Name: Annihilation
Rating: 3.851317957166392 (607 reviews)
ISBN: 9780374104092

Jeff VanderMeer

Describes the 12th expedition to “Area X,” a region cut off from the continent for decades, by a group of intrepid women scientists who try to ignore the high mortality rates of those on the previous 11 missions. Original. 75,000 first printing.

A Novel

Annihilation

The first volume of the extraordinary Southern Reach trilogy. 'Creepy and fascinating' Stephen King. Welcome to Area X. An Edenic wilderness, an environmental disaster zone, a mystery for thirty years.

The Southern Reach Trilogy #1

I'm simply fascinated by the whole setting / thought experiment as well as the mixture of beautiful nature and eery atmosphere.

SOON TO BE A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE The Southern Reach Trilogy begins with this 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). Area X has been cut off from the rest of the continent for decades. Nature has reclaimed the last vestiges of human civilization. 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. The members of the eleventh expedition returned as shadows of their former selves, and within weeks, all had died of cancer. In Annihilation, the first volume of Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach trilogy, we join the twelfth expedition. The group is made up of four women: an anthropologist; a surveyor; a psychologist, the de facto leader; and our narrator, a biologist. 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. 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.

A Novel: Movie Tie-In Edition

i really liked it! different than the movie but better because it being from her perspective while she was in there was very cool. the book mainly just focused solely on her journey in area x and the fact she stayed is so interesting and can’t wait to read the rest of the series eventually 

Izzy Pacheco

Greg Talbot

"It is absolutely necessary, for the peace and safety of mankind, that some of earth’s dark, dead corners and unplumbed depths be let alone; lest sleeping abnormalities wake to resurgent life, and blasphemously surviving nightmares squirm and splash out of their black lairs to newer and wider conquests" - At the Mountains of Madness (1931) - H.P. Lovecraft Presaging the unnatural and horror of the expedition into “Area X”, an expedition, the twelfth exploration of its kind, a group of four scientists, each specialized in a different area enter as a research team. We are transported into an atmosphere of eerieness and unaturalness with the opening “the tower, which was not suppose to be there (p.10).”. Given little backstory other than that this is a continuing government area to explore this alien presence, we follow from the perspective of a biologist as she tries to acclimate to this new world. One of the immediate strengths of the book is that the our biologist attempts to understand the whole world with detachment and logic, and yet the versimilitude of Area X to a human ecosystem prompts wonder and terrror. The biologist brings a consciousness to the Tower and surrounding area. Describing the rumblings, distortions of land in the map, unnatural sightings, nature transforming into human replicas, and temperatures changing dramatically. It’s not just her entering a haunted house, it’s the eerie realizing that there is a transformation that is occuring around her, and possibly inside her as well. The tower appears to be the focal point of this expedition, and on her first visit, she sees a type of written communication with filaments in the wall of the tower. She wonders how much to disclose to the group, but we know she believes when descending into the base of the tower “we were descending into an organism” (p.71). The more the biologist sees her work as the role as a detective the more terrifying the questions she’s willing to ask are “what lay beyond the map” / “what lay inside the lighthouse” (p.109). More than visually stunning work of Alex Garland in 2018’s movie of “Annihiliation”, the written story allows for a darker and more isolated exploration of this world. When the team gives up on each other, when the biologist questions her husband’s expedition, when she considers her natural comfortability in unnatural places like parking lots late at night...the biologist’s world is already equipped for the dark unsettling journey. “Annihiliation” at least for me is a very solid atmospheric horror/sci-fi story. It’s greatest gift to the reader is that the mystery expands until the end of the story. It is not a problem to be solved...it is a madness to be wrestled with. The imagery is striking, creative and horrific in ways I hadn’t considered before. When the biologist states “transformations were taking place here, and as much as I had felt part of the “natural” landscape on my trek to the lighthouse, I could not deny that these habitats were transitional in a deeply “unnatural” way” (p.252)”, it is a warning to the reader too that their grasp of reality may be broken by the stronger consciousness of dark places.

