Read Karen Joy Fowler’s new introduction to Annihilation, which still captivates a decade later

Few works change the game as instantly as Jeff VanderMeer’s 2014 novel Destruction. The first book in the author’s Southern Reach trilogy introduced readers to Area X, a strange and unspecified location that defies all attempts by scientists to document it. The novel follows what is billed as the 12th attempt to explore Area X by four unnamed women, which ends in disaster.

Of Destruction and its sequels Authority And AcceptanceVanderMeer created the definitive work of climate change speculative fiction, a trilogy that combined weird fiction and eco-horror for an unforgettable experience. And it gets weirder, because VanderMeer revisits the Southern Reach this fall with Absolution.

To celebrate Area X’s 10th anniversary and the upcoming AbsolutionThe original Southern Reach trilogy is being reissued with stunning new covers and new introductions by literary greats. Read the first of these below: The new introduction by acclaimed author Karen Joy Fowler for Destructionan ode to one of the most unforgettable and unknown new locations that has captivated us in a long time.

To stop understanding at what cannot be understood is a high achievement. Those who cannot do it will be destroyed on the lathe of heaven.

—Zhuangzi (translated by Ursula K. Le Guin)

For most of my reading life, mimetic realism has been the literary form of admiration among critics, reviewers, and professors. The various literatures of the fantastic, those stories that place the writer’s imagination above lived experience, have, for reasons that are unclear to me, been suspect—either childish or escapist or lacking in subtlety or lacking in characterization. That they are often none of these things has had little effect on their reception. Fortunately, this has changed.

My own attachment to the imaginary has been lifelong, but I was well into adulthood before I noticed that my enjoyment was often largely a matter of setting. Fantastic stories are the only ones that can take place absolutely anywhere. Some of my favorite examples, which I came across around the same time as this revelation: Kim Stanley Robinson’s “Venice Drowned,” set, as the title suggests, in a future where the city of Venice is completely submerged; Michael Swanwick’s “The Edge of the World,” set in that imaginary place where it was once feared that ships would sail over the edge and disappear from the world altogether; This shape we are inby Jonathan Lethem, where the setting, in a final surprise (spoiler alert), turns out to be the strangely large interior of the Trojan Horse. While these stories work beautifully in every other way, it’s the imaginativeness of their locations that first gets that buzzing going in my head.

Area X is a relatively recent addition to this vast and exciting realm, a deeply textured and richly imagined world. At its most basic, the plot of Destruction is not unknown. A small group of explorers enters an unknown wilderness. Dangerous adventures ensue. If a reader finds this setting in the opening pages, he or she may feel somewhat familiar with the recognition. More than familiar, the plot is classic. Think King Solomon’s Mines, Lost Horizon, The man who would be king.

That sense of comfort won’t last long. The reader in question will soon become painfully aware that he or she has been immersed in the territory of someone else’s imagination. If, as John Gardner famously said, good writing is “a vivid and continuous dream,” Destruction quickly feels more like a hallucination.

In this first book in VanderMeer’s ambitious and masterful (now four-and-counting) project, we don’t really know much about Area X. It’s separated from the rest of the world by an invisible border; all communication with the people who previously inhabited the region has been lost, as have the people themselves.

Repeated attempts have been made to explore and map Area X. Several expeditions have been sent by the mysterious agency known as the Southern Reach. These previous expeditions have ended in disaster. Why the Southern Reach continues to make these attempts is unknown. Almost everything about the Southern Reach remains unknown.

*

One of the main features of Area X is an old lighthouse, noted and mapped by previous expeditions. It appears to have been the site of a terrible battle at one time. There is a second feature, which has not been noted or mapped before. This feature acts as a kind of mirror to the lighthouse, and our narrator continues to refer to it as a tower, even though its top is at ground level and the stairs lead down. The rest of the expedition refers to it as a tunnel, and this difference in perception puts the narrator at odds with her fellow travelers in ways that will only deepen.

The most compelling feature of the tower is written on the walls. Words, sentences in English, appear that seem organic, like fungi. The sentences have a quasi-Biblical cadence and the words almost make sense, but not quite. The tower seems to breathe and perhaps even live.

