This is the last time I leave the house until I finish the novel.
February 15, 2016 6:06 AM   Subscribe

Eventually, I wind up in the master bedroom, looking at a poster against the wall that has a hand-drawn map of Area X on it, just like I thought the former director would have left behind. It’s a poster I drew myself, of course. But I stare at it for a while, and a genuine feeling of dread and fear travels up my spine. I’m seeing the room through Control’s eyes—he’s looking at a map created by some unknown source, wondering what the hell it’s doing in the former director’s bedroom.

Getting an entire trilogy published in less than a year is bad for your (mental) health, as Jeff Vandermeer found out writing the Southern Reach trilogy.
posted by MartinWisse (34 comments total) 29 users marked this as a favorite
 
Wow, that was surprisingly harrowing to read! I have several collections of short stories curated by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer which are all fantastic, so I picked up Annihilation as soon as I heard about it (which, conveniently, was after all three Southern Reach books had been released). I loved Annihilation, and felt sort of ambivalent about Authority. I didn't read Acceptance, but this article has made me want to go back and start over and maybe make it all the way through this time.
posted by torisaur at 6:45 AM on February 15, 2016


Sadly, this isn't surprising for me to read because I was greatly disappointed by the Southern Reach trilogy. A great, interesting premise ended up not really materializing into a coherent, sensical whole.
posted by Eyeveex at 7:07 AM on February 15, 2016 [10 favorites]


I enjoyed binge-reading the series. In fact, now that I've become accustomed to binge-watching television I find that it's now my preferred mode of media consumption. Wave of the future I guess?
posted by orrnyereg at 7:33 AM on February 15, 2016


Bad for the books, too. Authority was a huge disappointment, and caused me to peter out during Acceptance.
posted by graventy at 8:25 AM on February 15, 2016


The problem with publishing a series where each book comes out over a year after the previous is that I forget what happened -- since apparently no one in the industry has heard of something called a synopsis. So sometimes I never get around to the next book, often I read them and dislike them because I can't remember some clearly important thing that happens and quit reading the author. I should just stop reading the first book in a planned series until just before the last book is published -- but then occasionally there are series where it is worth it.

(I particularly hate trilogies that are really one excessively long thousand page book published in three parts.)

I haven't read the Southern Reach trilogy; I'm undecided about it, as historically I am iffy on his writing but people I trust really liked it.
posted by jeather at 8:39 AM on February 15, 2016 [1 favorite]


Weird, Authority was possibly my favourite of the three. YMMV.

The Southern Reach trilogy is ultimately about the unknowability of things, so it doesn't surprise me that the ending was so unsatisfying for some people. Vandermeer is a bit Neal-Stephensonian in the way he expresses fascinating ideas successfully but generally can't write an ending to save his life, so that doesn't help matters either. It also doesn't help that he literally bases his stories on dreams a lot of the time (as in this particular case), so they tend to follow dream logic more than standard conventions of storytelling.

In a way, reading this piece made me enjoy the books less? It's like, ok, you had this really harrowing experience while writing the books, but at the same time you openly admit to "method acting" your way through it. Points for commitment, but I don't think the conclusions generalise in an interesting way.

I still love Vandermeer's work, though. The weird, unresolved dream logic stuff totally works for me, in the same way that a lot of Nabokov's stuff does. (Who, I should note, Vandermeer specifically cites as a major influence in various places.)
posted by tobascodagama at 8:58 AM on February 15, 2016 [2 favorites]


Honestly, if anything, I feel like the ending of Acceptance might have been a little too explicable. But I still respect the kind of mind that could take Stephen Wright's joke about everything in his apartment being replaced by an exact replica and turn it into a kind of horror story. (Though I admit to being slightly confused by people who claim to have actually found these books scary.)
posted by tobascodagama at 9:02 AM on February 15, 2016


The tone and aesthetics and worldbuilding of this trilogy was super good, but it just never quite stuck the landing... it was still pretty good! I definitely wouldn't call the books bad, and for me the unresolved nature of the ending wasn't really a problem. I just think it legitimately raised its own bar so high that it failed to clear it, wrote some checks it couldn't cash.
posted by jason_steakums at 9:04 AM on February 15, 2016 [3 favorites]


