Annihilation (book).

I enjoyed the 2018 film adaptation of Annihilation, a gripping sci-fi horror story starring Natalie Portman as the lead scientist on an expedition into an unknown biological anomaly called “the Shimmer” that has taken over a portion of what is probably the southern United States and appears to be expanding. Previous expeditions have ended in varying disasters; the one preceding Portman’s included her husband, who came back alive but was a shell of his former self. The nature of the Shimmer was never explained, but was also beside the point of the story.

The movie was a very loose adaptation of Jeff VanderMeer’s novel of the same name, the first part of the Southern Reach trilogy. The book is also very good, but there’s not that much in common between the two other than the general setup, the main character’s identity, and her husband’s history on a prior expedition. The movie was a psychological thriller with a touch of violence, preying on your expectations and the constant uncertainty of an essentially alien environment where the rules by which we live in our world no longer applied. The book also has those rules, and the vague sense of horror from the environment, but VanderMeer seems far more interested in exploring the main character than the region, known as Area X, or the mystery behind its creation and expansion.

No characters are named in the book; the narrator is simply the biologist, the character portrayed by Portman in the movie. She’s part of a four-woman expedition along with a psychologist, a surveyor, and an archaeologist; they cross the border into Area X after the psychologist hypnotizes them so they won’t experience or remember it, presumably because the transition is somehow upsetting or traumatic. Inside Area X, they find a pristine ecological habitat with seemingly impossible life forms, including what appears to be living writing on a tower wall, but something in the area is also clearly hostile to their presence. The team itself starts to fall apart between the strain of the mission, one member’s treachery, and the influence of one or more unfriendly life forms in the area. The text is the biologist’s journal of the expedition’s gradual implosion and a document of what she learned while inside Area X about the strange life forms she found there, with intermittent flashbacks to her life before the mission, including her life with her husband before he entered Area X and the brief period after his surprising return.

The assumption is that the biologist at least survives to the end of the book, so the multiple times she appears to be in mortal danger, you know she’s going to make it out alive – but you never know what’s going to happen to the other characters, especially given the high fatality rate on previous expeditions, and Area X itself appears to be some sort of sentient life form and thus another character in the book. VanderMeer focuses as much on the conflict between the biologist and the ecology of Area X as on anything else, using it as a way to explore the psyche of the narrator by putting her into multiple situations where she is both at odds with colleagues on the team and threatened by the immediate environment. Much of what goes awry with the team itself is predictable, at least a general level – we’ve seen plenty of stories in print and film of groups collapsing under pressure – but the bio-horror of Area X is novel and means that she can’t take many basic aspects of life for granted. It’s as if she’s been put into a biological hot zone without adequate protection, and has that stress as well as the stress of the mission, her husband’s vanishing, and the failure of the team to hold together for even a few days after crossing.

This is just part one of three, and it feels incomplete as a result; the world-building aspect is more successful than the biologist’s story. I never felt like I understood her character well, and the journey on which she goes is itself incomplete and a bit unsatisfying. I’ll almost certainly finish the trilogy, though, given how much I enjoyed the world he created and the many mysteries of Area X, even if I never get more details on the biologist’s motivations for doing what she does.

Next up: Still reading The Unbearable Lightness of Being.