of their tadpoles always present. Water gliders and aquatic beetles began to make the place their own. Rather than get rid of my thirty-gallon freshwater aquarium, as my parents wanted, I dumped the fish into the pool, and some survived the shock of that. Local birds, like herons and egrets, began to appear, drawn by the frogs and fish and insects. By some miracle, too, small turtles began to live in the pool, although I had no idea how they had gotten there. Within months of our arrival, the pool had become a functioning ecosystem.

Inevitably my focus netted from my parents useless lectures of worry over my chronic introversion, as if by doing so they could convince me they were still in charge. I didn’t have enough (or any) friends, they reminded me.

It was a test of our curiosity and fascination, which walked side by side with our fear. A test of whether we preferred to be ignorant or unsafe.

… the shadows of the abyss are like the petals of a monstrous flower that shall blossom within the skull and expand the mind beyond what any man can bear …

The wind picked up, and it began to rain. I saw each drop fall as a perfect, faceted liquid diamond, refracting light even in the gloom, and I could smell the sea and picture the roiling waves. The wind was like something alive; it entered every pore of me and it, too, had a smell, carrying with it the earthiness of the marsh reeds. I had tried to ignore the change in the confined space of the tower, but my senses still seemed too acute, too sharp. I was adapting to it, but at times like this, I remembered that just a day ago I had been someone else.

At first, I must have seemed mysterious to him, my guardedness, my need to be alone, even after he thought he’d gotten inside my defenses. Either I was a puzzle to be solved or he just thought that once he got to know me better, he could still break through to some other place, some core where another person lived inside of me. […] I told him point-blank, so there would be no mistake: This person he wanted to know better did not exist; I was who I seemed to be from the outside. That would never change.

But there is a limit to thinking about even a small piece of something monumental. You still see the shadow of the whole rearing up behind you, and you become lost in your thoughts in part from the panic of realizing the size of that imagined leviathan.

But in what had been kitchens or living rooms or bedrooms, I also saw a few peculiar eruptions of moss or lichen, rising four, five, feet tall, misshapen, the vegetative matter forming an approximation of limbs and heads and torsos. As if there had been runoff from the material, too heavy for gravity, that had congregated at the foot of these objects. Or perhaps I imagined this effect. One particular tableau struck me in an almost emotional way. Four such eruptions, one “standing” and three decomposed to the point of “sitting” in what once must have been a living room with a coffee table and a couch—all facing some point at the far end of the room where lay only the crumbling soft brick remains of a fireplace and chimney. The smell of lime and mint unexpectedly arose, cutting through the must, the loam.

Can you really imagine what it was like in those first moments, peering down into that dark space, and seeing that? Perhaps you can. Perhaps you’re staring at it now.

A species of mussels found nowhere else lived in those tidal pools, in a symbiotic relationship with a fish called a gartner, after its discoverer. Several species of marine snails and sea anemones lurked there, too, and a tough little squid I nicknamed Saint Pugnacious, eschewing its scientific name, because the danger music of its white-flashing luminescence made its mantle look like a pope’s hat.

That’s how the madness of the world tries to colonize you: from the outside in, forcing you to live in its reality.

Reality encroaches in other ways, too. At some point during our relationship, my husband began to call me the ghost bird, which was his way of teasing me for not being present enough in his life.

Observation had always meant more to me than interaction.

My sole gift or talent, I believe now, was that places could impress themselves upon me, and I could become a part of them with ease.

One journal, half-destroyed by the damp, focused solely on the qualities of a kind of thistle with a lavender blossom that grew in the hinterlands between forest and swamp. Page after page described encountering first one specimen of this thistle and then another, along with minute details about the insects and other creatures that occupied that microhabitat.

The ever-more distant sound of waves was like eavesdropping on a sinister, whispering conversation.

Death, as I was beginning to understand it, was not the same thing here as back across the border.

The boar on the way to base camp, the strange dolphins, the tormented beast in the reeds. Even the idea that replicas of members of the eleventh expedition had crossed back over. All supported the evidence of my microscope. Transformations were taking place here, and as much as I had felt part of a “natural” landscape on my trek to the lighthouse, I could not deny that these habitats were transitional in a deeply unnatural way.

Seeing all of this, experiencing all of it, even when it’s bad, I wish you were here. I wish we had volunteered together. I would have understood you better here, on the trek north. We wouldn’t have needed to say anything if you didn’t want to. It wouldn’t have bothered me. Not at all. And we wouldn’t have turned back. We would have kept going until we couldn’t go farther. Slowly, painfully, I realized what I had been reading from the very first words of his journal. My husband had had an inner life that went beyond his gregarious exterior, and if I had known enough to let him inside my guard, I might have understood this fact. Except I hadn’t, of course. I had let tidal pools and fungi that could devour plastic inside my guard, but not him. Of all the aspects of the journal, this ate at me the most. He had created his share of our problems—by pushing me too hard, by wanting too much, by trying to see something in me that didn’t exist. But I could have met him partway and retained my sovereignty. And now it was too late.

