Annihilation

"That interview is where I heard about him, actually. I bought a copy of Annihilation right away and lost myself in it. I can’t tell you how eerie and absorbing it is. I’d better explain the set up: Annihilation is the first novel in VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy. The Southern Reach is a research institution set up to investigate the mysterious ‘Area X’, an exclusion zone with strange and frightening effects on the human mind. We follow ‘the biologist’, one member of a four-woman team that has been dispatched into the zone. Long abandoned and fenced off, it has grown into a pristine wilderness – but it is haunted by traces of the expeditions that have gone before them. If you’ve seen Andrei Tarkovsky’s classic film Stalker , you’ll have some sense of the atmosphere and concept. Like Stalker , it’s incredibly unsettling, and yet terribly, verdantly beautiful. It’s very, very good. Yes. What’s interesting about the Southern Reach trilogy is that it doesn’t answer all the questions that it poses. You have to be quite willing to come away at the end still not quite certain what is going on. But I like that about it. I made the mistake of taking Annihilation with me on a trip to Swona, an abandoned island off the north coast of Scotland, where I spent 24 hours alone and slept in an abandoned house. I’d travelled there in June, when the wildflowers were in bloom and the birds were breeding; I thought it would be nice to see it so full of life, and it was. But the ‘life’ was not pleased to see me. I was threatened by what we call bonxies – great skuas, big busty seabirds – and then dive-bombed and scratched by Arctic terns when I accidentally got too close to their colony. “I had to put it down and read a 1974 Readers Digest instead, because it was making me far too jumpy to sleep” Being there amid the abandoned houses, all in various states of dereliction, some with belongings still in the cupboards and one with the dining table still set, was very unsettling. Even though I knew myself to be safe, I just couldn’t relax. There were birds stamping around in the roof space of the house I stayed in overnight, which kept me awake. And my only reading matter was this, which definitely didn’t help. In the end I had to put it back in my rucksack and read a 1974 Readers Digest that I found in a cupboard, because it was making me far too jumpy to sleep."

"In the introduction to The Weird , the 2011 anthology that Jeff Vandermeer and his wife Ann edited, they suggest the weird isn’t a genre or a form so much as a technique or an affect, a thing that lurks in the interstices, and which emerges in unexpected and unsettling ways. I rather love this idea, not least because it captures something of what makes both Annihilation and its two sequels, Authority and Acceptance , so compelling, the way reading them leaves you feeling like you’ve been colonised yourself, your brain permanently altered by your descent into the world of the books. Read this way, Annihilation is a ghost story, albeit a ghost story of a very particular kind. But as is often the case with the sort of writing gathered together under the loose (and contested) rubric of the weird, the novel takes the tropes and techniques of a particular kind of supernatural story and empties them out so they give rise to something entirely new. Instead of the supernatural hokum of a ghost story or a horror novel, the book generates a sense of sustained dread and abjection, as the characters at its centre are killed or hollowed out and replaced by whatever it is that lurks in the mysterious Area X that lies at the heart of the three books. In itself that would be an achievement, but what makes Annihilation and its sequels so exciting isn’t merely that they’re such extraordinary studies of the dislocation of the self. It’s Vandermeer’s decision to apply these techniques to the questions thrown up by climate change to create something that might be described as a kind of ‘ecological uncanny.’ The reader is brought face to face with the unknowability of the world, its inhuman scale and indifference to the human and the disjunction between our minds and the minds of the other presences – animal, vegetable, even mineral – that share our planet. “ The reader is brought face to face with the unknowability of the world, its inhuman scale and indifference” In the Southern Reach books this sense of nature’s immensity, complexity and ferocity are given palpable force. This is partly down to the clarity and intensity of Vandermeer’s prose. But it’s also because the books give shape to a deeply unsettling sense of disruption, of unknown forces intruding into the real, dislocating and deranging it. To the characters these forces feel like violations of the natural order, but that’s at least partly because what’s happening exceeds their powers of comprehension. In this the trilogy echoes philosopher Timothy Morton’s notion of the hyperobject — that is, something so massively extended and distributed in time and space it transcends spatiotemporal specificity. Constituted out of the relationship between other objects, hyperobjects cannot be experienced directly, or in their totality. Instead we only ever perceive their effects, or imprints. As a result hyperobjects remain essentially ungraspable, apprehended only imperfectly and intermittently, yet simultaneously affecting us in unpredictable and often disconcerting ways. Morton’s most important example of a hyperobject is climate change, a phenomenon generated by the interrelationship between the Sun and the Earth and atmospheric conditions under human impact, yet experienced by us in the form of rising