ABSTRACT
In Jeff VanderMeer’s trilogy The Southern Reach (2014), a team of scientists from different disciplines is sent out by a secret government agency called The Southern Reach to explore Area X, a so-called “transitional landscape” somewhere on the US east coast in which nature seems to be progressing in unforeseen and disconcerting directions. Even more worrying, the borders of Area X are expanding. The official story sold to the general public is that the area is off-limits due to the catastrophic impact of military experiments. The unnamed biologist who is the first-person narrator of Annihilation, the first part of the trilogy, recounts how soon after the scientists arrive, they are confronted with a landscape that is doubly weird. On the one hand, it appears completely empty and pristine, unperturbed by human influence; on the other hand, the scientists encounter phenomena that baffle their understanding. On the top floor of an abandoned lighthouse, a giant pile of diaries written by previous explorers is rotting away. In a tunnel thrusting deep into the ground, a sluglike creature baptized “The Crawler” is writing ominous poetry, the letters made of living tissue. After being infected by spores emitted by the living letters, a strange golden light starts shining from within the scientists’ bodies. While some lose themselves in agonizing delirium, not only abandoning the mission but losing their will to live, the expedition’s biologist is fascinated by the transformation and, somehow, able to weather it. Although, in a way, the biologist does lose herself as she is cloned in an encounter with the Crawler—who turns out to be a kind of bioengineer—the trilogy prompts the reader to ask what a person really is, what is unique about the entity we call the human, and whether losing the sense of human uniqueness is truly a loss or a gain. This posthumanist tenor is amplified by the narrator’s casting doubt on the reliability of her own narration, suggesting that human life is governed by forces beyond the grasp of individuals.