Tim Pendry

You can safely watch the Netflix film of 'Annihilation' before reading the book. The two works are associated with one another but are so geared to their respective media - mass subscription TV and niche genre fiction - that they are sufficiently different variations on a theme to stand alone. I liked the film for what it was and I like the book within the same limited terms but I am not quite as enthusiastic as other reviewers simply because I think the book is a step-down from VanderMeer's more intense short stories which explore body horror and the triumph of the alien. He has four female protagonists but these strike me as dangerously close to men in cultural drag, a striving with liberal fortitude to give space to strong scientific women but instead providing us with unreal aspirational exemplars that do not feel or think like real women in the field. They may appeal to many women aspirationally as symbols of strength like the nonsense around the unearthed Viking warrior who was not or as a politically correct variant on male fans' intriguing desire for strong attractive women in SciFi stories but they are very much a male creation. This does not detract from the imagination of VanderMeer in building an essentially Lovecraftian proposition (the unknowable incursion into human affairs of something utterly alien and indifferent to us) into something for our time. VanderMeer's essential position appears to be ecological - that nature is bigger than we are but that nature includes all that is in nature including that which is unnatural and alien and which intrudes into our world from outside it. He is of the fashionable eco-pessimistic school of thought. This approach may not accord with my concerns but, as a writer, VanderMeer is a master in expressing his own concerns. Above all, he is skilled at suggestion - the sort of suggestion that is generally the territory of the poet rather than the thriller or hard scifi writer. He suggests a great deal in this first book of a trilogy (which no doubt will be clarified in the subsequent two books). What he suggests is very uncomfortable - a remorseless slow alien and expansionist subversion of the evolved genetic grounding of our own superiority and of the world. He also plays, alongside Lovecraft, another card. The conspiracy thriller of the unknown government agency hiding truths (perhaps from ignorance) but demanding absolute loyalty from willing volunteers - the essence of American government complexity and public paranoia. The net result is a rather mysterious book, well written, inconclusive, suggestive (as we have said), paranoid and very very American in cultural tone. It displays the current cultural pessimism of modern America, very far from the optimism of hard SciFi which fuelled a past America. Is it SciFi or is it horror? It is, of course, a hybrid novel. There is not a lot that is visceral or 'old dark house' - there are no vampires or ghouls - but the perversion of nature itself by unknown alien forces is a natural development of Lovecraft's themes. All in all, 'Annihilation', for all its obscurities and suggestiveness (though the writing itself is clear and attractive), is one of those books that is going to be in the American genre canon - as much for its expressing the mood of our time as its intrinsic worth.

M. Sosotris

*head explodes*

I’m going to keep this short: this is exactly the kind of slow-burn, ominous, deepening, character-driven sci-fi mystery that I wish Lost had been. 

Just wow. 

I will say, don’t be put off by the distant, anti-social tone of the narrator. One you get into the second chapter, you’re too hooked to back out. It’s worth it.

I'm extremely tempted to compare this to the movie, but I will try not to, other than now saying I believe this is a rare case of the movie being better than the book. I somewhat enjoyed this book, but I do see a lot of wasted potential in an interesting setting. 

"Annihilation" intentionally leaves so much of Area X unexplored and I don't see how a reader can see this as anything other than poor storytelling. Surely Jeff VanderMeer knows that a mystery is always more interesting if left unanswered, but with so much of Area X untouched by our narrator, this ends up feeling like a void.

To say the ending is "unresolved" is a massive understatement. Not just the ending, but our entire character and her journey, really. I suppose one can argue that it's a very realistic ending for someone who agreed to enter an anomalous zone: her life isn't fixed, she doesn't find some ultimate purpose; she experiences a bunch of weird shit that she admits she is woefully unprepared to even begin attempting to resolve... before it sort of just ends. Is this a good way to start a series? I don't know, I've never seen a plot quite handled this way.

For the longest time with the book, I had the impression that the author sat down and just started writing whatever came to mind with zero end-goal in mind. Outside of a few moments that clearly required research, arguably the whole book feels this way. That exercise is good for building the writing muscle I'm sure, but a book should feel like a journey, shouldn't it? This felt like reading a decomposition. 

