A review by gvenezia
Area X: The Southern Reach Trilogy: Annihilation; Authority; Acceptance, by Jeff VanderMeer
4.0
VanderMeer's Search for Meaning in a Trilogy of Ideas: Climate Change, Philosophy of Language, Ecological Horror, Contusions of Self-Knowledge, the Social Nature of Truth, Bureaucratic Subterfuge, the Kafka-esque, the Weird, and the Sublime
While imperfect and at times plodding, VanderMeer's trilogy has accomplished what few series or standalone books can: serious engagement with the zeitgeist, tie-in with perennial literary themes, engaging plotting, aesthetic novelty, and a mature and measured ability to represent humanity's contradictions and unresolved theories in a generative way.
The trilogy is bookended by the metaphors and symbolism of Area X—its confounding nature, its echos, its copies, its unfathomability. The sequel, Authority, serves as the expository, Kafka-esque centerpiece. While the least effective of the three, the sequel expands the social ecology of Area X while focusing mostly on one character and his dealings with absurd bureaucracy, human drama, and a long-con. The third installment, Acceptance carries the most narrative and thematic threads, reflects on the trilogy's meaning and symbolism, and proves the most interesting from a character perspective. But as seed for the trilogy, a successful movie adaptation, and insightful literary analysis, Annihilation is the most effective, enjoyable, and meaningful.
While I've written more just on the first book here, the trilogy as a whole has generated some insightful analysis I've drawn from:
LARB
"The Ecological Uncanny"
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-ecological-uncanny-on-the-southern-reach-trilogy/
* Lovecraftian, The Weird
* Climate Change
* * "Like global climate change, this ecological development could annihilate the human race. However — again like climate change — the growth of Area X is easily ignored by governmental figures preoccupied by flashier, more imminent disasters"
* Language
* * “Annihilation, like the other novels in the trilogy, is preoccupied with the way that external environments and beings manipulate our internal selves. Language is held up to particular scrutiny. Characters are infected by words; stories are deployed as weapons; phrases derail characters’ ability to perceive objective reality. Cleverly, VanderMeer turns the text against the reader at times, alerting us to the fact that we, too, are being manipulated with language."
* * "We, like the narrator, are powerless to escape the narrative environment in which we are immersed"
* Trilogy
* * "Authority, its immediate sequel, requires more patience. If Annihilation draws on the Lovecraftian side of the Weird literary tradition, Authority favors the Kafkaesque."
* "While Acceptance is perhaps the most technically accomplished of the three novels, it is also the least able to stand on its own."
* Imagery & Literary
* * "All three of VanderMeer’s novels draw power from their gut-punches of vivid imagery."
* * "the novels also make effective use of what might be termed the ecological uncanny to build their atmospheres of dread. . . Doppelgängers — people who resemble us but are not us — and repetitions, as well as ghosts and emblems of death, serve as fundamental reminders of a past from which the adult self needs to disassociate itself in order to properly function in human society. In the Southern Reach trilogy, it is no longer just one’s psychological depths that are being repressed, but one’s knowledge of oneself as nonhuman, as much an alien part of a natural world as a plant or a whale. Rather than just tackling the psychological framework of the adult, it is the category of “the human” that these novels gleefully tear at, dissect, and absorb. As such, they make for appropriately spooky reading in the age of the Anthropocene, at our own moment of environmental crisis and uncomfortable self-recognition."
New Yorker
"Weird Thoreau"
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/weird-thoreau-jeff-vandermeer-southern-reach
* Trilogy Summary
* * "Broadly speaking, the novels, “Annihilation,” “Authority,” and “Acceptance,” are eco-sci-fi: they’re about researchers exploring a mysterious, deadly, and unaccountable wilderness called Area X. But they’re also experiments in psychedelic nature writing, in the tradition of Thoreau, and meditations on the theme of epistemic pessimism, in the tradition of Kafka. Often, speculative fiction betrays itself, becoming predictable just at the moment when it’s supposed to be “out there.” But the Southern Reach books make it all the way out. They imagine nature, both human and wild, in a new way. And they take a surprising approach to language: in addition to being confounding science-fiction novels, they are fractured, lyrical love letters to Florida’s mossy northern coast."
* Hyperobject and Epistemology
* * "Hyperobjects, Tompkins explains, are “events or systems or processes that are too complex, too massively distributed across space and time, for humans to get a grip on”:
'Black holes are hyperobjects; nuclear materials such as uranium and plutonium, with their deep-time half-lives, are hyperobjects; global warming and mass species extinction are hyperobjects. We know, we live with, the local effects of these phenomena, but mostly they are quite literally beyond our ken. In one sense they are abstractions; in another they are ferociously, catastrophically real.'
