Annihilation (Southern Reach Trilogy #1)

Annihilation (Southern Reach Trilogy #1)

by Jeff VanderMeer
Annihilation (Southern Reach Trilogy #1)

Annihilation (Southern Reach Trilogy #1)

by Jeff VanderMeer

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Overview

A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE FROM ALEX GARLAND, STARRING NATALIE PORTMAN AND OSCAR ISAAC

The Southern Reach Trilogy begins with Annihilation, the Nebula Award-winning novel that "reads as if Verne or Wellsian adventurers exploring a mysterious island had warped through into a Kafkaesque nightmare world" (Kim Stanley Robinson).


Area X has been cut off from the rest of the continent 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 expedition 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 delivers—they discover a massive topographic anomaly and life forms that surpass understanding—but it's the surprises that came across the border with them and the secrets the expedition members are keeping from one another that change everything.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780374710774
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date: 02/04/2014
Series: Southern Reach Trilogy
Sold by: Macmillan
Format: eBook
Pages: 208
Sales rank: 19,057
File size: 1 MB

About the Author

About The Author
Jeff VanderMeer is the author of Dead Astronauts, Borne, and The Southern Reach Trilogy, the first volume of which, Annihilation, won the Nebula Award and the Shirley Jackson Award and was adapted into a movie by Alex Garland starring Natalie Portman. VanderMeer speaks and writes frequently about issues relating to climate change. He grew up in the Fiji Islands and now lives in Tallahassee, Florida, with his wife, Ann VanderMeer, and their cats, plants, and bird feeders.

Read an Excerpt

Annihilation


By Jeff Vandermeer

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Copyright © 2014 VanderMeer Creative, Inc.
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-374-71077-4



CHAPTER 1

01: INITIATION


The tower, which was not supposed to be there, plunges into the earth in a place just before the black pine forest begins to give way to swamp and then the reeds and wind-gnarled trees of the marsh flats. Beyond the marsh flats and the natural canals lies the ocean and, a little farther down the coast, a derelict lighthouse. All of this part of the country had been abandoned for decades, for reasons that are not easy to relate. Our expedition was the first to enter Area X for more than two years, and much of our predecessors' equipment had rusted, their tents and sheds little more than husks. Looking out over that untroubled landscape, I do not believe any of us could yet see the threat.

There were four of us: a biologist, an anthropologist, a surveyor, and a psychologist. I was the biologist. All of us were women this time, chosen as part of the complex set of variables that governed sending the expeditions. The psychologist, who was older than the rest of us, served as the expedition's leader. She had put us all under hypnosis to cross the border, to make sure we remained calm. It took four days of hard hiking after crossing the border to reach the coast.

Our mission was simple: to continue the government's investigation into the mysteries of Area X, slowly working our way out from base camp.

The expedition could last days, months, or even years, depending on various stimuli and conditions. We had supplies with us for six months, and another two years' worth of supplies had already been stored at the base camp. We had also been assured that it was safe to live off the land if necessary. All of our foodstuffs were smoked or canned or in packets. Our most outlandish equipment consisted of a measuring device that had been issued to each of us, which hung from a strap on our belts: a small rectangle of black metal with a glass-covered hole in the middle. If the hole glowed red, we had thirty minutes to remove ourselves to "a safe place." We were not told what the device measured or why we should be afraid should it glow red. After the first few hours, I had grown so used to it that I hadn't looked at it again. We had been forbidden watches and compasses.

When we reached the camp, we set about replacing obsolete or damaged equipment with what we had brought and putting up our own tents. We would rebuild the sheds later, once we were sure that Area X had not affected us. The members of the last expedition had eventually drifted off, one by one. Over time, they had returned to their families, so strictly speaking they did not vanish. They simply disappeared from Area X and, by unknown means, reappeared back in the world beyond the border. They could not relate the specifics of that journey. This transference had taken place across a period of eighteen months, and it was not something that had been experienced by prior expeditions. But other phenomena could also result in "premature dissolution of expeditions," as our superiors put it, so we needed to test our stamina for that place.

