To The Last Page

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...