"'What happened to her?' the surveyor whispered. She kept taking quick, nervous glances back at me as she stood guard, almost as if whatever had happened wasn't over. As if she expected the anthropologist to come back to horrifying life."
Jeff VanderMeer is an American science fiction author resident in Florida. The Southern Reach trilogy is his most celebrated work, and Annihilation forms the first part of this trilogy. He's often grouped alongside other authors within the "New Weird" subgenre, but in my opinion that subgenre is nonsense. At what point was science fiction not weird?
I saw Alex Garland's film adaptation long before reading the book, and while the book and the movie are similarly bleak I'd have to say that the book is more of an intellectual exercise. The film - as one would expect - adds more drama and characterization to what is a very bare bones story. The movie is also more violent than the book, at least to the extent that the other characters witness acts of violence. In the book deaths happen "offscreen" while the protagonist is busy elsewhere.
In case you haven't seen the movie or read the book, in Annihilation several characters explore Area X, a strange region quarantined off from the rest of the world. These characters are never named, and the protagonist is known only as "the biologist." Throughout this (very) short book the biologist reflects back upon her reasons for entering Area X, and although these reflections explain her reasons for being there her tone remains unemotional throughout. This approach makes sense, because it is ideas that are being explored in Annihilation, not the characters themselves.
You might, by the way, want to check out the concept of annihilation in particle physics before either reading the book or watching the movie. It sheds a certain light (or a certain number of photons) on what the author was trying to do.
Having only read Annihilation - again, a very short book - I'm unable to arrive at some sort of conclusion regarding Jeff VanderMeer as a writer. He definitely has a good command of the subject matter, and the detail with which he explores biological concepts brought to mind Neal Stephenson. Unlike Stephenson, however, VanderMeer knows how to get to the point, and I'm happy to say that where a book like Seveneves is burdened with unnecessary details (often at the expense of its story), Annihilation says only what it needs to say and nothing more.
But, strangely enough, what Annihilation really reminded me of is H.P. Lovecraft's famous story In the Mountains of Madness. Sure, In the Mountains of Madness isn't science fiction by any stretch of the imagination, but both Annihilation and Lovecraft's story share the same sense of existential dread.
To sum up, I'd recommend this book. As science fiction stories go it's rock solid, and it will likely stay with you for a long time. I have a few other books on my shelf yet to read, but after doing so I'll try to keep VanderMeer in mind. I'm pretty sure the other two books in his Southern Reach trilogy are just as good as Annihilation.
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