It’s an inspired connection: hyperobjects are everywhere in the Southern Reach books. Area X is a hyperobject; so, by extension, is nature itself. “Authority,” the second book in the trilogy, takes place largely within the offices of the Southern Reach, the government agency in charge of Area X: it imagines bureaucracy as a hyperobject.
While imperfect and at times plodding, VanderMeer's trilogy has accomplished what few series or standalone books can: serious engagement with the zeitgeist, tie-in with perennial literary themes, engaging plotting, aesthetic novelty, and a mature and measured ability to represent humanity's contradictions and unresolved theories in a generative way.
The trilogy is bookended by the metaphors and symbolism of Area X—its confounding nature, its echos, its copies, its unfathomability. The sequel, Authority, serves as the expository, Kafka-esque centerpiece. While the least effective of the three, the sequel expands the social ecology of Area X while focusing mostly on one character and his dealings with absurd bureaucracy, human drama, and a long-con. The third installment, Acceptance carries the most narrative and thematic threads, reflects on the trilogy's meaning and symbolism, and proves the most interesting from a character perspective. But as seed for the trilogy, a successful movie adaptation, and insightful literary analysis, Annihilation is the most effective, enjoyable, and meaningful.
While I've written more just on the first book here, the trilogy as a whole has generated some insightful analysis I've drawn from:
LARB
"The Ecological Uncanny"
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-ecological-uncanny-on-the-southern-reach-trilogy/
* Lovecraftian, The Weird
* Climate Change
* * "Like global climate change, this ecological development could annihilate the human race. However — again like climate change — the growth of Area X is easily ignored by governmental figures preoccupied by flashier, more imminent disasters"
* Language
* * “Annihilation, like the other novels in the trilogy, is preoccupied with the way that external environments and beings manipulate our internal selves. Language is held up to particular scrutiny. Characters are infected by words; stories are deployed as weapons; phrases derail characters’ ability to perceive objective reality. Cleverly, VanderMeer turns the text against the reader at times, alerting us to the fact that we, too, are being manipulated with language."
* * "We, like the narrator, are powerless to escape the narrative environment in which we are immersed"
* Trilogy
* * "Authority, its immediate sequel, requires more patience. If Annihilation draws on the Lovecraftian side of the Weird literary tradition, Authority favors the Kafkaesque."
* "While Acceptance is perhaps the most technically accomplished of the three novels, it is also the least able to stand on its own."
* Imagery & Literary
* * "All three of VanderMeer’s novels draw power from their gut-punches of vivid imagery."
* * "the novels also make effective use of what might be termed the ecological uncanny to build their atmospheres of dread. . . Doppelgängers — people who resemble us but are not us — and repetitions, as well as ghosts and emblems of death, serve as fundamental reminders of a past from which the adult self needs to disassociate itself in order to properly function in human society. In the Southern Reach trilogy, it is no longer just one’s psychological depths that are being repressed, but one’s knowledge of oneself as nonhuman, as much an alien part of a natural world as a plant or a whale. Rather than just tackling the psychological framework of the adult, it is the category of “the human” that these novels gleefully tear at, dissect, and absorb. As such, they make for appropriately spooky reading in the age of the Anthropocene, at our own moment of environmental crisis and uncomfortable self-recognition."
New Yorker
"Weird Thoreau"
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/weird-thoreau-jeff-vandermeer-southern-reach
* Trilogy Summary
* * "Broadly speaking, the novels, “Annihilation,” “Authority,” and “Acceptance,” are eco-sci-fi: they’re about researchers exploring a mysterious, deadly, and unaccountable wilderness called Area X. But they’re also experiments in psychedelic nature writing, in the tradition of Thoreau, and meditations on the theme of epistemic pessimism, in the tradition of Kafka. Often, speculative fiction betrays itself, becoming predictable just at the moment when it’s supposed to be “out there.” But the Southern Reach books make it all the way out. They imagine nature, both human and wild, in a new way. And they take a surprising approach to language: in addition to being confounding science-fiction novels, they are fractured, lyrical love letters to Florida’s mossy northern coast."
* Hyperobject and Epistemology
* * "Hyperobjects, Tompkins explains, are “events or systems or processes that are too complex, too massively distributed across space and time, for humans to get a grip on”:
'Black holes are hyperobjects; nuclear materials such as uranium and plutonium, with their deep-time half-lives, are hyperobjects; global warming and mass species extinction are hyperobjects. We know, we live with, the local effects of these phenomena, but mostly they are quite literally beyond our ken. In one sense they are abstractions; in another they are ferociously, catastrophically real.'
It’s an inspired connection: hyperobjects are everywhere in the Southern Reach books. Area X is a hyperobject; so, by extension, is nature itself. “Authority,” the second book in the trilogy, takes place largely within the offices of the Southern Reach, the government agency in charge of Area X: it imagines bureaucracy as a hyperobject.