temperatures, extreme weather events and environmental and social breakdown. But one might just as easily think about the Earth’s ecology in this way, or even evolution and consciousness. The result is an incredibly potent way of imagining our own inability to conceive of the disaster of climate change, and the way its disruptions and convulsions unsettle our sense of the order of things. Like Area X, the effects of climate change make the world alien, even terrifying, deranging our sense of the natural order and revealing the void at the centre of things. The Southern Reach books make this process manifest, and in so doing they ask us to rethink some of our most fundamental assumptions about our centrality to the world and the meaning of our existence. One of the really disturbing things about writing Clade was that even as I was working on it reality was overtaking me, meaning that a whole series of things that were still speculative when I began the book were actually happening by the time I finished it. That sense of reality outpacing fiction was unsettling, and it’s only accelerated since I finished the book. But as you say, climate change is only the most significant of a host of environmental pressures that range from overpopulation to pollution, falling biodiversity and habitat loss, and which are altering the Earth’s climate and environment in entirely unprecedented ways. The familiar is being erased, as landscapes are razed and burned or alienated to human use, birds and animals disappear, supplanted by new and unfamiliar species, rivers die and the oceans empty out. This transformation has been dubbed the Anthropocene. I’m a little uneasy about the term, and the way it celebrates human primacy rather than the costs of that primacy (personally I think E O Wilson’s term ‘Eremocene’, or Age of Silence might have been more appropriate), but whatever we call it the reality is, as Mckenzie Wark writes , that human and natural forces are now so entwined that the fate of one determines the fate of the other. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter The immensity of this transformation is such that, like climate change, it’s essentially unthinkable at some deep level, both because its complexity exceeds our imaginative capacities, and because any genuine attempt to engage with its ethical dimension is completely overwhelming. Part of what I find fascinating about the Southern Reach novels is that they transcend this problem by shifting our frame of reference. Humanity is hollowed out and left behind, and what we find in its place is the unknowability of nature. It’s also one of the things I wanted Clade to do: as the novel heads toward its conclusion the time frames begin to expand, leaving the human behind and reaching out into deep time, since doing that not only reveals something of the transience and contingency of human history, but also a context within which the scale of climate change can be understood."

"I mean, I certainly encounter fewer giant sea monsters in the course of my work. I like this book, and the whole Southern Reach trilogy, because it illustrates that nature is really weird. I feel like there are a few narratives out there: the Dominion story, where we have complete control and mastery over nature, and the Mother Earth story, where nature protects and nurtures us. Neither of these stories is completely false, of course, but it’s useful to be reminded that the planet and its ecosystems don’t necessarily care about our emotional or physical comfort. I mean, I live in New York, a developed city in a rich country, and I have access to roads, a subway system, electric power whenever I want it, and heating or air conditioning. But all that technology is powerless against a blizzard or a hurricane. The whole city can be shut down by weather, and while we can make ourselves more resilient, there’s really nothing we can do to stop a direct hit. I think Annihilation evokes two things very well: that sense of confusion and powerlessness, and the drive to exert some sort of control over the situation by exploring and learning. “We may not all turn into monsters, but I suspect the future might be weirder than we realise” The typical sci-fi book is set on a distant planet. But we’re ensuring that future generations are going to come of age on a different planet: the one we’re making for them right now. I like that Annihilation is set on a planet that’s very recognizably Earth, but also frighteningly different. We may not all turn into monsters, but I suspect the future might be weirder than we realise. We’re going to see the emergence of unprecedented climates: conditions that literally no one has ever experienced. And we’ll see more and different extremes. I hate the phrase ‘the new normal’: it’s not like natural disasters will become everyday occurrences. Call it the ‘new abnormal,’ maybe: climate change does mean more heatwaves, more severe downpours, possibly stronger and weirder storms, re-shaping coasts. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter But here’s the thing that scares me the most: we talk about climate adaptation like our future selves will calmly accept responsibility and make informed decisions to cope with the changing world. History and current events suggest otherwise. Adversity tends to empower demagogues with easy answers, and climate change will bring plenty of adversity. So we should beware ‘climate essentialism’: it’s never just about climate, and you can’t put the vast range of possible human responses in a climate model based on physics and chemistry. The politics of 2016/17 have definitely been bizarre, but I suspect it will only get weirder from here."

