The Twisted Secret of Area X | Annihilation Trilogy

An underrated book in this same genre is Blood Music by Greg Bear, published in 1985. It's about a geneticist who modifies human blood cells to be able to learn, leading to super-intelligent clusters of cells that escape and transform the entire landscape, including all of humanity. It's an incomprehensibly alien intelligence that comes from our own cells instead of outer space. Fantastic book.

I loved this series and it’s one of cinema’s great tragedies that the movie didn’t make enough money to get the trilogy made. Very underrated. Thank for covering it! 👍

Minor correction: The Forgotten Shore is actually on the Gulf Coast, not the Pacific Coast!

The moaning creature is a fascinating one, because area x seems to have externalised the bizarre multilayered things done to the psychologist's mind by Lowry. The idea that it regularly sheds its face and skin as a result of its own identity crisis is just horrific.

The Southern Reach trilogy was one of the most invested I've been in books in years. I just devoured them. I felt a little empty for a few weeks after I finished them, because I didn't want to leave the world it built yet. It was just the perfect amount of mystery. I tell people the books are essentially about boundary disollution writ large. Boundaries between beings, their environment, even between concepts and percepts. It's like an archetypical psychedelic trip: Beautiful, horrifying, fascinating, and profoundly mysterious and alien, all at once.

My theory for what happened to Saul the lighthouse keeper is not that he turned into the crawler, but that he turned into the tower itself and the crawler is in fact his brain. In annihilation, the biologist collects a sample from one of the steps of the tower and a sample from the crawler. She determines that the sample from the tower is human flesh/skin (I can’t remember exactly) and that the sample from the crawler is human brain tissue. This would explain why the tower itself seems to be alive and breathing. Many people view the description of the crawler as physically having Saul trapped within it but I interpreted this as the human mind simply trying to make sense of something it cannot comprehend. As if an image of what this whole thing once was is flashing into our minds yet still incomprehensible.

who’s here for a recap before reading absolution? 😊

I think one of the keys to understanding Southern Reach & Central comes from a line in the movie (I can’t remember if it was also in the novels) where a character cynically observes “Half the people here sleep curled up in the fetal position.” The researchers at Southern Reach are scared. They’ve been trying for years to figure out what’s happening in Area X and they STILL don’t have a clue and it’s making them desperate. Take the 12th expedition: they make it an all-female expedition because-up until now-all the previous expeditions were male or mixed-gender. That’s not a plan! That’s randomly throwing stuff against a wall to see what sticks. And even as they get more and more desperate to learn something-anything- about Area X, they still send their people in with hypnotic kill-words programmed into their brains so that their handlers can make them end themselves... No wonder they find evidence that two of the previous expeditions (apparently) fought a pitched gun battle with each other at the lighthouse! Southern Reach is a toxic agency of control that is flailing around madly as it realizes control is impossible. There’s one scene in ‘Authority’ when (I think) the director discovers that one of the SR’s scientists is hiding in a crawl space every night instead of going back to his room. On the walls of that space, the scientist has painted a deranged mural featuring all the other scientists of Southern Reach. As horrified as the director is by the discovery, the scientist himself is almost catatonic at being discovered. The Southern Reach are scientists in the hands of authoritarian government that has reached the edge of what they can control, and are screaming into the void beyond.

This is what the internet was meant for; sharing reading suggestions.

We're given a hint on why the 11th expedition's Psychologist is transformed so horrifically while the Biologist is transformed so perfectly in Acceptance. It's the hypnosis/conditioning they undergo. Lowry drops a hint to Cynthia/Gloria that he put a "stinger" in the Psychologist during his conditioning, something meant to provoke Area X. Afterwards, Cynthia specifically fights for the Biologist because she's so self-contained that she has some immunity to Lowry's mental meddling. It seems with Area X that the simpler the organism, the easier it is to "improve". Most life forms in Area X are how they started originally - just cleaned up of all poisons. However, consciousness is a particularly tough nut to crack and Lowry had made it worse by "infecting" the explorers with an alternate consciousness. Area X couldn't duplicate a doubled consciousness, so the doppelgangers all came back passive, as if in a trance. That's because they were. They were Lowry's conditioning personified - a false, hypnotized self. And perhaps in reading them and sussing out their false selves via the doppelganger creation process, it left most of them able to transform successfully, possibly into an owl, possibly a dolphin. Everyone except the 11th expedition's Psychologist. Whatever Lowry had done to him left him unable to be "cleaned" of his conditioning, so the transformation couldn't be completed. The Biologist however easily threw off her minimal conditioning once infected by the spore, so her doppelganger was able to be a true separate person. She's the example of what Area X could do if Lowry hadn't kept trying to control the uncontrollable.