We also needed to acclimate ourselves to the environment. In the forest near base camp one might encounter black bears or coyotes. You might hear a sudden croak and watch a night heron startle from a tree branch and, distracted, step on a poisonous snake, of which there were at least six varieties. Bogs and streams hid huge aquatic reptiles, and so we were careful not to wade too deep to collect our water samples. Still, these aspects of the ecosystem did not really concern any of us. Other elements had the ability to unsettle, however. Long ago, towns had existed here, and we encountered eerie signs of human habitation: rotting cabins with sunken, red-tinged roofs, rusted wagon-wheel spokes half-buried in the dirt, and the barely seen outlines of what used to be enclosures for livestock, now mere ornament for layers of pine-needle loam.

Far worse, though, was a low, powerful moaning at dusk. The wind off the sea and the odd interior stillness dulled our ability to gauge direction, so that the sound seemed to infiltrate the black water that soaked the cypress trees. This water was so dark we could see our faces in it, and it never stirred, set like glass, reflecting the beards of gray moss that smothered the cypress trees. If you looked out through these areas, toward the ocean, all you saw was the black water, the gray of the cypress trunks, and the constant, motionless rain of moss flowing down. All you heard was the low moaning. The effect of this cannot be understood without being there. The beauty of it cannot be understood, either, and when you see beauty in desolation it changes something inside you. Desolation tries to colonize you.

As noted, we found the tower in a place just before the forest became waterlogged and then turned to salt marsh. This occurred on our fourth day after reaching base camp, by which time we had almost gotten our bearings. We did not expect to find anything there, based on both the maps that we brought with us and the water-stained, pine-dust-smeared documents our predecessors had left behind. But there it was, surrounded by a fringe of scrub grass, half-hidden by fallen moss off to the left of the trail: a circular block of some grayish stone seeming to mix cement and ground-up seashells. It measured roughly sixty feet in diameter, this circular block, and was raised from ground level by about eight inches. Nothing had been etched into or written on its surface that could in any way reveal its purpose or the identity of its makers. Starting at due north, a rectangular opening set into the surface of the block revealed stairs spiraling down into darkness. The entrance was obscured by the webs of banana spiders and debris from storms, but a cool draft came from below.

At first, only I saw it as a tower. I don't know why the word tower came to me, given that it tunneled into the ground. I could as easily have considered it a bunker or a submerged building. Yet as soon as I saw the staircase, I remembered the lighthouse on the coast and had a sudden vision of the last expedition drifting off, one by one, and sometime thereafter the ground shifting in a uniform and preplanned way to leave the lighthouse standing where it had always been but depositing this underground part of it inland. I saw this in vast and intricate detail as we all stood there, and, looking back, I mark it as the first irrational thought I had once we had reached our destination.

"This is impossible," said the surveyor, staring at her maps. The solid shade of late afternoon cast her in cool darkness and lent the words more urgency than they would have had otherwise. The sun was telling us that soon we'd have to use our flashlights to interrogate the impossible, although I'd have been perfectly happy doing it in the dark.

"And yet there it is," I said. "Unless we are having a mass hallucination."

"The architectural model is hard to identify," the anthropologist said. "The materials are ambiguous, indicating local origin but not necessarily local construction. Without going inside, we will not know if it is primitive or modern, or something in between. I'm not sure I would want to guess at how old it is, either."

We had no way to inform our superiors about this discovery. One rule for an expedition into Area X was that we were to attempt no outside contact, for fear of some irrevocable contamination. We also took little with us that matched our current level of technology. We had no cell or satellite phones, no computers, no camcorders, no complex measuring instruments except for those strange black boxes hanging from our belts. Our cameras required a makeshift darkroom. The absence of cell phones in particular made the real world seem very far away to the others, but I had always preferred to live without them. For weapons, we had knives, a locked container of antique handguns, and one assault rifle, this last a reluctant concession to current security standards.

It was expected simply that we would keep a record, like this one, in a journal, like this one: lightweight but nearly indestructible, with waterproof paper, a flexible black-and-white cover, and the blue horizontal lines for writing and the red line to the left to mark the margin. These journals would either return with us or be recovered by the next expedition. We had been cautioned to provide maximum context, so that anyone ignorant of Area X could understand our accounts. We had also been ordered not to share our journal entries with one another. Too much shared information could skew our observations, our superiors believed. But I knew from experience how hopeless this pursuit, this attempt to weed out bias, was. Nothing that lived and breathed was truly objective—even in a vacuum, even if all that possessed the brain was a self-immolating desire for the truth.

