The Southern Reach Trilogy by Jeff VanderMeer, and: Borne (review)

"Une piqûre et tout bascule."

—Antoine Volodine, Terminus radieux (2014)¹

In a 2016 conversation with the philosopher Timothy Morton, Jeff VanderMeer remarked how he is a "big believer in trying to bring the reader or viewer back to understanding that the under-meaning of what they think is mundane is not really that mundane and is also incredibly complex."² There is little mundanity in VanderMeer's fiction, which is brimming with eerily intelligent life forms overspilling the boundaries between natural and unnatural, organic and artificial, human and nonhuman. In these works, "[t]hings can leak through either way and the boundary isn't thin or rigid."³ In their insistence on what Morton calls "porosity" or "perforation," VanderMeer's novels are also strikingly timely: his vibrant landscapes are haunted by ecological disaster and industrial overreach. VanderMeer's writing demonstrates a literary imagination at its most kaleidoscopic and most demanding, and nowhere is this more evident than in his two latest works: the Southern Reach Trilogy and Borne.

The Florida-based VanderMeer (b. 1968), dubbed the "King of Weird Fiction" by the New Yorker in 2015, is among the most distinctive and critically lauded writers of contemporary weird fiction to have emerged since the early 2000s.⁴ Aligned with the so-called New Weird writers—a hybrid genre whose blend of fantasy, horror, and science fiction elicits an unsettling sensation of the uncanny—VanderMeer has also found significant mainstream success.⁵ The three novels of the Southern Reach Trilogy—Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance—were released in quick succession in 2014, and Borne, a standalone novel, was published in 2017.⁶ All four garnered significant critical and popular acclaim, with Annihilation winning the Nebula and Shirley Jackson Awards and Borne recently nominated for the Arthur C. Clarke Award. Annihilation was also adapted into an acclaimed film by writer-director Alex Garland in 2018. All of this suggests that, despite the stylistic and conceptual challenges his writing presents, VanderMeer is creating fiction that speaks strongly to our present moment.

In her 2017 book Unthought, N. Katherine Hayles makes a provocative distinction between "consciousness" and "cognition" to advance a new way of thinking about thought itself. Whereas consciousness is associated with a self-awareness limited to a small number of terrestrial animals, she argues that cognition is present in all biological life-forms to some extent: from bacteria to bees to buzzards, cognitive processes are taking place.⁷ What Hayles calls "unthought" is a "terra incognita that beckons beyond our received notions of how consciousness operates," and her aim in the book is to take us beyond the anthropocentric framework of consciousness that has bolstered the human's privileged position as the earth's arch-thinker.⁸

VanderMeer tantalizingly echoes Hayles's project to undo the idea of intelligence as a unique attribute of the human species. Alongside the terrifying transformations we witness in the Southern Reach Trilogy and Borne, these novels pose uncommonly challenging questions regarding the nature of thought, consciousness, and intelligence. In particular, from his early Ambergris novels to the present, VanderMeer's ongoing preoccupation with the sporous and the fungal points to a fascination with vegetal intelligence at the limit of human comprehension. In his novels, uncanny life "thinks back": refusing to be the object of rational enquiry, weird entities perform their own probing enquiries that slip through the cracks of human thought.

Area X, around which gravitate the three novels of the Southern Reach Trilogy, is a challenging example of such nonhuman—or perhaps unhuman—intelligence. Some thirty years prior to the events of the first novel, Annihilation, an invisible border separates a vast expanse of coastal wilderness from the rest of the world. All human life is struck from the map: the zone is afflicted with a "contamination" that paradoxically "cleanses everything."⁹ As if nature were desperate to wipe the...