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Annihilation
Unavailable
Annihilation
Unavailable
Annihilation
Audiobook6 hours

Annihilation

Written by Jeff VanderMeer

Narrated by Carolyn McCormick

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

3.5/5

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About this audiobook

’A contemporary masterpiece’ Guardian

THE FIRST VOLUME OF THE EXTRAORDINARY SOUTHERN REACH TRILOGY – NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY ALEX GARLAND (EX MACHINA) AND STARRING NATALIE PORTMAN AND OSCAR ISAAC

For thirty years, Area X has remained mysterious and remote behind its intangible border – an environmental disaster zone, though to all appearances an abundant wilderness.

The Southern Reach, a secretive government agency, has sent eleven expeditions to investigate Area X. One has ended in mass suicide, another in a hail of gunfire, the eleventh in a fatal cancer epidemic.

Now four women embark on the twelfth expedition into the unknown.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateFeb 27, 2014
ISBN9780007556519
Unavailable
Annihilation
Author

Jeff VanderMeer

Jeff VanderMeer is an award-winning novelist and editor. His fiction has been translated into twenty languages and has appeared in the Library of America’s American Fantastic Tales and in multiple year’s-best anthologies. He writes non-fiction for the Washington Post, the New York Times Book Review, the Los Angeles Times, and the Guardian, among others. He grew up in the Fiji Islands and now lives in Tallahassee, Florida, with his wife.

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Reviews for Annihilation

Rating: 3.722749754830718 out of 5 stars
3.5/5

2,422 ratings184 reviews

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  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    I love sci-fi, I love psychological thrillers, so I thought this one would be perfect. It started out strong and hooked me from the first page. It was creepy with a slow-building horror. Halfway through, though, it just got way too weird for my taste. I'm still not sure what happened, to be honest.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    This book wasn't what I was expecting. The prose was very lyrical and yet I still didn't know exactly was was going on throughout the book. The ending especially was weird. It was a short book but I get the sense that it would have taken me longer to read than it did to listen to the audio. There's something about this book... I can't put mu finger on it. It's both fascinating and upsetting in a literature point of view. Maybe it's a ploy to get readers to buy the other two books in the trilogy, stretching out a story that should have been one book into three. *Shrug* I'm still trying to wrap my head around it, obviously.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I need time to digest this book...
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I read this book to do a review for a blog, and I'm so glad that I did. Coming from a biology background, I really related to the desire to observe and the curious nature of the protagonist. I absolutely loved the writing as well. There were so many passages that I just wanted to underline and highlight and just reread. Favorite quote: "Desolation tries to colonize you." I just re-read that sentence over and over! I don't think I've had a sci-fi book leave me feeling so complete and like it was just perfect since I ready "The Forever War". Read this book!
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I liked it a lot! I’d actually give it 4.5 stars, if that were an option.

