Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer

Annihilation is the first book in The Southern Reach trilogy and tells the story of the 12th expedition to Area X. Area X is the (fictional) site of a mysterious ecological disaster, located somewhere in the southern U.S. It has been closed for over 30 years at the time this book opens, and access is restricted to occasional groups of scientists. The Southern Reach is the name of the quasi-governmental/military authority that controls Area X. Expeditions there are fraught with danger; several explorers have been lost, and those who return are physically or emotionally damaged. Do we think Expedition 12 will go any better? Well, with their story entitled Annihilation, what do you think?

There’s a lot to like here for fans of the TV show Lost, and those who like to read post-apocalyptic fiction. There’s a creepy monster, and some emotional baggage with the biologist, who has an interesting reason for going on this mission. There are double-crosses, and mysterious lights and noises, and a good old-fashioned shoot-out. While you could argue that VanderMeer is just checking off boxes on a list of sci-fi/horror tropes, he uses them in an interesting way, and I was entertained. I also applaud him for making the Expedition 12 scientists all female. It would have been so easy to make them all male, or to include one token female, but he made this interesting choice and I noticed.

Here’s my problem: why haven’t I read the two subsequent volumes of the trilogy: Authority and Acceptance? I finished this months ago, and put off writing about it until I could write about all three at once, but here I am, having not quite ever gotten round to the remaining two books. I think it’s because I feel a tiny bit manipulated, as if this whole thing smacks just a bit too much of clever marketing. Annihiliation is short, at 208 pages (though the two following books are longer). All three were released within 7 months of one another, so VanderMeer clearly had the sequels well in hand when the first was released. Why not wait and release them together as one long book? Why make me pay for three books instead of one?

Well, why did Peter Jackson carve The Hobbit up into three movies? Why did someone decide to release the Hunger Games and the Twilight trilogies as four movies? Let’s squeeze as much revenue out of these properties as we can, folks. VanderMeer sold the Annihilation movie rights for a “sizable” amount, according to the Deadline Hollywood website. Who wants to bet that the remaining two books will get nice deals, too, and Acceptance will be released as two films?  If these novels had been released as one book, could VanderMeer have only sold the rights once? (I am just asking and admit to knowing nothing about how these deals work.)

It’s the combination of all these factors (the on-trend post-apocalyptic theme, the trilogy, the movie rights) that has me feeling a little bit like a pawn in someone’s media marketing chess game. It’s nice to see an author making some money and I don’t begrudge VanderMeer his opportunity to do so. I know he’s been writing sci-fi for a while and has paid his dues. It just all seems so… calculating. “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!”

I already feel marketed-to in so many areas of my life (what TV shows I watch, products I buy, websites I visit); I don't like it when the same feeling invades my reading. It even makes me worry that VanderMeer’s choice of female protagonists was somehow motivated by a reading survey that indicated that large numbers of female readers enjoy post-apocalyptic trilogies.

Look, I know I sound like @GuyinyourMFA, whose hilarious tweets poke fun at the idea that Literature (with a capital L) can only be written with great suffering and angst, and that marketing is anathema to Art. I don’t mean that. But clearly something in me is resisting the call to participate in VanderMeer’s cunning plan. If it is a cunning plan. Which I think it is.

(Newsflash! Just in time for the  holidays! Farrar Straus Giroux releases Area X: The Southern Reach Trilogy, all in one volume. Could the timing be any better?)

(Book 23, 2014)

The Wool Series by Hugh Howey

The Wool Series is comprised of eight novellas (the first one of which is called Wool) that all take place in a post-apocalyptic USA where a small contingent of survivors are holed up in something resembling a missile silo. Hugh Howey self-published this series through Amazon’s Kindle Direct publishing system starting in 2011. Book 8 was published in January 2013. All the novellas are available in various permutations (singly and in omnibus editions) as Amazon Kindle downloads, and volumes 1-5 are now available in print from Simon & Schuster. Howey made news when he struck his print deal with Simon & Schuster (which occurred after these books were already Kindle bestsellers) because he retained the e-book rights. I wanted to try the series in part because I’ve been enjoying the post-apocalyptic genre, but mostly because I was interested in seeing whether a self-published book was any good. I’m skeptical because they seem like such wild cards – some have lots of spelling and grammatical errors, not to mention derivative plots. I prefer to read books that have been professionally edited – is that such a bad thing?*

