INTRODUCTION
BY N. K. JEMISIN
Desolation tries to colonize you. (Annihilation)
To my own shame, I have become a jaded reader in recent years. By this I mean that my enthusiasm and curiosity, my drive to experience new worlds, have all been damaged by a persistent disjunct between reality and the speculative fiction I most enjoy. Is it any wonder, given the horrors of Trump’s first regime, the looming threat of another, a global plague allowed to run rampant, and a billionaire-backed culture war on the rest of us? I’m more jaded about everything now. Escapism at this juncture feels like a way to temporarily pretend that everything is fine—and while there’s value in taking a break from Hell, it also feels dangerous. Like drinking to drown my sorrows; nothing wrong with alcohol now and again, but nobody needs a steady diet of oblivion.
What I’ve found myself seeking instead are philosophies of entropy and survival—that is, fiction that addresses multifaceted decay and the psychology needed to survive it. At this point (to mangle Audre Lorde) the massa has handed his tools out freely after designing them to break at first usage, buying out the only shop that could fix them (and the only newspaper that tried to report on the scam), and charging all customers a subscription fee. And these days, it’s no longer just us marginalized folks who need our media to acknowledge the slow-motion apocalypse we’re all trapped in.
Enter the Southern Reach books. When I first read Annihilation—during the run-up to the 2016 election—it was a welcome breath of fungal, fetid air. Other fiction of the time seemed determined to suggest there was no need for alarm, things couldn’t be so bad, anything broken could be fixed. Could it, though? As I watched my country embrace a stupid, incompetent, and blatantly criminal fascist while insisting that his spiteful, privileged sycophants somehow had a point … well. When you’re already queasy, sweet smells make the feeling worse.
It helped to read instead about the smells—and sights, and horrors, and haunting beauty—of Area X. It helped me to imagine that creeping, transformative infection, warping body and mind and environment and institution, because that was the world I was living in. It helped to meet the twelfth expedition’s nameless women, who were simultaneously individuals with selfish motivations and archetypes trapped in their roles: the biologist, driven by the loss of her mate and the need to integrate into a new ecosystem; the psychologist, a human-subjects ethics violation in human(?) flesh. We are dropped into danger with these women, immediately forced to confront an existential threat with courage and perseverance … and this, this, was what I needed from my fiction. The second book, Authority, was even more what I needed. As we watch Control slowly realize he’s never been in control, and that things are a lot worse than his complacency allowed him to see, it just resonated so powerfully. His overreliance on procedure and the assumed wisdom of his predecessor, his dogged refusal to see the undying plant in his office as a sign of something wrong … There was nothing of 2014’s politics overtly visible in the book, and yet they were all over it, like mold.
I’ve read (and written) reviews of these books, and it seems to me that there’s a common misreading that applies: namely, that they are “climate fiction,” or “cli-fi.” This clunky label fits superficially, in that climate change occurs during the course of the book. However, Area X, with its inexplicable reality-warping power, is a poor metaphor for human-caused destruction, or even for the surreality of climate denial (talk about reality warping).
I think a better analytic is to view the books as postcolonial fiction. Per Caribbean Canadian writer Nalo Hopkinson, postcolonial stories take the adventurous repertoire of science fiction, such as traveling to a distant realm and taming the exotic flora, fauna, and people who live there, and “from the experience of the colonizee, critique it, pervert it, fuck with it.” The characters of the Southern Reach books are only obliquely marginalized. Their races, ethnicities, class distinctions, and other markers of identity are deliberately downplayed, down to the lack of personal names—but they are all women, which is atypical of pretty much any US government agency. Two of them (the Asian biologist and the half-Indigenous psychologist) are racialized. Biology and psychology and anthropology are often dismissed as “soft” sciences in large part because too many women thrive in them, or because they’ve done too good a job of reconsidering racial/cultural/ethnic equity and updating practices and personnel to suit. As the twelfth expedition proceeds into Area X, on the surface it seems they are reenacting a thousand science fiction novels, going forth as intrepid strangers into a strange land. But for any reader who’s familiar with those classic narratives, Annihilation’s version feels like a setup: our marginalized protagonists, lacking the privileges and power of stalwart, square-jawed white men, seem doomed from pretty much the moment they enter Area X.
So they are the colonizees in this situation, and Area X is definitely fucking with them … but as the story proceeds, it becomes clear that they are themselves fucking with that classic adventure dynamic. The psychologist has wholly focused her skills on taming her fellow adventurers, and perhaps herself. The biologist is trying to solve a mystery of identity—something unquantifiable and scientifically immeasurable, more felt than known, and deeply personal. The anthropologist has no one to study save her fellow expedition members, and only the surveyor seems wholly focused on Area X at all. Perhaps this is why she later tries to kill the biologist. We see the irony of this setup most clearly with Control in Authority; he is the stalwart, square-jawed man that traditional science fiction has primed us to expect, even hope for, because he’ll have the power to solve the situation—right? But Control becomes the proof that no colonizee can ever “tame” Area X. At best, they might manage to tame themselves.