"I'm excited by this discovery," the psychologist interjected before we had discussed the tower much further. "Are you excited, too?" She had not asked us that particular question before. During training, she had tended to ask questions more like "How calm do you think you might be in an emergency?" Back then, I had felt as if she were a bad actor, playing a role. Now it seemed even more apparent, as if being our leader somehow made her nervous.

"It is definitely exciting ... and unexpected," I said, trying not to mock her and failing, a little. I was surprised to feel a sense of growing unease, mostly because in my imagination, my dreams, this discovery would have been among the more banal. In my head, before we had crossed the border, I had seen so many things: vast cities, peculiar animals, and, once, during a period of illness, an enormous monster that rose from the waves to bear down on our camp.

The surveyor, meanwhile, just shrugged and would not answer the psychologist's question. The anthropologist nodded as if she agreed with me. The entrance to the tower leading down exerted a kind of presence, a blank surface that let us write so many things upon it. This presence manifested like a low-grade fever, pressing down on all of us.

I would tell you the names of the other three, if it mattered, but only the surveyor would last more than the next day or two. Besides, we were always strongly discouraged from using names: We were meant to be focused on our purpose, and "anything personal should be left behind." Names belonged to where we had come from, not to who we were while embedded in Area X.


* * *

Originally our expedition had numbered five and included a linguist. To reach the border, we each had to enter a separate bright white room with a door at the far end and a single metal chair in the corner. The chair had holes along the sides for straps; the implications of this raised a prickle of alarm, but by then I was set in my determination to reach Area X. The facility that housed these rooms was under the control of the Southern Reach, the clandestine government agency that dealt with all matters connected to Area X.

There we waited while innumerable readings were taken and various blasts of air, some cool, some hot, pressed down on us from vents in the ceiling. At some point, the psychologist visited each of us, although I do not remember what was said. Then we exited through the far door into a central staging area, with double doors at the end of a long hallway. The psychologist greeted us there, but the linguist never reappeared.

"She had second thoughts," the psychologist told us, meeting our questions with a firm gaze. "She decided to stay behind." This came as a small shock, but there was also relief that it had not been someone else. Of all of our skill sets, linguist seemed at the time most expendable.

After a moment, the psychologist said, "Now, clear your minds." This meant she would begin the process of hypnotizing us so we could cross the border. She would then put herself under a kind of self-hypnosis. It had been explained that we would need to cross the border with precautions to protect against our minds tricking us. Apparently hallucinations were common. At least, this was what they told us. I no longer can be sure it was the truth. The actual nature of the border had been withheld from us for security reasons; we knew only that it was invisible to the naked eye.

So when I "woke up" with the others, it was in full gear, including heavy hiking boots, with the weight of forty-pound backpacks and a multitude of additional supplies hanging from our belts. All three of us lurched, and the anthropologist fell to one knee, while the psychologist patiently waited for us to recover. "I'm sorry," she said. "That was the least startling reentry I could manage."

The surveyor cursed, and glared at her. She had a temper that must have been deemed an asset. The anthropologist, as was her way, got to her feet, uncomplaining. And I, as was my way, was too busy observing to take this rude awakening personally. For example, I noticed the cruelty of the almost imperceptible smile on the psychologist's lips as she watched us struggle to adjust, the anthropologist still floundering and apologizing for floundering. Later I realized I might have misread her expression; it might have been pained or self-pitying.

We were on a dirt trail strewn with pebbles, dead leaves, and pine needles damp to the touch. Velvet ants and tiny emerald beetles crawled over them. The tall pines, with their scaly ridges of bark, rose on both sides, and the shadows of flying birds conjured lines between them. The air was so fresh it buffeted the lungs and we strained to breathe for a few seconds, mostly from surprise. Then, after marking our location with a piece of red cloth tied to a tree, we began to walk forward, into the unknown. If the psychologist somehow became incapacitated and could not lead us across at the end of our mission, we had been told to return to await "extraction." No one ever explained what form "extraction" might take, but the implication was that our superiors could observe the extraction point from afar, even though it was inside the border.