I have only read the first three volumes (Wool, Proper Gauge, and Casting Off -- as a knitter I love these allusions but these books are definitely NOT about knitting). So far the plot and setting seem a little like “the survivors of the vampire apocalypse go to District 13” but I have a feeling that greater complexity is right around the corner. At least I hope so; right now these feel a bit formulaic to me, but perhaps that’s a function of reading three in a row, rather than spacing them out as you would if you were caught up. Howey is a good (if workmanlike) writer (and there are no typos); the characters are likable (except those that are supposed to be hate-able) and there is no shortage of strong women characters. That said, why am I not rushing out to read volumes 4-8? I’m not sure. Maybe I just need a break from post-apocalyptic dread?**

I noticed on Amazon that at least four authors have self-published e-books that are set in Howey’s world. From what I can tell, two of the authors have Howey’s blessing, as evidenced by quotes from Howey in the product description. So he’s authorizing fan fiction; that’s interesting.

(Book 12, 2013)

*I know that commercial publishers release bad books all the time, and that many good books never get published.  Nevertheless I don't want to waste my limited reading time on something that absolutely no one has vetted, as is the case with some self-published e-books.

**I promise not to write about this genre any more for a while.

The Passage by Justin Cronin

I like to think I am tapped in to what’s current, at least when it comes to literature. Then the gods get wind of my hubris and drop a bomb on me to keep me humble – in this case The Passage by Justin Cronin. Where the heck was I while everyone else was reading and talking about this book (and about the author’s huge advance and about the movie rights and about the sequels….). Guys, what else am I missing?

If, like me, you’ve been living in a closet filled only with British literary fiction, here is a brief overview: The Passage is a futuristic technothriller about a world destroyed by vampires and the handful of humans left alive to fight them. Don’t be put off by the vampire aspect of this story – there’s nothing Twilight-ish about it; the vampires are the result of a military experiment gone horribly wrong and Cronin has transformed the vampire myth into something that can be explained by virology. The vampires are glimpsed only fleetingly and are so repugnant and dangerous that no one gets near them and survives (well, almost no one). The vampires are just the scary thing that drives the plot forward; most of the story involves the lives of the humans who remain and their struggle to survive.

A lot of reviewers have compared this book to Stephen King’s 1978 sci-fi-/horror classic The Stand. It does share some plot points with that book but I felt like The Passage was an homage rather than a ripoff. This is a very 21st century book with kick-ass female characters and a great use of technology. It’s also a very tense read. Cronin sustains just the right level of dread for pages and pages. I couldn’t read this before bed and had to wait to finish the last 10% (in Kindle units) until I knew I would be able to do it in one sitting.

 Several of my friends have described this book as a “guilty pleasure.” But why do they feel guilty about reading it? I don’t. I’ll read almost anything that has an interesting plot and is well written. Labels (blockbuster, bestseller, chicklit, romance) don’t put me off; in fact, I want more guilty pleasures just like this. Luckily, the sequel The Twelve comes out on October 16.

(Book 21, 2012)

How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu

This was mindbending. It didn’t help that in the same weekend that I read this, I also watched the movie Inception and several episodes of Season 5 of Lost. I was lucky I could find my own kitchen, given all the time travel/dream-within-a-dream/bright flashes of light that were going on in my own personal entertainment universe.

How To Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe is the story of a travelling time machine repairman. Did you try to use your time machine to change the past? Uh oh. You broke it. Charles Yu to the rescue. But Charles (yes, the protagonist’s name is the same as the author’s) also uses his own time machine to avoid living in any particular year or place and instead (against the rules) hovers in a kind of no-time space where his only friends are his virtual dog Ed, and TAMMY, his management software with an inferiority complex. Only when he is forced to return to real time when his own time machine breaks down do actual things start to happen.

I wanted to like this, and I did, in some ways. It has a sweet father-son relationship story buried inside the layers of overly clever science fictional technojargon. Even some aspects of the science fictional world-building were funny and original, but mostly it was over the top. Yu can be an interesting writer and reminds me a little of Nicholson Baker, but Yu (like some other alternate reality writers) can get so caught up in his own details that he forgets that he is telling a story, that someone else is trying to follow what he is saying, that he has to work to maintain the reader’s interest. About half way through I started skimming, resulting in no loss of comprehension (because I was only getting about 60% of it anyway).

(Book 55, 2010)