ANNIHILATION | Jeff VanderMeer
READ APRIL 2020
This book was read in the original LAX LAB climate fiction book club, which was active between 2020 and 2023. 🕷
ANNIHILATION |
Jeff VanderMeer
2014
FSG Orginals
“I am aware that all of this speculation is incomplete, inexact, inaccurate, useless. If I don’t have real answers, it is because we still don’t know what questions to ask. Our instruments are useless, our methodology broken, our motivations selfish.”
— Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation, 2014
Welcome to Area X. This exclusion zone along a stretch of coastline is a mysterious place where pristine nature has inexplicably taken over. Here, unruly nature is quarantined. We join the twelfth expedition – a biologist, an anthropologist, a surveyor, and a psychologist – on a government mission to explore and chart the mysteries of Area X.
Jeff VanderMeer’s novel Annihilation is the first book in the author’s Southern Reach Trilogy. Through this atmospheric and unsettling novel, we explore the unknown, the uncanny, our relationship with science, and the mysteries and power of nature. Perhaps some of these themes may take on new meanings in our present moment, also full of unknowns, spaces unsafe, and areas of exclusion.
“That's how the madness of the world tries to colonise you: from the outside in, forcing you to live in its reality.”
— Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation, 2014
About the author
Jeff VanderMeer— author website
Further reading, listening, viewing
Annihilation (2018), written and directed by Alex Garland
‘The weird Thoreau’
Joshua Rothman, The New Yorker, 14 January 2015
‘The Accidental Activist’
Jeff VanderMeer, Esquire, 6 September 2023
‘Jeff VanderMeer is writing a fourth Southern Reach novel / It’s called Absolution, and it’s out in October’
Andrew Webster, Verge, 4 April 2024
Original LAX LAB book cover illustration by Emma Arnold, 2020