Aside from these two notable features, most of Area X is now wilderness, a bewildering wilderness where anything and everything seems possible. Despite the narrator’s disorientation, now shared by the reader, the text is immensely compelling. VanderMeer’s descriptions are detailed: sounds and sights, beasts and plants, all wonderfully brought to life in his imagery and prose.

And everything here is equally interesting: the ruins of houses, the appearance and activities of insects, the waterways, dolphins, stairs, stones. The text demands a kind of clear attention from the reader, an energy of involvement that matches the energy of the writing. As a narrative strategy, the specificity of details serves to ground the reader in a story that is otherwise full of uncertainty. We may not know exactly what is happening, how or why, but we will always know where we are.

The overall impression of Area X is one of breathtaking abundance. The landscape is simultaneously beautiful and dangerous, as nature always is. But here that very fertility is threatening; it threatens to overwhelm. Area X is in the process of renewal that seems to include the erasure of all remaining artifacts of human impact. Area X now leaves its mark on the people who enter it, rather than the other way around. Its mark may or may not be deadly. But it is always transformative.

*

The archetypal power of images such as the lighthouse and the tower, together with the lack of proper names for the group of explorers, can tempt a reader to allegory. I think this is a fool’s game. Not that a referential decoding cannot be made to work, but that so many other decodings work too. Trying to find a key will neither improve nor clarify the text. Nevertheless, two things strike me as essential elements of this work.

The first, and clearly a major focus of the book, is the proper relationship of humans to nature. Humans are used to masterfully navigating the world. There are other top predators, of course, and nature is under no obligation to protect us. We are also prey to bacterial attacks, cancers and other diseases, threats. The dangers are great and small. But the fact that so many animals flee at the sight of us has allowed us to surrender to a sense of our own primacy. We are used to being seen. We are used to seeing ourselves as powerful. We are used to feeling that we are above the natural world rather than within it. In Area X, none of this will work. This is a landscape that refuses to surrender to anyone’s pretensions.

A second essential point in the book is the pervasive uncertainty. Uncertainty is the hallmark of every element of this story—not only in the unpredictable and enigmatic world of Area X, but also in the social dynamics of human relations on both sides of the border. The narrator’s thoughts and perceptions are suspect even to herself. She seems to act in good faith and tries to be a reliable guide, except that she cannot be sure of who she used to be or who she has become. She cannot be sure that she sees the same things that others see. She cannot even be certain that she sees what she thinks she sees.

The words on the tower walls are a manifestation of this uncertainty. The reader waits in vain to see their meaning revealed, to see that the perfectly understandable words communicate a perfectly understandable whole. The question of whether they are intended to communicate at all remains open as well.

*

The project of understanding our world is less advanced than we might imagine, despite all the years we have spent working on it. Even our own bodies remain a mystery to us. No other book captures this fact so well: we live within an understanding of circumstances that is at best partial and at worst mistaken. Despite all our efforts, our observations, our constant experiments, even when conducted with care and precision, the world remains largely unknowable to us. We can create logical, plausible, even predictive stories, but these are only hypotheses. To think that we have achieved, or ever could achieve, complete clarity, let alone bend the world to our will, vastly overestimates our powers. Expecting certainty is just another example of human arrogance.

And yet sometimes, often even, action is expected of us. We know we don’t know enough. And we know we must act anyway.

This is a clear imperative in relation to the climate crisis, but it is also an honest assessment of the enduring, eternal human condition. Decisions have always been made with incomplete information, and history is littered with examples of actions based on beliefs that were not so much incomplete as absurd.

Living in the midst of uncertainty is inevitable. To acknowledge it is to live as an adult. Destruction is a book for adults.

Our climate crisis is an unspoken but obvious subtext in this fantastic and imaginative book. The best way for people, as individuals and more generally, to live in harmony with the rest of the world is perhaps the most important question of our time, and will likely remain so. And so Destructionwhich speaks so powerfully and memorably on this subject will likely remain a book that fits the present moment perfectly for decades to come.

Excerpt from ANNIHILATION: A Novel by Jeff VanderMeer. Originally published 2014 by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. 10th Anniversary paperback edition, MCD/Picador 2024. Copyright © 2014 by VanderMeer Creative, Inc. Introduction copyright © 2024 by Karen Joy Fowler. All rights reserved.