We had been told not to look back upon arrival, but I snuck a glance anyway, while the psychologist's attention was elsewhere. I don't know quite what I saw. It was hazy, indistinct, and already far behind us—perhaps a gate, perhaps a trick of the eye. Just a sudden impression of a fizzing block of light, fast fading.


* * *

The reasons I had volunteered were very separate from my qualifications for the expedition. I believe I qualified because I specialized in transitional environments, and this particular location transitioned several times, meaning that it was home to a complexity of ecosystems. In few other places could you still find habitat where, within the space of walking only six or seven miles, you went from forest to swamp to salt marsh to beach. In Area X, I had been told, I would find marine life that had adjusted to the brackish freshwater and which at low tide swam far up the natural canals formed by the reeds, sharing the same environment with otters and deer. If you walked along the beach, riddled through with the holes of fiddler crabs, you would sometimes look out to see one of the giant reptiles, for they, too, had adapted to their habitat.

I understood why no one lived in Area X now, that it was pristine because of that reason, but I kept un-remembering it. I had decided instead to make believe that it was simply a protected wildlife refuge, and we were hikers who happened to be scientists. This made sense on another level: We did not know what had happened here, what was still happening here, and any preformed theories would affect my analysis of the evidence as we encountered it. 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. With nothing left to anchor me, I needed to be here. As for the others, I don't know what they told themselves, and I didn't want to know, but I believe they all at least pretended to some level of curiosity. Curiosity could be a powerful distraction.

That night we talked about the tower, although the other three insisted on calling it a tunnel. The responsibility for the thrust of our investigations resided with each individual, the psychologist's authority describing a wider circle around these decisions. Part of the current rationale for sending the expeditions lay in giving each member some autonomy to decide, which helped to increase "the possibility of significant variation."

This vague protocol existed in the context of our separate skill sets. For example, although we had all received basic weapons and survival training, the surveyor had far more medical and firearms experience than the rest of us. The anthropologist had once been an architect; indeed, she had years ago survived a fire in a building she had designed, the only really personal thing I had found out about her. As for the psychologist, we knew the least about her, but I think we all believed she came from some kind of management background.


(Continues...)

Excerpted from Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer. Copyright © 2014 VanderMeer Creative, Inc.. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Table of Contents

Contents

Title Page,
Copyright Notice,
Dedication,
01: Initiation,
02: Integration,
03: Immolation,
04: Immersion,
05: Dissolution,
Acknowledgments,
Also by Jeff Vandermeer,
Copyright,

Reading Group Guide

In Jeff VanderMeer's haunting Southern Reach trilogy, an American wilderness has become a shadowland, concealed by the government for more than thirty years. An environmental disaster zone, Area X is home to strange biological forces that have begun gathering strength. The secret agency known as the Southern Reach has sent in eleven expeditions to discover the truth about Area X, but each team succumbed to violence or illness. Our story begins as a twelfth group is attempting to succeed where all others have failed. Comprised of four women, the team includes a psychologist (the de facto leader), a surveyor, an anthropologist, and a biologist. Their mission is to map the terrain and collect specimens; to record their observations, scientific and otherwise, of their surroundings and of one another; and, above all, to avoid being contaminated by Area X itself. But those who venture across the border bring their own secret histories, creating a world where trust is a fool's game.


This guide is designed to enrich your discussion. We hope that the following questions will enhance your journey into Area X.

Interviews

Barnes & Noble Review Interview with Jeff VanderMeer

A few months ago, we talked with World Fantasy Award–winning writer and editor Jeff VanderMeer about Wonderbook, his illustrated guidebook for creative writers, and he told us a little about his forthcoming work of fiction, the Southern Reach Trilogy. The story, he said, was fundamentally "about how people react when they come up against the truly inexplicable and about our relationship to nature."

The first in this three-volume work, Annihilation, is now in the hands of readers, whom it plunges headlong into a tale that lives somewhere between a Conradian suspense and adventure, eerie horror, and a postmodern investigation into questions of identity and self- knowledge. Unfolding in lushly described natural environment, it follows a biologist assigned to a team who have volunteered to investigate the secrets of an uncanny coastal region known only as "Area X." And while Area X has terrors lying in wait for the biologist and her colleagues, as dissension, suspicion, and secrets quickly take their toll, the real challenges — and horrors — the biologist must face prove to come from within.

