Annihilation: A Novel

INTRODUCTION

BY KAREN JOY FOWLER

To let understanding stop at what cannot be understood is a high attainment. Those who cannot do it will be destroyed on the lathe of heaven.

—Zhuangzi (as translated by Ursula K. Le Guin)

For most of my reading life, mimetic realism was the admired mode of literature among critics, reviewers, and professors. The various literatures of the fantastic, those tales which prioritize the writer’s imagination above lived experience, have been, for reasons unclear to me, suspect—either childish or escapist or lacking in subtlety or deficient in characterization. That they are often none of these things had little impact on their reception. Fortunately, this has changed.

My own attachment to the imaginary has been lifelong, but I was well into adulthood before I noticed that my pleasure was often largely a matter of setting. Fantastical stories are the only ones that can take place absolutely anywhere. Some of my favorite examples, encountered around the same time as this revelation: Venice Drowned, by Kim Stanley Robinson, a story set, as the title suggests, in a future when the city of Venice is completely underwater; The Edge of the World, by Michael Swanwick, which takes place in that imaginary spot where it was once feared that ships might sail over the edge and out of the world altogether; This Shape We’re In, by Jonathan Lethem, where the setting in a final surprise (spoiler alert) turns out to be the strangely large inside of the Trojan horse. Although these stories function beautifully in all other ways, it is the imaginative power of their locations that first sets off that humming in my brain.

Area X is a relatively recent addition to this expansive and thrilling territory, a deeply textured and richly imagined world. At its most basic, the plot of Annihilation is not unfamiliar. A small group of explorers enters an unknown wilderness. Perilous adventures follow. Finding this setup in the opening pages, a reader might be forgiven for feeling some of the comfort of recognition. More than familiar, the plot is classic. Think King Solomon’s Mines, Lost Horizon, The Man Who Would Be King.

That sense of comfort will not last long. Said reader will soon become acutely aware that they are immersed in the terrain of someone else’s imagination. If, as John Gardner famously said, good writing is a vivid and continuous dream, Annihilation soon feels more like a hallucination.

In this, the first book of VanderMeer’s ambitious and masterful (four now and counting) project, what we actually know about Area X is not much. It has become separated from the rest of the world by an invisible border; all communication with those people previously living in the region has been lost, as have the people themselves.

Repeated efforts have been made to explore and map Area X. Several expeditions have already been sent in by the mysterious agency known as the Southern Reach. These previous expeditions came to disastrous ends. Why the Southern Reach persists in these attempts is unknown. Almost everything about the Southern Reach remains unknown for now.

One of the primary features of Area X is an old lighthouse, noted and mapped by previous expeditions. It appears to have once been the site of a dreadful battle. There is a second feature, which has not been previously noted nor mapped. This feature functions as a sort of mirror to the lighthouse, and our narrator persists in calling it a tower, although its top is at ground level and the stairs lead downward. The rest of the expedition refers to it as a tunnel, and this difference in perception sets the narrator at odds with her fellow travelers in ways that will only deepen.

The most compelling feature of the tower is written on its walls. Words appear there, sentences in English, which seem to be biological, fungal in nature. The sentences have a quasi-Biblical cadence, and the words almost make sense, but not quite. The tower seems to breathe and may be alive.

Apart from these two prominent features, most of Area X is now wilderness, a bewildering wilderness in which anything and everything seems possible. Despite the narrator’s disorientation, shared now by the reader, the text is profoundly immersive. VanderMeer’s descriptions are detailed—sounds and sights, beasts and plants, all made terrifically vivid in his images and prose.

And everything here is of equal interest—the ruins of houses, the appearance and activities of insects, the waterways, dolphins, staircases, stones. The text requires a sort of bright attentiveness on the part of the reader, an energy of engagement to match the energy of the writing. As a narrative strategy, the specificity of detail serves to ground the reader in a story otherwise filled with uncertainties. We may not know what exactly is happening, how or why, but we will always know where we are.

The overall impression of Area X is one of breathtaking abundance. The landscape is simultaneously beautiful and dangerous, as nature always is. But here this very fecundity is threatening; it threatens to overwhelm. Area X is in a process of a renewal that seems to include the erasure of all remaining artifacts of human impact. Area X is now putting its mark on those humans who enter it rather than the other way around. Its mark may or may not be deadly. But it is always transformational.

