Paperback, 195 pages

English language

Published April 16, 2014 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

ISBN:
978-0-374-10409-2
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4 stars (30 reviews)

Area X has been cut off from the rest of the world for decades. Nature has reclaimed the last vestiges of human civilization. The first expedition returned with reports of a pristine, Edenic landscape; the second expedition ended in mass suicide, the third in a hail of gunfire as its members turned on one another. The members of the eleventh expedition returned as shadows of their former selves, and within weeks, all had died of cancer. In Annihilation, the first volume of Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach Trilogy, we join the twelfth expedition.

The group is made up of four women: an anthropologist; a surveyor; a psychologist, the de facto leader; and our narrator, a biologist. Their mission is to map the terrain, record all observations of their surroundings and of one another, and, above all, avoid being contaminated by Area X itself.

They arrive expecting the unexpected, and Area X …

3 editions

Exzessives Schreiben

5 stars

Wie angekündigt habe ich Annihilation schon wieder gelesen (vermutlich zum vierten Mal, zuletzt erst im Dezember), Anlass ist die angekündigte Besprechung des Werks im empfehlenswerten Science Fiction-Podcast Sprawl Radio.

Was mir bei dieser Lektüre auffiel, war der Bezug zum exzessiven, sinnlosen Schreiben. Darauf kam ich, weil ich zur Zeit wieder in so ein Journaling/immer ein Notizbuch dabeihaben-Rabbithole gefallen bin. In Annihilation schreiben immer alle, der Crawler schreibt einen endlosen, alttestamentarischen Sermon auf die TunnelTurmwand, die Notizbücher der Expeditionen vergammeln in mannshohen Haufen, zugleich lesen wir den Report der Biologin. Das passt dann vielleicht auch irgendwie zu dem exzessiven Schreiben Richard Seymours in The Twittering Machine.

Review of 'Annihilation' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

I can not quite pinpoint what I liked about this books, but I can say that I thought it was fun.

Annihilation is a novel in the Weird fiction vein, and has a lot of characteristics associated with that genre. There's a first person narrator, inexplicable occurrences, entities whose being is incomprehensible and whose existence threatens the sanity of normal human beings. It kind of reminds me of At the Mountain of Madness... if it took place in some Southern US jungle and if Lovecraft was a good writer.

VanderMeer here is actually a very focused and competent writer in this novel, which you normally do not see with Weird fiction. This is particularly appreciated towards the end as one of the incomprehensible creatures is seen and encountered. The reader is left disoriented, but in a good way... as if you had a brush with the creature and not like …

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