The second and third volumes in this quick-release trilogy — Authority and Acceptance — follow later this year, so readers won't have to wait long to follow VanderMeer's labyrinth to the center. But believe me, you don't want to hear any spoilers. So in a recent email conversation with the novelist, we confined ourselves to the events of the first volume, which is packed with plenty of surprises all on its own. The following is an edited transcript of our conversation. — Bill Tipper

The Barnes & Noble Review: Annihilation begins with an adventure-story scenario that echoes with the memory of dozens of classic novels, pulp stories, and films: a team of four women, each an expert in a separate discipline, are deposited in the mysterious wilderness of "Area X," armed and with the mission to explore and report. (Then you drop characters, and readers, down a succession of rabbit holes.) Did you have particular fictional models in your mind, an archetypal expedition into the jungle? Do you enjoy reading adventure stories?

Jeff VanderMeer: The opening more or less wrote itself, and I didn't really have a literary antecedent in mind — perhaps because the setting is such a real place to me. But I've always liked expeditions into the unknown, and so perhaps I was thinking on some subconscious level of some of Borges's metaphysical expeditions and of the sedimentary layer of childhood reading in various pulp magazines and anthologies of similar scenarios. If so, it was all mulched up and crushed together in such a way as to be indecipherable to me as influence. Multiple readings of Kafka, the nature poetry of Patiann Rogers, and Leena Krohn's short novel Tainaron certainly were useful on a craft level — and J. G. Ballard's a master of making space and time compress or expand in reader's minds, and there are moments in Annihilation where something I learned from Ballard helped me create certain effects.

BNR: The "biologist" — as we come to know her — who narrates the story has both the damaged stoicism of the hard-boiled hero and a sensitivity to the natural world that bespeaks something very different. Things go very badly for the "team" — is her isolation from them something that you see as a strength, or is she the most vulnerable of them all?

JV: Is she damaged or is the world around her outside of Area X damaged? That's the question I hoped to raise, to some extent. We're so over-programmed to interact, especially in the age of social media, that I've seen people who don't want smartphones castigated as somehow deviant. In such an environment, solitude is a rare experience, and perhaps we should value it more — value it in the way the biologist does, who surely knows herself better than I know myself. Not to mention, every day we walk by weeds in the pavement using quantum mechanics to enhance photosynthesis and worms in the soil whose senses far outstrip our own and our tech, in certain aspects. As to whether she's vulnerable or not — it's a very good question. I think she is, and ultimately that is a strength. She makes herself vulnerable, is willing to take that risk with the natural world in a way she doesn't with people.

BNR: For all its menace in the story, the coastal wetland of Area X is a beautiful environment — you offer the sense that though it's replete with terrible mysteries, it's also got a sort of organic unity of its own. And much of the portraiture of the landscape and wildlife is done with obvious affection. It seems at least superficially a Floridian landscape — did you base it on a particular place in your home state?

JV: There's a fourteen-mile hike I do out at the St. Marks Wildlife Refuge in North Florida, and the entire novel takes place within that expanse, even though Annihilation is the kind of novel where I don't name where they are, in terms of where it is on earth. There's a kind of useful distance created that's similar to when you base a character on someone you know but it's not really that person, that's just the catalyst for creating the character. Still, there's not a physical description in the novel that isn't something I've seen while hiking. I was even charged by a wild boar once, although in the novel something much stranger happens than what happened to me in real life. I do find it beautiful — I wouldn't trade it for any place in the world.

BNR: Annihilation shares with some of your earlier work a central and rather unsettling concern with the question of how we know that we are really "us" inside — and what's most interesting in this novel is that there are agencies, both human and inhuman, that look to be trying to do the driving for your main character. Do you see this kind of threat to the unitary self as a major theme in your novels?

JV: Yes, I do, and the juxtaposition is deliberate. Clearly, Annihilation charts the extremes, but to some extent we're all constrained by "isms" and systems we live within, all affected by them. So this just makes manifest what is often a steady pulsing truth beneath the surface anyway. What I'm interested in charting are the ways in which people deal with these kinds of pressures, no matter where they originate. I said somewhere else that in the face of things like global warming the key to our survival is to be able to envision the world without us in it — and in a sense acts of imagination are required regarding preservation of the self, too.