The archetypal power of images such as the lighthouse and the tower, along with the lack of proper names for the band of explorers, may tempt a reader toward allegory. I think this is a fool’s game. Not that a referential decoding can’t be made to work, but that so many other decodings will also work. Trying to find a key will neither enhance nor clarify the text. Nevertheless, two things do stand out to me as essential parts of this work.

The first, clearly a major concern of the book, is the proper relationship of humans to nature. Humans are used to walking masterfully through the world. There are other apex predators, of course, and nature is under no obligation to keep us safe. We are also prey to bacterial onslaughts, cancers, and other illnesses, threats. The dangers are both large and small. But the fact that so many animals flee at the sight of us has allowed us to indulge in a sense of our own primacy. We are used to being seen. We are used to seeing ourselves as powerful. We are used to feeling that we are above rather than inside the natural world. In Area X, none of this will work. This is a landscape that refuses to indulge in anyone’s pretensions.

A second essential issue in the book lies in its pervasive uncertainty. Uncertainty is the hallmark of every element of this story—not just in the unpredictable and puzzling world of Area X but also in the social dynamics of the human relationships on both sides of the border. The narrator’s thoughts and perceptions are suspect even to herself. She appears to be operating in good faith, trying to be a reliable guide, except she cannot be sure of either who she used to be or who she has become. She cannot be sure that she sees the same things others see. She cannot even, with confidence, be certain that she is seeing what she thinks she is seeing.

The words on the tower walls are one manifestation of this uncertainty. The reader waits in vain to see their meaning revealed, to see the perfectly comprehensible words communicate a perfectly comprehensible whole. The question of whether they are even intended as communication likewise remains open.

The project of understanding our world is less advanced than we might imagine, for all the years we’ve been about it. Even our own bodies remain mysterious to us. No other book captures this fact so well—that we live within an understanding of circumstances that is partial at best and mistaken at worse. Despite all our efforts, our observations, our ongoing experiments—even when carried out with care and rigor—the world remains largely unknowable to us. We can create logical, plausible, even predictive narratives, but these are merely hypotheses. To think we have attained, or someday might attain, a complete clarity, much less bend the world to our will, vastly overestimates our powers. To expect certainty is just another example of human hubris.

And yet sometimes, often even, action is required of us. We know that we do not know enough. And we know that we must act anyway.

This is a clear imperative regarding the climate crisis, but it is also a fair assessment of the enduring, eternal human condition. Decisions have always been made with incomplete information and history is littered with examples of actions based on beliefs that were not so much incomplete as preposterous.

To live amid uncertainty is inevitable. To acknowledge it is to live as a grown-up. Annihilation is a book for grown-ups.

Our climate crisis is an unstated but evident subtext throughout this fantastic and fantastical book. The best way for humans, as individuals and even more so in aggregate, to live in concordance with the rest of the world is perhaps the major question of our time and likely to remain so. And so Annihilation, which speaks so powerfully and memorably to this very issue, is likely to remain a book fitted exactly to the current moment for decades of moments to come.

01: INITIATION

The tower, which was not supposed to be there, plunges into the earth in a place just before the black pine forest begins to give way to swamp and then the reeds and wind-gnarled trees of the marsh flats. Beyond the marsh flats and the natural canals lies the ocean and, a little farther down the coast, a derelict lighthouse. All of this part of the country had been abandoned for decades, for reasons that are not easy to relate. Our expedition was the first to enter Area X for more than two years, and much of our predecessors’ equipment had rusted, their tents and sheds little more than husks. Looking out over that untroubled landscape, I do not believe any of us could yet see the threat.

There were four of us: a biologist, an anthropologist, a surveyor, and a psychologist. I was the biologist. All of us were women this time, chosen as part of the complex set of variables that governed sending the expeditions. The psychologist, who was older than the rest of us, served as the expedition’s leader. She had put us all under hypnosis to cross the border, to make sure we remained calm. It took four days of hard hiking after crossing the border to reach the coast.

Our mission was simple: to continue the government’s investigation into the mysteries of Area X, slowly working our way out from base camp.