    It’s pretty trippy and one is never sure of anything, just like the protagonist is not sure of anything. It’s told in first person POV, but later uses a neat trick to get someone else’s perspective as well. I enjoyed the narration, McCormick has a pleasant voice.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Loved this. Captures the world of dreams (not easy to do well) in a mysterious, frightening, unsettling, yet oddly familiar (probably from dreams) world. Echoes of Lovecraft, Kafka, Ballard, Coetzee...a literary Lost. An existentialist adventure story. Moving on to Book 2...
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I only remembered that I saw the film once the audio began and I couldn't mind much of the film save that the FX were good. The audio is well read and the tale does draw you in. I enjoyed it much more than the film, although I felt it was a little too long. In saying that however I am looking forward to listening to the second volume. Well worth a listen, filled with deep, provocative visuals, a shifting, genetic jungle of forms.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    This is a good book, one of the better ones genre fiction produced in 2014. Let’s get that out of the way. It is also completely not my thing. If I had to vote for it on a shortlist, it would be because of its recognisable quality not because I liked it. I’ve already decided I won’t be bothering with parts two and three. Four women are sent into Area X, a wilderness area which manifests strange behaviours, as the latest in a number of expeditions, of which all the previous were unsuccessful. The women are never named – the narrator, whose journal forms the narrative, explains that the expeditions do not use names since referring to each other by profession is considered safer within Area X. A day or two after their arrival, they find a structure which the narrator calls the Tower but the others refer to as a tunnel. It is a staircase circling down into the earth to an unknown depth. Along the wall of the staircase is a line of glowing script, possibly fungal in nature, written by a creature several levels lower. None of this is explained. And deliberately not so. As I commented in a Twitter conversation with Jonathan McCalmont a few days ago, prompted by John Clute’s review of David G Hartwell & Patrick Neilsen Hayden’s 21st Century Science Fiction in The New York Review of Science Fiction (see here)… Clute’s point that science fiction colonises the universe – “to make the future in our own image” – resonated with some of my own thoughts on the genre. To me, the universe is explainable but not necessarily knowable, and I prefer science fictions which reflect that. Area X in Annihilation is plainly neither knowable nor explainable, and is clearly not meant to be. It’s an artistic choice, but it’s one that doesn’t interest me.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Annihilation reviewA story about a group of scientists exploring a mysterious area that defies the natural laws. It is an exciting, thrilling, and terrifying story. The main protagonist explores the many facets of "Area X", but a lot of it is about how she reacts to it. Since it is seen from her POV, there is very little explanation of anything and you feel like you are on the expedition with her. I really enjoyed how none of the characters have names, only titles. It has a similar essence to the movie, but has a completely different narration style. I think this is a fantastic book and I'm looking forward to continuing with the series. The book does have an ending and I can see this book being a stand alone as well.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Excelente livro, ficou muito bom na voz da narradora que dá vida aos personagens.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    A really great book, very different from the movie though I think it has its own charm (The movie that is)
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Great book and the reader is the best I have heard so far!
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    So, based on previous reviewers, you either love this book or you hate it. I have to admit, this book is probably not for everyone, as it takes some patience to get through and at times is not the easiest of reads. It is told from a single person point of view as that person's journal, though the writing is more in depth than you would probably find in someone's real journal. The beginning and into the middle can be a bit slow going, and I'm not sure yet exactly why some of the personal information about the person writing the journal was relevant (maybe more in the next two books?). Things pick up toward the end and the big reveal at the end reminded me a bit of Dan Simmons' Shrike in his novel Hyperion. My final assessment is that I did enjoy the book and will continue reading the next two to finish the trilogy; I do have some fascination with where this is ultimately going.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Definitely SF, but threaded through with a disturbing sense of the uncanny. Annihilation opens the trilogy with the biologist’s expedition journal and some lovely wildlife writing. Her unreliable first person narrative, full of misdirection, perfectly sets up the shifting, uncertain, chilling mystery of Area X.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I have been telling everyone I know to read this book for the past two months. Oh my god. This is my kind of book. Basically, it fills the hole LOST left in my heart. Minus the ending, yeah yeah, everyone likes to complain about that. But Annihilation is only the first in the Southern Reach Trilogy, so it can only really be compared to the beginning of LOST anyway. What I'm trying to say is this book is that brand of weird inexplicable discovery adventure. And it is just as thrilling.

    Maybe I should slow down. What is this book even about? An excellent, hard to answer question. It's about a place called Area X. There's not a lot known about this place, but it's this crazy jungle that's cut off from the rest of civilization. Nobody really seems to know what goes on there and the only way to get in is through a government agency's (the Southern Reach) mysterious "border." Eleven expeditions had previously been sent in to explore the mysteries of Area X, but they all either killed themselves, killed each other, or somehow crossed the border and returned to their homes only to die of cancer shortly after. Strange things are clearly going on in this area, as the menacing name would suggest.

    This is a story about the twelfth expedition. It is a group of four women who only go by the names the Biologist (she might as well be called the Main Character), the Anthropologist, the Surveyor, and the Psychologist. They all basically know nothing about the area or what they're really supposed to be doing there. The Psychologist has to put them under hypnosis so they don't like die of fright or something when they go over the weird border. They get there and everything's pretty jungle-y and typical until they find a big stone mound with stairs tunneling into the earth. They were given maps, but that wasn't on there. So they go down these stairs, a great idea, and they find words on the wall. Growing in fungus. THAT'S WEIRD. The Biologist gets a little too close and sniffs a fungus spore. But that makes her immune to hypnosis, which apparently the Psychologist continues to use on them.

    The Psychologist says some hypnosis trigger word and the rest get knocked out, so the Biologist has to fake it. She lists a bunch of commands and in them is something along the lines of "you will continue to believe the mound is made of stone." WHAT? WHAT EVEN? That is only in the first 20 pages or so. It gets weirder. More inexplicable things happen. It gets scarier. And you get more and more engrossed in the story. It flips between Area X and occasionally the Biologist before her expedition. I won't say any more.

