making assumptions about one’s preferences
This is a lesson I long since learned, and any of you who know me know the story. There I was on a rollercoaster, climbing up that initial hill, thinking Oh crap holy mother WHY AM I HERE? (For the record, I don’t honestly remember. I was a preteen, so presumably peer pressure or a desire not to look as uncool as I was.) As the terrible engine reached its apogee, I had this moment of incredible clarity. ‘Self,’ I said to myself, ‘you’ve never been on a rollercoaster, you can’t actually know you won’t like it. But you’re strapped in now, and probably going into the experience convinced you’ll hate it isn’t the way to get the most out of it.’
As it turns out, I love rollercoasters.
It’s a creed I try to live by, to shun the shunning of new experiences, to refuse to assume I can predict how I might feel about anything I haven’t actually tried. The philosophy has served me well, but it can be difficult. Books are no exception.
all of which brings me to: Annihilation, by Jeff Vandermeer
“I started out toward the coast, through the jagged narrow spaces between the trees. There, a greater darkness gathered, the confluence of the night, the clouds, and the sea. Somewhere beyond, another border.”
Annihilation, Jeff Vandermeer
I lean heavily toward the second F when it comes to SFF. When I pick up a book covered in pictures of bugs and discover the plot revolves around a protagonist known only as ‘the biologist,’ off to study a quarantined zone damaged by military testing, I’m making that face.
You know the face.
The face people make when someone tries to hand them something nasty.
Man was I wrong! I can’t promise you’ll love this book as much as I did, because I suspect its appeal is kind of niche. Do you like a story where you think you know what’s happening, but then the parameters start to shift? I’m not talking a world-upending twist a la Ender’s Game or Shogun (both amazing, read them!). We’re in the realm of reality dissolving around you, until you can’t tell up from down and you’re forced to stop trying to make sense of your environment. Sphere by Michael Crichton is an example that comes to mind.
Annihilation was a stellar contribution to this trope, in the form of a field journal written by a scientist detailing her exposure to and contamination by a presence so alien, reality is being rewritten around it. The story itself is short and fast-paced, punctuated by outbursts of violence as the exploration team collapses almost instantly on itself. The revelations that the situation has been extant longer than the biologist was told, that her training was largely lies and the mission is a double-blind, feel trivial alongside the impossibility that permeates Area X. What is there is an upside-down/ underground tower filled with fungus. How it appears reminded me of the distortion at the margin of a lens, where everything is bent painfully out of whack between the one clear image and the other.
I was at times – annoyed isn’t the right word, but I suppose puzzled by the author’s decision to put so much of the biologist’s back story into her narrative; it felt forced and inapt in the context of a woman so avowedly anti-social. It all fell together at the end, however, the ambivalent note she leaves us on, the dubious sense of hopefulness. You’re certain she’s doomed, but still. She refuses to form an opinion – is Area X bad or good? – and her perspective stays with you. Maybe walking in the other direction will lead somewhere after all, and it feels worth trying.
Honestly, weird AF and very well written, the prose is a perfect balance of stark and expressive. Strongly recommend, if you like this kind of thing. If you don’t… like I said at the beginning, you won’t be sure until you try it.
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