The expedition could last days, months, or even years, depending on various stimuli and conditions. We had supplies with us for six months, and another two years’ worth of supplies had already been stored at the base camp. We had also been assured that it was safe to live off the land if necessary. All of our foodstuffs were smoked or canned or in packets. Our most outlandish equipment consisted of a measuring device that had been issued to each of us, which hung from a strap on our belts: a small rectangle of black metal with a glass-covered hole in the middle. If the hole glowed red, we had thirty minutes to remove ourselves to a safe place. We were not told what the device measured or why we should be afraid should it glow red. After the first few hours, I had grown so used to it that I hadn’t looked at it again. We had been forbidden watches and compasses.

When we reached the camp, we set about replacing obsolete or damaged equipment with what we had brought and putting up our own tents. We would rebuild the sheds later, once we were sure that Area X had not affected us. The members of the last expedition had eventually drifted off, one by one. Over time, they had returned to their families, so strictly speaking they did not vanish. They simply disappeared from Area X and, by unknown means, reappeared back in the world beyond the border. They could not relate the specifics of that journey. This transference had taken place across a period of eighteen months, and it was not something that had been experienced by prior expeditions. But other phenomena could also result in premature dissolution of expeditions, as our superiors put it, so we needed to test our stamina for that place.

We also needed to acclimate ourselves to the environment. In the forest near base camp one might encounter black bears or coyotes. You might hear a sudden croak and watch a night heron startle from a tree branch and, distracted, step on a venomous snake, of which there were at least six varieties. Bogs and streams hid huge aquatic reptiles, and so we were careful not to wade too deep to collect our water samples. Still, these aspects of the ecosystem did not really concern any of us. Other elements had the ability to unsettle, however. Long ago, towns had existed here, and we encountered eerie signs of human habitation: rotting cabins with sunken, red-tinged roofs, rusted wagon-wheel spokes half-buried in the dirt, and the barely seen outlines of what used to be enclosures for livestock, now mere ornament for layers of pine-needle loam.

Far worse, though, was a low, powerful moaning at dusk. The wind off the sea and the odd interior stillness dulled our ability to gauge direction, so that the sound seemed to infiltrate the black water that soaked the cypress trees. This water was so dark we could see our faces in it, and it never stirred, set like glass, reflecting the beards of gray moss that smothered the cypress trees. If you looked out through these areas, toward the ocean, all you saw was the black water, the gray of the cypress trunks, and the constant, motionless rain of moss flowing down. All you heard was the low moaning. The effect of this cannot be understood without being there. The beauty of it cannot be understood, either, and when you see beauty in desolation it changes something inside you. Desolation tries to colonize you.

As noted, we found the tower in a place just before the forest became waterlogged and then turned to salt marsh. This occurred on our fourth day after reaching base camp, by which time we had almost gotten our bearings. We did not expect to find anything there, based on both the maps that we brought with us and the water-stained, pine-dust-smeared documents our predecessors had left behind. But there it was, surrounded by a fringe of scrub grass, half-hidden by fallen moss off to the left of the trail: a circular block of some grayish stone seeming to mix cement and ground-up seashells. It measured roughly sixty feet in diameter, this circular block, and was raised from ground level by about eight inches. Nothing had been etched into or written on its surface that could in any way reveal its purpose or the identity of its makers. Starting at due north, a rectangular opening set into the surface of the block revealed stairs spiraling down into darkness. The entrance was obscured by the webs of banana spiders and debris from storms, but a cool draft came from below.

At first, only I saw it as a tower. I don’t know why the word tower came to me, given that it tunneled into the ground. I could as easily have considered it a bunker or a submerged building. Yet as soon as I saw the staircase, I remembered the lighthouse on the coast and had a sudden vision of the last expedition drifting off, one by one, and sometime thereafter the ground shifting in a uniform and preplanned way to leave the lighthouse standing where it had always been but depositing this underground part of it inland. I saw this in vast and intricate detail as we all stood there, and, looking back, I mark it as the first irrational thought I had once we had reached our destination.

This is impossible, said the surveyor, staring at her maps. The solid shade of late afternoon cast her in cool darkness and lent the words more urgency than they would have had otherwise. The sun was telling us that soon we’d have to use our flashlights to interrogate the impossible, although I’d have been perfectly happy doing it in the