Annihilation: A Novel: 1 (Southern Reach Trilogy)

Product Information

But as we climbed back up, I had a moment of vertigo despite being in such an enclosed space, a kind of panic for a moment, in which the walls suddenly had a fleshy aspect to them, as if we traveled inside of the gullet of a beast. What did she mean by saying that we would continue to think of the tower as made of coquina and stone? You do not know whether you have left this earth or crossed through an alternative dimension, or whether you yet remain in a strange forgotten corner of the world.

Perhaps she meant merely to reassure us, but I would like to believe she was trying to reassure herself. Something about the idea of a tower that headed straight down played with a twinned sensation of vertigo and a fascination with structure. What a brilliant and strange museum of dystopian artefacts he has there, and this tale assembled via outstanding prose, assured pacing, exquisite timing, all leading you slowly from science-suspense into a horror most profound.Why do we see as strengths those things that are actually now weaknesses in ourselves as a sustainable species on Earth? We knew that the psychologist’s role was to provide balance and calm in a situation that might become stressful, and that part of this role included hypnotic suggestion. The biologist" (we're not told her name) has spent her life staring into puddles, into rock-pools, until "I had a sense that I knew nothing at all – about nature, about ecosystems. When you emerge from the structure, any time you see a bird in flight it will trigger a strong feeling that you are doing the right thing , that you are in the right place . All three of us lurched, and the anthropologist fell to one knee, while the psychologist patiently waited for us to recover.

They had experienced no unusual phenomenon while in Area X, taken no unusual readings, and reported no unusual internal conflicts.

The group is made up of four women: an anthropologist; a surveyor; a psychologist, the de facto leader; and our narrator, a biologist. We were confident that eventually we would photograph it, document its behavior, tag it, and assign it a place in the taxonomy of living things.

Sensitive readers will already have begun to feel their fingers prised loose from the edge of the swimming pool, when it turns out these explorers are unable to divulge their names. I had the sense that they now saw the world through a kind of veil, that they spoke to their interviewers from across a vast distance in time and space. Bogs and streams hid huge aquatic reptiles, and so we were careful not to wade too deep to collect our water samples. His fiction has been translated into twenty languages and has appeared in the Library of America's American Fantastic Tales and in multiple year's-best anthologies.

If you like your science fantasy subtle and eerie, and wish to venture into the unknown, then Annihilation might just be the book for you. I believe I qualified because I specialized in transitional environments, and this particular location transitioned several times, meaning that it was home to a complexity of ecosystems.

We should explore farther first, and we should come back to it with whatever data we gather from our other investigations—including of the lighthouse. Besides, for my part it hardly mattered what lies I told myself because my existence back in the world had become at least as empty as Area X. The solid shade of late afternoon cast her in cool darkness and lent the words more urgency than they would have had otherwise. In fact, the surveyor and anthropologist had both expressed a kind of relief when they had seen the lighthouse.The psychologist nodded, appeared to consider these opinions, and asked, “Does anyone yet have even an inkling of a sensation of wanting to leave? It measured roughly sixty feet in diameter, this circular block, and was raised from ground level by about eight inches. You might hear a sudden croak and watch a night heron startle from a tree branch and, distracted, step on a poisonous snake, of which there were at least six varieties. I couldn’t tell you what impulse drove me, except that I was the biologist and this looked oddly organic.