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 compelling, elegant, and existential story. 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. Annihilation is a novel in which facts are undermined and doubt instilled at almost every turn. “VanderMeer masterfully conjures up an atmosphere of both metaphysical dread and visceral tension. “Chilling.” - Julie Bosman, New York Times “VanderMeer's dreamy narrative, shot through with echoes of Lovecraft, Orwell, and Kafka, is compulsively readable.” - Tina Jordan, Entertainment Weekly “I'm loving The Southern Reach trilogy by Jeff VanderMeer. 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.Īnnihilation: A Novel: Movie Tie-In Edition (The Southern Reach Trilogy #1)

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.

The group is made up of four women: an anthropologist a surveyor a psychologist, the de facto leader and our narrator, a biologist. In Annihilation, the first volume of Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach trilogy, we join the twelfth expedition. The members of the eleventh expedition returned as shadows of their former selves, and within weeks, all had died of cancer. 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. Nature has reclaimed the last vestiges of human civilization.

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).Īrea X has been cut off from the rest of the continent for decades. A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE FROM ALEX GARLAND, STARRING NATALIE PORTMAN AND OSCAR ISAAC

Annihilation southern reach