"Yes, and again there’s been a complete trilogy in the meantime, plus a fourth addition in 2024. Annihilation itself is very short and intense and creepy and beautiful. We follow four women on an expedition into Area X: the anthropologist, the psychologist, the surveyor, and our protagonist the biologist. We don’t know names, or much more about Area X; we are told very early that two of the band especially don’t need to be named, as they will die imminently. This is the whole tone of the novel – sparse, tense, mysterious. For all that, the descriptions are incredibly evocative. VanderMeer has said the inspiration was a walk through a wildlife refuge, and that shines through. There are accurately-labelled features of wilderness mixed in with the invented and uncanny – the nightly distant moaning, the increasingly-hideous ‘tower’ – so that the lines between the two are blurred. It’s a short read, and it grips you: a great choice if you feel a little out of the habit of immersive reading. Yes! That’s partly because the three books of N K Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy come in in 2016, 2017 and 2018, scooping the Hugo all three years, and the Nebula as well in 2018…"

"I should preface this by saying, no, I have not seen the film. Everyone keeps asking, but I am reluctant to see it. I love the book, and I’m afraid the film will ruin it. Annihilation is the first volume in the Southern Reach Trilogy. A colleague of mine, Roy Scranton, knows Jeff VanderMeer and brought him to Notre Dame a few weeks ago for a reading. Way in advance, Roy said, ‘Laura, you’re going to love this guy, he’s the weird Thoreau.’ I picked it up, a little skeptical, but was really drawn into it. Yes, Jeff is truly Thoreauvian in truly weird ways. Here’s another mode of exploring the Thoreauvian wider view of the universe. Once again we see the Walden space, set apart from and against the “normal” world—Sloterdijk’s stress collective—which in Annihilation is this nasty, broken down, stagnant bureaucratic swamp, depressing and ugly. And the point of attraction, the Walden at the edge of town—here it’s called Area X—is a weird speculative fiction. I am tempted to read Annihilation as an allegorical treatment of our situation in the Anthropocene, with global warming: the redemptive wild place that Thoreau creates in our imagination under the name ‘Walden Pond’ becomes this darkly threatening Area X, which is subtly expanding and swallowing all of us, destabilizing the very concept of what it is to be human. “Jeff is truly Thoreauvian in truly weird ways” Teams of scientists are sent into this zone to figure out what is going on in there. And either they don’t return at all, or they return deranged in some way—they don’t last very long back in society. We follow a biologist as she goes into Area X as an expedition member. Here’s the pattern again: the excursion from the stress collective out into the wild, non-human space, and the alteration, the defamiliarization, the dismay, the fear. Like Thoreau, the biologist is not at all repelled, but drawn in, fascinated. This is the point about VanderMeer being “the weird Thoreau”: only somebody who himself loves the strange and uncanny lifeforms of our world could create such a disturbing wild place as Area X. And it’s the same with Annie Dillard. She’s particularly fascinated by the most grotesque insects and most repellent nonhuman behaviors. So here’s the biologist moving into this eerie space, and instead of being repelled and desperate to flee from it, she’s drawn in deeper; she becomes it. And she writes of the beauty of it (the book is her journal record), while everybody else finds it horrifying. There is a real edge here, because this wild is not at all benign, in fact it’s deeply terrifying, and we’re pretty sure we can’t trust her. For this unknown is clearly some indefinable existential threat to the human community, to humanity itself. In that sense, I think, this novel encodes a deep sense of anxiety about what our planet is becoming. It’s no longer a benign planet, for we feel it becoming strange and threatening to us as human beings, and to the human community, in ways that we can’t control. I didn’t ask VanderMeer if this is a reading of the novel that he would encourage, but it is something I felt very strongly. Absolutely yes. No question. I think he’d be right up there with Bill McKibben. Somebody asked me recently: who are the most Thoreauvian people today? Instantly two names came to mind: Annie Dillard and Bill McKibben. In terms of the politics of the moment, in trying to bring people together around climate change activism, the Thoreauvian activist heritage is alive in Bill McKibben. He began with his book The End of Nature— what a shocking concept. Then there’s his more recent book, Eaarth, spelt with an extra ‘A’—apparently you would pronounce it ‘Arth’—so, Earth has mutated into Eaarth, become estranged from us, unnatural and very frightening—again, not friendly and not benign. It’s going to be very, very difficult to live on this new planet we’ve created. Well, again, that’s the sense in Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation . Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Thoreau convinces us that it is, almost, a paradise of beauty and harmony at Walden. But if you look at the fine print, even in Walden itself, it’s not a paradise at all. By the time he published Walden , Walden Pond had been deforested—there were no trees left. He documents this in his journal, and makes a point of it in Walden , but readers somehow breeze right past without noticing. That is, Thoreau is not telling us, ‘oh, it’s beautiful in nature, let’s all go to this beautiful place and forget the world.’ He’s saying, we had this place, a natural commons we all loved and cherished, and we have destroyed it. And this destructiveness is the backdrop for everything in Walden —indeed, one could say that because Walden ceased to exist, Thoreau had to recreate it in words, to resurrect it as a place of the imagination lest we demolish all the other Waldens, too. To go from Thoreau, to Jeff VanderMeer, to Bill McKibben, is not a big leap at all. We’re more than ever caught in the Thoreau’s dilemma, trying to imagine a better world even as the world around us is degrading. We still have and need prophets to recall us to the deeper reality that says, this is not right. Annie Dillard does it poetically, Bill McKibben does it through activism. Oh yes. A lot of us were reading Walden back in the 1970s, but it was his journals that moved me. That’s why I’m so fond of the 1906 publication I mentioned earlier, those 14 volumes. There was a kind of poetry in the everyday fare. You are given this intimate sense of what he was doing, how he living , moment to moment in this extraordinarily intense way—both outward, involved in the natural and social worlds, and inward, always returning and turning it into this astonishing prose, this work of art. And it just goes on and on, 14 volumes of it. I read it all back in college, and I read it a second time to prepare the biography. Add to that his letters and the letters that friends wrote to him, accounts of him by his friends, memoirs of him by family and friends, and so on. After a while, you do feel that this is somebody who, in some strange way, you have in fact met and know quite intimately—better than the people that you actually know in real life. I mean, how many of us have read 14 volumes of each others’ journals? Their innermost thoughts? It had been a longstanding question among Thoreauvians. Bob Richardson wrote his wonderful intellectual biography, but it begins with Thoreau as a Harvard student. What about childhood and youth?—a new “comprehensive” biography, written from archival sources, cradle to grave? There had been none since Walter Harding’s in 1965. To my surprise, it occurred to me about ten years ago that I would write it. I asked around and nobody else said they were planning on taking up this kind of full bore, start-from-scratch birth to death narrative. I thought it would be a way to pull together this long friendship I’ve had with this writer, whom I came to when I was about 15 or 16 years old. He speaks very powerfully to a certain kind of young person, and I was one of those young people. Writing the biography felt like returning a thank-you gift to someone long gone, a way to honor what he had given me as a young person. Early on the book was immensely long and very scholarly, but I ended up setting a lot of that aside and trying instead to write a book worthy of Thoreau, one that aspired to be itself a work of literature. Because how else could Thoreau truly be honored? It’s a very challenging philosophy today. Re-reading Annie Dillard, I was struck by the fact that hers was a world without computers, without smart phones. She mentions reading newspapers, but there’s no mention of television. So you have this new whole layer, the way our lives are dissolved into email, the Internet, Twitterverse and so on. Where is the end game in all that? Thoreau would be urging us to pull back into the real, which is why, again, it was refreshing to read Annie Dillard, who also recalls us to “the real.” When Thoreau says ‘simplify,’ he means the constant quest to ask yourself: what is real? What is essential to living? And, my God, I think we have to turn and ask that question. I think that turning towards simplification has become harder now because we are so scattered and fragmented across the virtual world as well as the material world. I think we’re lost if we don’t find some way to recover the ground under our feet and what connects us—the ground, the planet, the atmosphere, the sense that we are embodied creatures, that we’re embedded in material reality. Well, look, as we talk I’m looking outside. There’s a bit of wild garden I’ve been creating, the sun just came out, and we just had some rain, so everything is sparkling in the morning sunlight. In a very basic way, this we share. This feels much more real than what I find when I turn on the TV. How do we keep grounded and yet keep facing forward into a real future together? Simplifying, consciously and thoughtfully, would seem to be essential to that."