BNR: Hypnotism plays an important role in the story — an idea that lends an almost premodern quality to that part of Annihilation but that you deploy to singular effect by making it unclear just how far its influence has spread. How did you decide to include it as an aspect of the story — and what does it imply about our sense of free will?

JV: In the second and third novels it becomes clear that there's a great deal of conditioning behind the hypnosis, and selection of individuals with at least some initial impulse to obey the mission statement of the Southern Reach, so it in a way becomes an even more troubling question. It might seem a little out there, but with social media in particular you see mind viruses not particularly different from hypnotic suggestion spreading at an accelerated rate. We take in received ideas and lies every day and spout them out again because we live in an age in which the lines between fact and fiction, expertise and ignorance, have been irrevocably blurred. It's not that far from someone suddenly taking up some idea as their own and outright hypnotism. A skilled e-magician can induce any number of e-effects. So although it's expressed as hypnosis, the idea of suggestibility is key to how our society often works.

BNR: The shadow of otherworldly forces permeates this novel, but it quickly becomes apparent that singularly human mysteries are driving many of the events of the story — in particular the work of the agency of the Southern Reach, and the way it has burdened the expedition with some very strange preparations and misdirections. Were you deliberately setting out to mingle a conspiracy story with something more traditionally science fictional? Is either term satisfying to you?

JV: Whether we admit it or not, at the very least inefficiency and superstition play a fairly large role in our world. I can't tell you the number of times in day jobs that I've seen major decisions made on whims, because someone had a crush on someone else, or for other reasons that have nothing to do with logic. I've also seen major corporations and government agencies enact policies based on codifying worst practices just because a particular project that should have imploded did not implode, without further analysis. So the answer is just that nothing in the Southern Reach novels in that regard is different than what I've directly observed. It becomes not even a matter of conspiracy so much as an Agreement to Mutually Pretend that then either devolves naturally or some gifted bullshit artist comes along and deliberately manipulates the narrative. In the Southern Reach trilogy, those systems come up against a System that is so completely different that there isn't a single common point of reference.

BNR: Overarchingly, there is the sense in this book of a puzzle laid out for the reader, one that requires careful attention to obliquely rendered clues. Do you see it that way? Will there be a solution in future volumes?

JV: The series does not end with a miniature polar bear inside a snow globe that's on a character's desk that led to a dream the character had which is the story the reader or viewer has been experiencing. I'm forever in favor of leaving some vistas unexplored, but I'm also a fan of delivering on a promise. I don't think it'll play out the way readers may expect, but there are answers in the second and third book that should satisfy.

BNR: Annihilation restricts itself to the point of view of the biologist, as she struggles to survive and make sense of what she finds as a result of the "expedition." Will the next volume continue her story?

JV: I can confirm that readers will learn more about the biologist at some point, but the second book is an expedition into the Southern Reach, through the viewpoint of John Rodriguez, the newly appointed director of the agency. I can also confirm that one thousand white rabbits play a role, and that what has once been shelved may suddenly be un-shelved in dramatic fashion. Perhaps that's cryptic, but isn't that part of the fun of getting involved with a series like this one? BNR: The title of the book comes from a sequence I found the most chilling in the entire book. Did you have that moment in mind from the early stages?

JV: Perhaps the most unsettling thing for me is I don't remember writing that sequence. I had bad bronchitis while writing Annihilation, and although I would review the day's writing, some mornings I would just wake up and write while still half asleep. That morning I woke with the sound of seagulls in my head and the smell of sea salt, and a vision of the lighthouse, and I just sat down at the computer and wrote the scene. Although a lot of things changed in the revision process, that scene remained largely the same.

BNR: Do you ever scare yourself with your writing?

JV: It's really peculiar — Annihilation is, on an autobiographical level, a love song to a place I know so well, and thus nothing in it really scared me, except the initial vision of what was in the tunnel. But I will tell you that while writing Authority, I continually felt as if things were peering out at me from the text, and more than once I had to step away and stop writing. And then while writing Acceptance I can't even describe the experience, but it was like somehow from on high seeing everything playing out at once and being filled with a kind of love toward the characters as they struggled to do their best in impossible situations. This series is personal to me, and I'm fiercely protective of the people in it.

February 21, 2014

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