Jeff VanderMeer

’A contemporary masterpiece’ Guardian THE SECOND VOLUME OF THE EXTRAORDINARY SOUTHERN REACH TRILOGY – NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY ALEX GARLAND (EX MACHINA) AND STARRING NATALIE PORTMAN, OSCAR ISAAC, GINA RODRIGUEZ AND TESSA THOMPSON

The Southern Reach Trilogy #2

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darby

This is what most people wanted: to be close to but not part of. They didn’t want the fearful unknown of a “pristine wilderness.” They didn’t want a soulless artificial life, either. 

Holly

Sometimes, since he'd been briefed on the truth, he'd felt a great, empty chasm opening up inside of him...

"Never do something for just one reason," his grandpa had told him more than once, and that, at least, Control had taken to heart.

Already his wings were burning up and he felt more like some ponderous moaning creature trapped in the mire.

The thing about people who wanted to show you things was that sometimes their interest in granting you knowledge was laced with a little voyeuristic sadism.

The plaintive groan of metal and the vibration of engines that continued running as they disappeared... A smoldering, apocalyptic vision, the con towers of a destroyer, sent to investigate with the wrong intel, "sliding into nothing", as one observer put it.

Maybe "superstition" was what snuck into the gaps, the cracks, when you worked in a place with falling morale and depleted resources. Maybe superstition was what happened when your director went missing in action and your assistant director was still mourning the loss. Maybe that was when you fell back on spells and rituals, the reptile brain saying to the rest of you, "I'll take it from here. You've had your shot." ... How many invisible, abstract incantations ruled the world beyond the Southern Reach?

Imagine that language is only part of a method of communication. Imagine that it isn't even the important part but more like the pipeline, the highway. A conduit only.

Central descended on the Southern Reach like a many-limbed über-parasite...

Slow death by malign unknown time-traveling force. Slow death by invasion from an alternate earth. Slow death by wildly divergent technology or shadow biosphere or symbiosis or iconography or etymology. 

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