The black sky, free of clouds, framed by the tall narrow lines formed by pine trees, reflected the full immensity of the heavens. No borders, no artificial light to obscure the thousands of glinting pinpricks. I could see everything. As a child, I had stared up at the night sky and searched for shooting stars like everyone else. As an adult, sitting on the roof of my cottage near the bay, and later, haunting the empty lot, I looked not for shooting stars but for fixed ones, and I would try to imagine what kind of life lived in those celestial tidal pools so far from us. The stars I saw now looked strange, strewn across the dark in chaotic new patterns, where just the night before I had taken comfort in their familiarity. Was I only now seeing them clearly? Was I perhaps even farther from home than I had thought?

That which dies shall still know life in death for all that decays is not forgotten and reanimated shall walk the world in a bliss of not-knowing …

I really wanted to lose myself. People my entire life have told me I am too much in control, but that has never been the case. I have never truly been in control, have never wanted control.

What I found when I finally stood there, hands on bent knees, peering down into that tidal pool, was a rare species of colossal starfish, six-armed, larger than a saucepan, that bled a dark gold color into the still water as if it were on fire. Most of us professionals eschewed its scientific name for the more apt “destroyer of worlds.” It was covered in thick spines, and along the edges I could just see, fringed with emerald green, the most delicate of transparent cilia, thousands of them, propelling it along upon its appointed route as it searched for its prey: other, lesser starfish. I had never seen a destroyer of worlds before, even in an aquarium, and it was so unexpected that I forgot about the slippery rock and, shifting my balance, almost fell, steadying myself with one arm propped against the edge of the tidal pool. But the longer I stared at it, the less comprehensible the creature became. The more it became something alien to me, and the more I had a sense that I knew nothing at all—about nature, about ecosystems. There was something about my mood and its dark glow that eclipsed sense, that made me see this creature, which had indeed been assigned a place in the taxonomy—catalogued, studied, and described—irreducible down to any of that. And if I kept looking, I knew that ultimately I would have to admit I knew less than nothing about myself as well, whether that was a lie or the truth.

It might be beyond the limits of my senses to capture—or my science or my intellect—but I still believed I was in the presence of some kind of living creature, one that practiced mimicry using my own thoughts. For even then, I believed that it might be pulling these different impressions of itself from my mind and projecting them back at me, as a form of camouflage. To thwart the biologist in me, to frustrate the logic left in me.

I couldn’t even breathe any longer. So I opened my mouth and welcomed the water, welcomed the torrent. Except it wasn’t really water. And the eyes upon me were not eyes, and I was pinned there now by the Crawler, had let it in, I realized, so that its full regard was upon me and I could not move, could not think, was helpless and alone.

Imagine, too, that while the Tower makes and remakes the world inside the border, it also slowly sends its emissaries across that border in ever greater numbers, so that in tangled gardens and fallow fields its envoys begin their work.

If the hints in the journals are accurate, then when the Crawler reaches the end of its latest cycle within the Tower, Area X will enter a convulsive season of barricades and blood, a kind of cataclysmic molting, if you want to think of it that way. Perhaps even sparked by the spread of activated spores erupting from the words written by the Crawler.

This part I will do alone, leaving you behind. Don’t follow. I’m well beyond you now, and traveling very fast. Has there always been someone like me to bury the bodies, to have regrets, to carry on after everyone else was dead? I am the last casualty of both the eleventh and the twelfth expeditions. I am not returning home.

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2018 edit: So excited for the movie! I may have to re-read...

(2022 note: For the record, the movie is a fantastic adaptation. It perfectly captures the feeling and atmosphere of the novel, though it's not completely faithful to the plot.)

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2015 review: Gorgeous prose, well-balanced characters, and an intriguing premise all made this a smart page-turner. However, I was disappointed to find that at the conclusion of the trilogy there were no real answers given. Perhaps if I had been more prepared for the abruptness of the ending I would have enjoyed it more.

Thus, I definitely recommend this, but only to those who love to chew on puzzles which have no given answer.

Strange and weird, like a bad dream. I enjoyed it, but I'm not sure why....

cop out ending

it really puts you in someone else’s head, an interesting person’s head. it’s a very lonely book, as our minds are lonely places. i enjoyed the writing, along with the scene it set and the world it built!