Annihilation: A Novel: 1 (Southern Reach Trilogy)

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The birds sang as they should; the deer took flight, their white tails exclamation points against the green and brown of the underbrush; the raccoons, bowlegged, swayed about their business, ignoring us. Besides, for my part it hardly mattered what lies I told myself because my existence back in the world had become at least as empty as Area X.

A tense and chilling psychological thriller about an unraveling expedition and the strangeness within us. Unable to convince the surveyor she is not a threat, the biologist shoots her dead using newly enhanced instincts that have resulted from her "brightening".Jeff VanderMeer is the author of Hummingbird Salamander , the Borne novels ( Borne , The Strange Bird , and Dead Astronauts ), and The Southern Reach Trilogy ( Annihilation , Authority , and Acceptance ), the first volume of which won the Nebula Award and the Shirley Jackson Award and was adapted into a movie by Alex Garland. Assimilator and assimilated interact through the catalyst of a script of words, which powers the engine of transformation.

I couldn’t tell you what impulse drove me, except that I was the biologist and this looked oddly organic. Garland stated to Creative Screenwriting that his adaptation is based on only the first novel of the trilogy, saying, "At the point I started working on Annihilation, there was only one of the three books. The anthropologist in particular was on edge; her gaze couldn’t alight on any one thing but kept moving and moving. In part to get the distance to explore modes of thoughts, and in the absence of being able to imagine being truly not-human, to get as close to that as possible without marginalizing that state of being as horrific.Then came silence, and then another movement, at a different rhythm, which for a terrifying moment seemed like it might come from a second source. Why do we see as strengths those things that are actually now weaknesses in ourselves as a sustainable species on Earth?