Annihilation - Jeff VanderMeer

New life forms

The first part of Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach trilogy manages to present a vaguely unsettling new spin on what amounts to a familiar SF situation where a group of explorers face unknown dangers in a hostile alien environment. Just to raise the tensions, the volunteers are aware that they are not the first explorers of Area X either. This, we are told, is the twelfth expedition (but you'll soon find that you can take nothing as written in Annihilation), the previous expeditions having ended in rather strange and inconclusive terms, with scientists and investigators wandering off, disappearing or committing suicide. What's strange about the alien environment of Area X however is that it appears to be an area of natural wilderness on Earth.

In fact, Annihilation initially bears more than a passing resemblance to Andrei Tarkovsky's remarkable and influential film Stalker, but only as a jumping off point. In contrast to Tarkovsky's poetical allegory there seems to be a more conscious attempt to tie events to a meaningful new view of reality, or perhaps to a psychological reality. That, however, is hard to determine from the first part of the trilogy alone. Like "the Zone" in Stalker, the four explorers who pass over the vague boundary into Area X don't have names, just professions, the team consisting of a biologist (the narrator), an anthropologist, a surveyor and a psychologist. We are led to believe very early on that the narrator will be the only surviving member of the team. Things evidently are going to go very wrong.

The dangers of Area X aren't immediately apparent. It has been mapped before, and resembles a regular piece of Earth coastline, one that is dominated by a lighthouse. The twelfth expedition however quickly discover an unusual structure not previously mapped, a wide tunnel that goes deep underground, which the biologist nonetheless feels compelled to describe as a "Tower". What lies within is best left for the reader to discover, but suffice to say that it would in any case be difficult to describe and that it does indeed pose a deadly threat to the explorers. Even what that threat constitutes however is difficult to pin down, since the biologist's testimony - like everything else in Area X - is somewhat compromised by the fact that nothing that happens in this strange environment can be taken at face value.

The difficulty of pinning down what Annihilation is about might present a problem for some readers. There's clearly an allegorical side to the work and distinct parallels can be drawn to the few pieces of information (facts are hard to determine) we have about the biologist's life and personality, her interest in the study of life in tide pools in particular matching up with some aspects of what is discovered in Area X. What is clear however is that Annihilation works equally well as a tense SF adventure in its own right - slight in page-count but full of incident and ideas - while also being a fascinating opening to the first part of what looks like being a compelling trilogy.