LoveReading Says
August 2015 Series of the Month.
I am an absolute sucker both for quest-through-the-wilderness tales, and for post-apocalyptic landscapes. Jeff VanderMeer's Annihilation delivers both, in creepily brilliant and utterly unforgettable style. Narrated by an unnamed female biologist, it tells of a scientific expedition - the latest of many failed ventures - into a desolate wilderness known as Area X, where they hear a "low, powerful moaning" at dusk.
"I would tell you the names of the other three, if it mattered," the biologist tells us, doomily, "but only the surveyor would last more than the next day or two." It all gets progressively more sinister and alien and uncanny and disastrous - I'm not sure I've read a book which scared me, and stayed with me so much, for years - with the story expanded on in the world outside Area X in the following two novels in VanderMeer's Southern Reach trilogy, Authority and Acceptance.
A slice of dreamily written, haunting literary science fiction flows through the whole trilogy. ~ Alison Flood
The Southern Reach Trilogy:
1. Annihilation
2. Authority
3. Acceptance
Reviewed by Alison FloodI was that child who used to read under the table during dinner and in the corners at family gatherings.
More reviews by Alison Flood About Annihilation
SPECIAL TENTH ANNIVERSARY EDITION The Southern Reach Trilogy begins with Annihilation, the 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 world for years. Nature has reclaimed the last vestiges of human civilization. Expeditions into Area X have ended in disaster or death. In Annihilation, the first volume of Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach Trilogy, we join the latest expedition. The group is made up of four women: an anthropologist; a surveyor; a psychologist, the de facto leader; and the 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 lifeforms that surpass understanding. But it's the secrets they carried across the border with them that change everything.
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Annihilation Synopsis
SPECIAL TENTH ANNIVERSARY EDITION
The Southern Reach Trilogy begins with Annihilation, the 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 world for years. Nature has reclaimed the last vestiges of human civilization. Expeditions into Area X have ended in disaster or death.
In
Annihilation, the first volume of Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach Trilogy, we join the latest expedition. The group is made up of four women: an anthropologist; a surveyor; a psychologist, the de facto leader; and the 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 lifeforms that surpass understanding. But it's the secrets they carried across the border with them that change everything.
About This Edition
| ISBN: |
9781250824042 |
| Publication date: |
30th July 2024 |
| Author: |
Jeff VanderMeer |
| Publisher: |
Picador USA |
| Format: |
Paperback |
| Pagination: |
224 pages |
| Series: |
Southern Reach |
| Primary Genre |
Science Fiction
|
| Other Genres: |
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| Recommendations: |
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Jeff VanderMeer Press Reviews
Praise for ANNIHILATION and the SOUTHERN REACH TRILOGY:
'I'm loving the Southern Reach Trilogy ... Creepy and fascinating
Stephen King
'Hauntingly weird and brilliantly new ... These are contemporary masterpieces and career-defining novels'
Adam Robert, Books of the Year, Guardian
'This trilogy is a modern mycological masterpiece ... Remarkable ... Tense, eerie and unsettling ... VanderMeer writes much better prose than Poe ever did ... This is genuinely potent and dream-haunting writing. VanderMeer has arrived.'
Guardian
'A teeming science fiction that draws on Conrad and Lovecraft alike ... Annihilation shows signs of being the novel that will allow VanderMeer to break through to a new and larger audience'
Sunday Telegraph
'VanderMeer's novel is a psycho-geographical tour de force, channelling Ballard and Lovecraft to instil the reader with a deep, delicious unease'
Financial Times
'What a haunting book this is, lodging deep in the memory in similar fashion to otherworldly classics such as David Lindsay's A Voyage To Arcturus ... Annihilation is so disquietingly strange as to defy summarisation. Read it'
Daily Mail
'Astonishing, frightening, spectacular ... The imaginative daring and reach with which VanderMeer has invented and executed a concept such as Area X is breathtaking ... Powerful and echoing ... I hope the trilogy will come to be seen not only as the instant sci-fi classic it is, but also as Literature'
New Statesman
'Immersive, insightful and often deeply bloody creepy, this is a startlingly good novel ... A major work' ***** SFX Magazine 'A tense and chilling psychological thriller about an unravelling expedition and the strangeness within us. A little Kubrick, a lot of Lovecraft, the novel builds with an unbearable tension and claustrophobic dread that lingers long afterwards. I loved it'
Lauren Beukes
'Original and beautiful, maddening and magnificent'
Warren Ellis
About Jeff VanderMeer
Jeff VanderMeer is an award-winning novelist and editor. His fiction has been translated into twenty languages and has appeared in the Library of America’s American Fantastic Tales and in multiple year’s-best anthologies. He writes nonfiction for the Washington Post, the New York Times Book Review, the Los Angeles Times, and the Guardian, among others. He grew up in the Fiji Islands and now lives in Tallahassee, Florida, with his wife.
More About Jeff VanderMeer
