Few works change the rules of the game as quickly as Jeff VanderMeer’s 2014 novel destruction. The first entry in the author’s Southern Reach trilogy introduced readers to Area X, a strange and unnamed place that defies all attempts by scientists to document it. The novel concerns what is believed to be the 12th attempt by four unnamed women to explore Area X, which ends in disaster.
With destruction and its sequels authority And assumptionVanderMeer has created the definitive work of climate change speculative fiction, a trilogy that combines weird fiction and eco-horror into one unforgettable experience. And it gets even weirder, because VanderMeer is revisiting the Southern Reach this fall with absolution.
To celebrate the 10th anniversary of Area X and the upcoming absolutionThe original Southern Reach trilogy is being reissued with beautiful new covers and new introductions by literary greats. You can read the first of these below: Acclaimed author Karen Joy Fowler’s new introduction for destructiona tribute to one of the most indelible and unknown new settings to have captivated us in a long time.
To leave understanding at that which one cannot understand is a great achievement. Anyone who cannot do this will be destroyed on the lathe of heaven.
—Zhuangzi (translated by Ursula K. Le Guin)
For most of my writing career, mimetic realism was the literary form admired by critics, reviewers, and professors. The various fantastic literatures, those stories that place the author’s imagination above lived experience, were suspect for reasons unclear to me – either childish or escapist, or lacking subtlety or characterization. That they are often neither of these things has had little impact on their reception. Thankfully, that has changed.
I’ve had a love of fantasy all my life, but it wasn’t until adulthood that I realized that my enjoyment often depends largely on the setting. Fantasy stories are the only ones that can take place absolutely anywhere. Some of my favorite examples, which I came across around the same time as this revelation, are: Venice Drowned by Kim Stanley Robinson, a story set, as the title suggests, in a future where Venice is completely underwater; The Edge of the World by Michael Swanwick, set in the imaginary place where it was once feared that ships might sail over the edge and disappear from the world altogether; What condition we are in
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Image: Picador
Area X is a relatively new addition to this vast and exciting area, a deeply structured and richly imagined world. Basically, the plot of destruction is not unknown. A small group of explorers enters an unknown wilderness. Dangerous adventures follow. If the reader finds this initial situation in the first pages, he can be forgiven for feeling a little comfort because he recognizes it. The plot is more than just familiar, it is classic. Remember, King Solomon’s Mines, Lost horizon, The man who wanted to be king.
This feeling of comfort will not last long. The reader in question will soon be aware that he has entered the terrain of someone else’s imagination. If, as John Gardner famously said, good writing is “a living and enduring dream,” destruction soon feels more like a hallucination.
In this first book of VanderMeer’s ambitious and masterful project (there are now four books and more to come), we don’t know much about Area X. It is separated from the rest of the world by an invisible border; all communication with the people who once lived in the region has been lost, as have the people themselves.
Repeated attempts have been made to explore and map Area X. The mysterious agency known as Southern Reach has already sent several expeditions there. These previous expeditions ended disastrously. Why Southern Reach continues these attempts is unknown. Almost everything about Southern Reach is currently unknown.
*
One of the main features of Area X is an old lighthouse that has been discovered and mapped by previous expeditions. It appears to have once been the site of a terrible battle. There is a second feature that has not yet been discovered or mapped. This feature acts as a sort of mirror image of the lighthouse, and our narrator insists on calling it a tower, even though its top is at ground level and the stairs lead down. The rest of the expedition refer to it as a tunnel, and this difference in perception puts the narrator in conflict with her fellow travelers that will only deepen.
The most fascinating feature of the tower is the writing on its walls. There appear words, sentences in English that seem to be biological, fungal in nature. The sentences have a quasi-biblical tone and the words almost make sense, but not quite. The tower seems to breathe and could be alive.
Aside from these two salient features, most of Area X is now wilderness, a bewildering wilderness where anything and everything seems possible. Despite the narrator’s disorientation, which the reader now shares, the text is deeply haunting. VanderMeer’s descriptions are detailed – sounds and sights, animals and plants, everything is brought to life incredibly vividly in his images and prose.