By the end of book 1, the twelfth expedition becomes the first successful one—by a colonizer’s rubric—in that they manage to share new understandings of Area X with those outside it, and in that at least one member of the team “survives” with her mind and form somewhat intact. The beginning of book 2 seems to confirm this, as the story shifts to explore the Kafkaesque bureaucracy of the Southern Reach itself. But the expedition members’ choices have become the choices of the colonized: Survive or not? Internalize or not? Assimilate or not? They bring these choices to Control, who adds his own familiar, horrifying existential questions: When change seems inevitable and irreversible, can it be controlled to some degree? Can the self remain intact after the mind and body have been Ship-of-Theseus’d into something unrecognizable?
This is not to say that climate-focused readings are irrelevant to the Southern Reach series. I mean that climate issues are also colonization issues, in that the worst effects of climate change fall hardest upon the most marginalized. We observe the breakdown of the twelfth expedition—an invasive species to this new biome—even as we observe the breakdown of recognizable life within Area X. New configurations of life emerge from this collapse of old structures: hybridizations, commensalisms, wholesale assimilations. Even our bureaucracies, as evidenced in Authority, form a kind of natural order that can be deconstructed and readapted. Control fails to contain Area X because of another key understanding that the colonized eventually develop: You cannot fight that with which you have become complicit. The best you can do is realize what’s happening and hope it’s not too late by the time you do.
Never fear, Area X reassures. Colonization and its associated harms, terrifying and painful as they might be, are not the end—however much traditional science fiction stories might suggest otherwise. Survival is possible, if one is lucky, brave, and clever … but it might require a transformation far more nuanced and complex than mere death. And this is a reassurance! Speculative fiction has historically framed colonization as a contest with winners and losers, but it’s never been that simple. Human beings are syncretic; some element of who and what we were will always remain in what we become. Entropy cannot be stopped, but new energy can be added to the system, and those who are caught up in the transformation can claim a degree of that power for themselves. And ultimately, syncretism means that we are carried forward regardless—if only in part. Still better than nothing.
As I write these words, multiple genocides are in progress. I feel no certainty for the future. Half my nation is so in thrall to its own bigoted fantasies that I neither expect nor particularly want the United States to survive. I do not fear the Singularity, sentient AI, or any technological boogeyman; I fear the confluence of greed and short-sightedness and spite that human rights and human consciences cannot survive intact.
But new systems emerge, inevitably. After a climate extinction or natural disaster, ecologies adapt; new entities eventually fill old, empty niches. Power changes hands, and stories can be deconstructed. Even when the situation is most terrifying, least stable, there will always be those who embrace the change, and perhaps gain new strength from it.
It’s a bittersweet understanding, but the change is upon us. We’re all in Area X now. If we’re lucky, clever, and courageous, we might still recognize ourselves when it’s all said and done.
000
In Control’s dreams it is early morning, the sky deep blue with just a twinge of light. He is staring from a cliff down into an abyss, a bay, a cove. It always changes. He can see for miles into the still water. He can see ocean behemoths gliding there, like submarines or bell-shaped orchids or the wide hulls of ships, silent, ever moving, the size of them conveying such a sense of power that he can feel the havoc of their passage even from so far above. He stares for hours at the shapes, the movements, listening to the whispers echoing up to him … and then he falls. Slowly, too slowly, he falls soundless into the dark water, without splash or ripple. And keeps falling.
Sometimes this happens while he is awake, as if he hasn’t been paying enough attention, and then he silently recites his own name until the real world returns to him.
001: FALLING
First day. The beginning of his last chance.
“These are the survivors?”
Control stood beside the assistant director of the Southern Reach, behind smudged one-way glass, staring at the three individuals sitting in the interrogation room. Returnees from the twelfth expedition into Area X.
The assistant director, a tall, thin black woman in her forties, said nothing back, which didn’t surprise Control. She hadn’t wasted an extra word on him since he’d arrived that morning after taking Monday to get settled. She hadn’t spared him an extra look, either, except when he’d told her and the rest of the staff to call him “Control,” not “John” or “Rodriguez.” She had paused a beat, then replied, “In that case, call me Patience, not Grace,” much to the stifled amusement of those present. The deflection away from her real name to one that also meant something else interested him. “That’s okay,” he’d said, “I can just call you Grace,” certain this would not please her. She parried by continually referring to him as the “acting” director. Which was true: There lay between her stewardship and his ascension a gap, a valley of time and forms to be filled out, procedures to be followed, the rooting out and hiring of staff. Until then, the issue of authority might be murky.
But Control preferred to think of her as neither patience nor grace. He preferred to think of her as an abstraction if not an obstruction. She had made him sit through an old orientation video about Area X, must have known it would be basic and out of date. She had already made clear that theirs would be a relationship based on animosity. From her side, at least.
“Where were they found?” he asked her now, when what he wanted to ask was why they hadn’t been kept separate from one another. Because you lack the discipline, because your department has been going to the rats for a long time now? The rats are down there in the basement now, gnawing away.
“Read the files,” she said, making it clear he should have read them already.
Then she walked out of the room.
Copyright © 2014 by VanderMeer Creative, Inc.
Introduction copyright © 2024 by N. K. Jemisin