Then we exited through the far door into a central staging area, with double doors at the end of a long hallway. It remained unremarkable, inert, in no way ominous … and yet it took an act of will to stand there, staring at the entry point. For weapons, we had knives, a locked conta

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 pulled back, but I thought I had felt something enter my nose, experienced a pinprick of escalation in the smell of rotting honey. 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.I followed the anthropologist so eagerly down through the remains of webs and the embalmed husks of insects into the cool brackishness of that place that I almost tripped her.

The novel won the 2014 Nebula Award for Best Novel [2] and the 2014 Shirley Jackson Award for best novel. Many of the animals and vegetation that VanderMeer has seen on this hike over the past 17 years appear in the novel. But I did not mind that a sense of camaraderie had begun to take hold, even if it would prove short-lived. For several hours, my thoughts turned inward toward explanations for what I had seen: parasites and other hitchhikers of a neurological nature. The solitary voice of its post-humanist narrator is both deeply flawed and deeply trustworthy--a difficult and excellent balance in a novel whose world is built seamlessly and whose symbols are rich and dark.

All three stared at me then, as if I were the strange cry at dusk, and after a moment the psychologist said, grudgingly, “If that helps make you more comfortable, then I don’t see the harm. The inspiration for Annihilation and the Southern Reach Trilogy was a 14-mile (23 km) hike through St. I was agitated by the idea that she might experience the same need to read further and would act upon it. As for the psychologist, we knew the least about her, but I think we all believed she came from some kind of management background.