Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer
Here I am catching up on a 10-year-old novel. No, I haven’t seen the movie, but by coincidence I think it turns up on Amazon Prime today. I might have seen the start of it, but I still might not watch it. I don’t like modern movies.
Published in 2014, this is the first of three novels about Area X, which (here at least) is a vaguely defined territory with highly restricted access, a forbidden zone. Some kind of Event with a capital E has occurred there and it has had a major impact on the biology of the area.
Several expeditions have been sent into Area X, not all of which have returned. The unnamed narrator is a member of the 12th expedition, which is already one person down before they even set foot in the territory. Nobody is dignified with a name: just job titles, functions: an anthropologist, a psychologist, a biologist, and a surveyor. The missing member was to be their linguist.
Now, this is already odd (in a good way). What a strange set of specialisms to send into an environmental “red zone”. Previous expeditions, we learn, included medics, but there is no medic here. A biologist makes sense, but more sense would be made by more specialised personnel: a zoologist and a botanist, perhaps. A psychologist just about justifies her presence, but why an anthropologist when there are supposed to be no people in there? Or are there? This was written pre-pandemic, but I couldn’t help thinking of the way that Covid revealed the pointlessness of many jobs. Kept thinking about that space ship full of hairdressers and telephone sanitisers in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
A banker, a lawyer, a hedge fund manager and a business consultant are sent into a forbidden zone.…
They have limited technology, for reasons which aren’t exactly clear at first. No computers, no phones, no tablets. They have limited weaponry. Cameras, but not digital. Notebooks. The biologist, our narrator, is recording the narrative in her notebook, and filling us in a little on her back story. Nobody seems to like each other very much. The group’s leader is the psychologist, who seems manipulative and dishonest. We’ve all had managers like this. They have a kind of map, which puts much emphasis on a lighthouse but omits entirely another major feature, which is a kind of bunker which has a staircase that spirals down into the ground. Why is the bunker not on their map? Why can’t the expedition members agree on what to call it. Some of them think of it as a tunnel (it’s not a tunnel), but our narrator thinks of it as a tower (it’s not a tower). It’s the differend: how can we even have a discussion when we can’t even agree on a form of words to describe the thing we want to talk about? We’ve all been in work meetings like this.
All of this reminds me of Ian McDonald’s Chaga, which is a novel (and sequence of short stories?) published in 1995 about some kind of alien flora which arrives by meteor in Kenya and begins to alter the land at a molecular level, creating a moving wave front of biological transformation. What happens to people who embrace the chaga and step into the transformed region is one of the ideas in the book. Here in the real world, chaga is a kind of fungus that grows on beech trees.
This is a fascinating (and Nebula Award winning) book, well worth seeking out if you’ve not read it. Here’s the persuader: it’s only 208 pages long. It’s a swift but gripping read, and there are three sequels. The second book is 352 pages, but by the time you get to that, you’re already in.
