Annihilationis the 1st volume in Jeff VanderMeer'sSouthern Reachseries,Authorityis the 2nd, &Acceptanceis the 3rd. The trilogy was a finalist for the2015 World Fantasy Award& the2016 Kurd-Laßwitz-Preis.Area X—a remote & lush terrain—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; all the members of the second expedition committed suicide; the third expedition died 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, & within months of their return, all had died of aggressive cancer.This is the twelfth expedition.Their group is made up of four women: an anthropologist; a surveyor; a psychologist, the de facto leader; & our narrator, a biologist.°°°“Perhaps most striking of all is the series’ ability to create connections between a reader & characters which distort preconceptions based on gender, age, & ethnicity. A key element in breaking those barriers is characters remaining unnamed, labelled only by their function, such as Control or ‘the biologist’. It’s somethingVanderMeeris clear was an essential part of the creation of the series & for creating the right atmosphere for the novels to develop.‘Once you give something a name’, he considers, ‘there are things it can’t be. So it’s this slippery thing, you have to name things but once you name them, you may exclude from the sense of what they are, things they actually are. You find this in the language of scientific papers, there’s all sorts of examples where you shift from objectivity to subjectivity as soon as you give something a name. Even the way you phrase something can gesture to the proactive or passive nature of it. ”— 2018 Interview,Waterstones