    I raced through this book. My own apartment was suddenly very scary at night. This book created a subtle, intense atmosphere that stayed with me and left me hyper-aware of my surroundings. I really love when stories or movies focus on environments. I feel like they can really set the tone for a plot like very little else can. Sometimes the writing felt a little dry, or vaguely scientific (not in vocabulary or content, but in style) perhaps because the narrator was a biologist. But other than that, I really loved this book. It keeps you wondering what's really going on. What is the Tower? What is the Southern Reach? What the hell is going on in Area X? And how much do these expedition members really know?

    I feel uncomfortable rating it higher than 8.5 (Though I originally did the 1-10 system to avoid .5s. Oops.) just because the ending is left pretty open considering there are two sequels, Authority (out now) and Acceptance. I don't want to give it a 9, because I don't really know how the entire story gets wrapped up. Though I'm pretty confident this won't be a trilogy that disappoints. I can't wait to get my hands on that last book.

    I think I'm in love.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This book was rather short, but it took me a few days to get through it. Every time I was too busy to pick it back up, or had to put it down to go to sleep, I felt an overwhelming NEED TO KNOW what happens next. It's mysterious and creepy and at times frankly terrifying. I don't know what the next two books in the trilogy will focus on, but my library hold can't come in fast enough.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    I made it about half way through this book before abandoning it. There is genius marketing involved getting people to pay for three short books rather than one longish book in order to get a full story, but they won't get any more of my money. I honestly don't know what people saw in this book. Ok, so it had some neat life forms, but the people had no life in them at all. The biologist was an extremely boring narrator who insisted on telling us way more than anyone could care to know about her backstory. This book just dragged on. I will never get to see if the pace picks up in books two and three.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Excellent. This had me hooked from the beginning. I read it in an afternoon and can't wait to read the next volume. I did find the ending somewhat too hocus-pocus for my liking but I'm willing to go with it and see how the next book ties in.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I'm writing my review of these books out of order, since I didn't want to comment on any of them until I'd finished the series. Annihilation, the first book, is definitely the strongest. If you aren't obsessed with resolution, it could definitely stand alone and would probably be even stronger because of it. The depth of the narrator, the creep-factor, and the mystery are well developed and fascinating, and I flew through this one and loved it.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    I thought I'd never say that the movie is better than the novel. The book is a psychological drama in a sci-fi setting. The protaginist's narations (mind ramblings) are exhausting. It will be better if the writer elaborates on the sci-fi side. There are lots of potential but they are left as stumps.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I am always looking for "good" science fiction. I don't like wacky, way-out-there, incomprehensible nor too technical stuff to be enjoyable. I still like traveling-the-universe type sci-fi. This 1st book in the Southern Reach Trilogy grabbed me right away even though everything takes place on earth in an isolated part of American. My only complaint is that it was too short.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A modern dance of sci-fi and Lovecraftian weird fiction.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    The book and film are dramatically different, which is good as I don't think the book as written would actually translate to film well. The book really feels like you're experiencing someone else's fever dream. Everything is always just slightly off in a way that makes you question it, but not too hard. I wasn't sure if I was going to want to read the rest of the trilogy going into this, but I'm pretty firmly settled on continuing on.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    I found this book very boring. There were a couple of times when something interesting happened that signaled that some action was coming, but no. This one wasn't my cup of tea.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This book mesmerized me. The challenge is to say anything about the actual book, as any thoughtful statement requires qualification, in particular an acknowledgement that any definite interpretation is provisional. Every deliberate word augments the literary realization of the unique ecosystem in which the protagonist - if it is in fact proper to call her that - finds herself or is entangled in or is altered by or voluntarily chooses. You begin to see my point.A concise summary will suffice: A biologist is part of an expedition to mysterious Area X, a region where an inexplicable and different living environment has taken hold. Is this ecosystem of terrestrial origin? What is its nature?What is more helpful, probably, is reaction. I was suffused with unease, a sense of the sublime, with perfection, beauty and terror all together. I'm reminded of some of the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich.Annihilation takes you on a ride from page one. I can’t do better than Warren Ellis’ succinct blurb: “Original and beautiful, maddening and magnificent.” Indeed. This is a masterful work. It’s not casual reading, and not only because it would be a pity to skim through the purposive telling and the fitting language of the narrative voice. This is a book that leads the reader into mystery and perplexity, beyond well rewarded. One needs to puzzle out with effort the uncertainties and subtleties of this realm. It is that pressing imperative that makes the reader feel as if they are personally exploring this confounding place.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    Good but not as good as I'd hoped. I was left feeling like I'd eaten an otherwise well-seasoned dish that lacked salt. There were interesting ideas and experiences but nothing to really get me as hooked as I should be. I think in great part it was the lack of a sympathetic character. The main character had few details about her, and even lacked a name. It was a fascinating world and I'm curious about what happens next, but I'm not as blown away as I was by books from similarly mindbending worlds (like "More than This" by Patrick Ness, for example)