Things got more interesting around the halfway point before the ending kind of dropped it back where it started, except now with mystical cosmic nonsense in front of your eyes. Some nice descriptors are used for this point, and really only for that point. The prose felt... not amateur, but not masterful, either. The obsession with italics really got grating at times.

I like the world and VanderMeer does conjure some interesting questions. The world constructed here is naturally enticing and makes the reader wonder about implications and the attached horror of them. If it even is horror is one, actually. Our narrator asks the same question by the end.

I sort of recommend "Annihilation". It wasn't bad but I am very happy there is a movie to go along with it. I do hope the rest of this series gets better, but it worries me that this book has the highest ratings. We'll see.

Evan

I'm extremely tempted to compare this to the movie, but I will try not to, other than now saying I believe this is a rare case of the movie being better than the book. I somewhat enjoyed this book, but I do see a lot of wasted potential in an interesting setting. 

  

"Annihilation" intentionally leaves so much of Area X unexplored and I don't see how a reader can see this as anything other than poor storytelling. Surely Jeff VanderMeer knows that a mystery is always more interesting if left unanswered, but with so much of Area X untouched by our narrator, this ends up feeling like a void.

To say the ending is "unresolved" is a massive understatement. Not just the ending, but our entire character and her journey, really. I suppose one can argue that it's a very realistic ending for someone who agreed to enter an anomalous zone: her life isn't fixed, she doesn't find some ultimate purpose; she experiences a bunch of weird shit that she admits she is woefully unprepared to even begin attempting to resolve... before it sort of just ends. Is this a good way to start a series? I don't know, I've never seen a plot quite handled this way.

  

For the longest time with the book, I had the impression that the author sat down and just started writing whatever came to mind with zero end-goal in mind. Outside of a few moments that clearly required research, arguably the whole book feels this way. That exercise is good for building the writing muscle I'm sure, but a book should feel like a journey, shouldn't it? This felt like reading a decomposition. 

  

Things got more interesting around the halfway point before the ending kind of dropped it back where it started, except now with mystical cosmic nonsense in front of your eyes. Some nice descriptors are used for this point, and really only for that point. The prose felt... not amateur, but not masterful, either. The obsession with italics really got grating at times.

  

I like the world and VanderMeer does conjure some interesting questions. The world constructed here is naturally enticing and makes the reader wonder about implications and the attached horror of them. If it even is horror is one, actually. Our narrator asks the same question by the end.

  

I sort of recommend "Annihilation". It wasn't bad but I am very happy there is a movie to go along with it. I do hope the rest of this series gets better, but it worries me that this book has the highest ratings. We'll see.

i really did try to like it. the writing was good? but my problem is that i wasn’t really engaged with the story — not even the characters were interesting to me. the first part of the book was more engaging than the last part but overall it was an underwhelming read. i will not read the sequels because i’m not remotely interested in what’s gonna happen sorry

Very interesting!!! Incredibly different from the movie, and I totally get why. This was darker, not scary but freaky. Definitely made me want to read the rest of the series… because even by the end of this book I had a million questions unanswered! In a fun way. 

Harlee K

Karolina

Totally wild and deeply thought provoking. Eerie, suspenseful and weird too. Might be 5 stars if the series continues well. Is that a fair way to grade one book in a series? If it was a stand-alone novel, the ending might leave a slight something to be desired. 

Gabe Cortez

Reading "Annihilation" by Jeff VanderMeer is like trying to categorize the uncategorizable. If I had to label it, I'd call it "Magical Science Fiction." At its core, the story explores the intersection of the supernatural and the scientific, blending the unknown with familiar natural concepts. VanderMeer challenges readers to grasp his vision of the mysterious, which is no small feat. Although the narrative occasionally struggles under the weight of its complex ideas, it ultimately succeeds. Despite its seemingly far-fetched premise, VanderMeer's imaginative storytelling kept me captivated and intrigued.

An impressively intriguing set up for Area X and all that's left to discover.

Loved the biologist's backstory, as sparse as it is, and how VanderMeer makes ecosystems thrilling.

c0up

An impressively intriguing set up for Area X and all that's left to discover.

Loved the biologist's backstory, as sparse as it is, and how VanderMeer makes ecosystems thrilling.

Annihilation A Novel

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