To The Last Page

From the mushroom spore and fungus infected world of Ambergris to the mysterious dangerous zones of the Southern Reach trilogy that spread and distort reality, the visions of Jeff VanderMeer are strange and, quite literally, in a world of their own. As the originator of a new genre that you could call eco-noir, each of those series has an detective/investigator acting as a guide for the reader as they try to make sense of the peculiar nature of a changing world. That’s much the format of the mystery of VanderMeer’s latest standalone (but who can ever know) novel, Hummingbird Salamander , a near-future novel that grapples with issues of climate change, natural disasters, animal extinction and pandemic crises, all interconnected and wrapped up in an abstract noir mystery that needs to be unravelled ultimately for the greater good of all mankind. Jane Smith is not actually a detective but she is involved in security. Although she is a former body-builder, she actually works as an IT secur...

If you didn't already know how dangerous a place Area X is from Annihilation , the first of Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach trilogy, by the time you start reading Authority and get the first glimpse of the world outside that is trying to explore and contain it, the full horror of the phenomenon starts to become apparent. By the end of the Authority too, the mystery, the danger and the scope of the trilogy's concept takes a leap to another level, but in-between it has to be said, there's a lot of confusion and inconsistency in this middle section of the work as a whole. Annihilation took us straight into Area X with an expedition exploring a section of costal landscape that exhibits strange and dangerous phenomena, posing a threat to the Southern Reach. Previous expeditions have been unsuccessful and have resulted in deaths, disappearances and damage to individuals who have been part of the exploration teams. In Authority , a new director called Control, has been ass...

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 allegor...