And here everything is equally interesting – the ruins of the houses, the appearance and activities of the insects, the waterways, dolphins, stairs, stones. The text demands a certain attention from the reader, an energy of engagement that matches the energy of writing. As a narrative strategy, the accuracy of details serves to anchor the reader in a story that would otherwise be full of uncertainties. We may not know exactly what is happening, how or why, but we always know where we are.
The overall impression of Area X is one of breathtaking richness. The landscape is simultaneously beautiful and dangerous, as nature always is. But it is precisely this fertility that is threatening here; it threatens to overwhelm. Area X is undergoing a process of renewal that seems to involve the eradication of all remaining artifacts of human influence. Area X now leaves its mark on the people who enter it, not the other way around. These marks may or may not be fatal. But they are always transformative.
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The archetypal power of images such as the lighthouse and the tower, and the lack of proper names for the exploring party, could lead the reader to allegories. I think this is foolish. Not that a referential decoding couldn’t work, but many other decodings would work as well. Trying to find a key will neither improve nor clarify the text. Yet two things stand out to me as essential components of this work.
The first and obviously most important concern of the book is the correct relationship of man with nature. Man is used to walking through the world sovereignly. Of course, there are other apex predators, and nature is not obliged to protect us. We are also exposed to bacterial attacks, cancer and other diseases and threats. The dangers are large and small. But the fact that so many animals flee at the sight of us has allowed us to give ourselves a sense of our own superiority. We are used to being seen. We are used to seeing ourselves as powerful. We are used to feeling above nature, rather than in it. None of this works in Area X. This is a landscape that cannot bend to the demands of others.
A second major problem with the book is its pervasive uncertainty. Uncertainty is the hallmark of every element of this story—not only in the unpredictable and enigmatic world of Area X, but also in the social dynamics of human relationships on both sides of the border. The narrator’s thoughts and perceptions are suspect even to herself. She seems to act in good faith, trying to be a reliable guide, but she cannot be sure of who she once was or who she has become. She cannot be sure that she is seeing the same things as others. She cannot even be certain that she is seeing what she thinks she is seeing.
The words on the tower walls are an expression of this uncertainty. The reader waits in vain for their meaning to be revealed, for the perfectly understandable words to communicate a perfectly understandable whole. The question of whether they are intended as communication at all also remains open.
*
The project of understanding our world is less advanced than we imagine, despite all the years we have spent working on it. Even our own bodies remain a mystery to us. No other book expresses this fact so well—that we live with an understanding of circumstances that is at best incomplete and at worst wrong. Despite all our efforts, our observations, our ongoing experiments—even when conducted with care and precision—the world remains largely unknown to us. We can construct logical, plausible, and even predictive narratives, but these are merely hypotheses. To think that we have achieved total clarity, or could one day achieve it, let alone bend the world to our will, is to vastly overestimate our abilities. To expect certainty is just another example of human hubris.
And yet sometimes, often, we must act. We know that we don’t know enough. And we know that we must act anyway.
This is a clear imperative in light of the climate crisis, but it is also a fair assessment of the permanent, eternal state of humanity. Decisions have always been made based on incomplete information, and history is replete with examples of actions based on beliefs that were not so much incomplete as absurd.
Living in uncertainty is inevitable. Admitting this is living like an adult. destruction is a book for adults.
Our climate crisis is an unspoken but obvious subtext in this fantastic and fantastical book. How humans as individuals and even more so as a whole can best live in harmony with the rest of the world is perhaps the greatest question of our time and is likely to remain so. And so destructionwhich addresses this very topic so powerfully and memorably, will probably remain a book that is perfectly suited to the present moment for decades to come.
Excerpted from ANNIHILATION: A Novel by Jeff VanderMeer. Originally published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2014. 10th Anniversary Paperback Edition, MCD/Picador 2024. Copyright © 2014 VanderMeer Creative, Inc. Introduction Copyright © 2024 Karen Joy Fowler. All rights reserved.