    I'll give the Kindle sample for the next book a chance. Maybe he wrote a likeable and interesting character in to the next book.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    It's way more subtle than mainstream scifi, but not very well suited for a movie. It does make the trilogy enticing though, but accept that a lot in the book is not explained
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Series Info/Source: This is the first book in the Southern Reach series. I borrowed this on ebook from the library.Thoughts: This is the second VanderMeer book I have read. The first was the "City of Saints and Madmen" and I liked the ideas presented in that book but struggled with the writing style. VanderMeer is an author I want to like but I always find his books a bit hard to read and somewhat wandering. He does an excellent job portraying weird, Lovecraftian, science fiction and this book is no exception to that.The book starts by following a team of scientists into Area X where they have been sent to find the previous team of research scientists that went missing there. What follows is an investigation of a beautiful, but alien, landscape that seems to have a mind of its own.This was interesting but ultimately a bit boring and felt like a lot of other Lovecraft sci-fi mash-ups. Some of the concepts here strangely remind me of T. Kingfisher's "What Moves the Dead". Our main protagonist is hard to engage with and relate to, she points this out herself many times throughout the book. She wanders a lot in her mind between her past and present. There isn't much of a plot here and the book ends fairly abruptly. I enjoyed the beginning portions of the book but the second half or so it is just the protagonist wandering around thinking to herself and that got difficult to stay engaged with. For the short length of this book it feels fairly long and I kept just wanting to finish it up. If you dig deeper there are some messages about humanity and the environment around it, etc, etc.I listened to this on audiobook and wasn't a huge fan of the narration. The narrator has a very flat, monotone voice which is hard to listen to and stay interested in. I am not completely sure if my issue with this book was more with the wandering, boring story or with the super dry and boring narration. My Summary (5/5): Overall this just wasn't for me. As I said above, VanderMeer is an author I keep wanting to love. I love the ideas presented here but the way it is written is just very vague and ends up being hard to engage with. I don't plan on reading the rest of the series. If you are intrigued by Lovecraft influenced sci-fi you might enjoy this, just be prepared to go with the flow here and not think too hard.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Finally getting round to these books - I've owned them and admired the covers for years. The synopsis sounded just my cup of tea, and it's safe to say I was hooked from the start.
    The biologist- our narrator - goes on an expedition into Area X along with a psychologist, a surveyor, and an anthropologist. They make up the twelfth expedition, the previous eleven groups having all failed to return or returned changed and dying. Area X is a mystery and they are needed to explore and survey, making notes and tracking their progress. This is the story of their expedition and what they find there.
    I really enjoyed the style of creeping tension, the lack of panic from the narrator, the evocative atmosphere of strange otherworldliness. I came away understanding nothing, but with a feeling of calm serenity about it all - much like the narrator herself. All In all, I'm looking forward to reading the next in the trilogy, and more by the author.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Ooooh! What an interesting book. Four women—a psychologist, a surveyor, an anthropologist and a surveyor—enter “Area X” on a mission to document what they find there. Previous missions had been made to do this, some with dismaying results. Entering this strange land, the four are made aware of a buried tower containing living plants which write phrases in English and all hear a recurrent moaning every evening. This is certainly a book which aroused my curiosity from its start. The story is not only about the exploration of an environment, but it is also about the fascinating interactions of each character to one another. An interesting phenomenon in this book was that none of the characters had names. They really were not necessary, though. All I could say after finishing this book was, “Whoa!” This was a mesmerizing and strangle-hold kind of read!