This piece is great. It's not like King's Misery, where the fiction has an unnatural hold on the reader, or The Dark Half, where the fiction has an unnatural hold on the writer. It's like The Jungle, where strange work has an unnatural hold on the working man.
posted by infinitewindow at 9:12 AM on February 15, 2016 [3 favorites]


His remarks about the influence of his feelings about the Gulf oil spill really cast the whole trilogy in a new light for me. I read and enjoyed all three books (though Annihilation didn't quite click as well for me as the other two), and I knew and worked professionally with Jeff in his pre-fulltime writer life, so I had a feeling I understood where some of it was coming from, but reading that really put the whole series into a richer, more personal context for me.
posted by saulgoodman at 9:45 AM on February 15, 2016 [2 favorites]


Also, I don't think anyone should ever forget that catastrophe, so it's good to see someone keeping those collective memories alive.
posted by saulgoodman at 9:47 AM on February 15, 2016 [3 favorites]


The problem with publishing a series where each book comes out over a year after the previous is that I forget what happened -- since apparently no one in the industry has heard of something called a synopsis. So sometimes I never get around to the next book, often I read them and dislike them because I can't remember some clearly important thing that happens and quit reading the author. I should just stop reading the first book in a planned series until just before the last book is published -- but then occasionally there are series where it is worth it.

Damned if I remember the details, but I was talking on twitter to some authors and editors at some point about how most series don't even have volume numbers anymore and apparently this is deliberate because if someone sees a #2 on the cover, they won't buy that book if they haven't bought #1, and often they won't buy #1, anyway, they'll just buy the first in a different series or something (most series have diminishing returns in terms of sales as you add more books).
posted by PhoBWanKenobi at 9:47 AM on February 15, 2016 [1 favorite]


Which is to say, they won't add synopses to books because then readers will know which is the most absurd to me. I'd love to see series come with a good ol' star wars style scroll at the beginning.
posted by PhoBWanKenobi at 9:49 AM on February 15, 2016 [4 favorites]


I'd love to see series come with a good ol' star wars style scroll at the beginning.

Donaldson's 10-book, three-series Thomas Covenant saga has a "What Has Gone Before" at the beginning of every volume but the first one, and I have appreciated that across the 30ish-year publication cycle it took for him to finally finish the entire story.
posted by hippybear at 10:13 AM on February 15, 2016 [2 favorites]


His remarks about the influence of his feelings about the Gulf oil spill really cast the whole trilogy in a new light for me.

I think it works even if you look at the story as a global warming parable of sorts. Or with any other type or scale of ecological catastrophe, for that matter. Just the idea of people striving to do whatever people do and fulfill whatever needs people need to fulfill, oh and in the process they somehow start a chain of events that nobody fully understands that seem to have dire consequences but the consequences are so disconnected from your day-to-day that it's almost impossible to think about and wrap your head around if you even try, and even the scientists trying to study it with their best science tools don't really grasp the whole thing, just that it's really really bad and we probably caused it, and nobody can agree on what to do because they don't understand it well enough to fully articulate what the effects will be of the original event, never mind any of their attempts to fix the situation or mitigate the effects -- these oil dispersants will surely fix the problem or pumping sulfur dioxides into the atmosphere or etc. etc. and they surely won't have unpredictable effects that are just as bad or worse...

Yeah, whatever else you can say about this trilogy, I think it captures the Anthropocene pretty well.
posted by tobascodagama at 10:15 AM on February 15, 2016 [5 favorites]


But maybe that's more of a Fanfare topic, since it's getting away from this piece on the writing process. My bad.
posted by tobascodagama at 10:15 AM on February 15, 2016


Donaldson's 10-book, three-series Thomas Covenant saga has a "What Has Gone Before" at the beginning of every volume but the first one, and I have appreciated that across the 30ish-year publication cycle it took for him to finally finish the entire story.

This reminds me of something I really appreciate in (non-fiction, argumentative) books: where the table of contents has a little sentence or two telling you what the argument of each chapter is going to be. Sometimes called an "analytical" table of contents.

Quite rare, I wonder if because it is not that easy to do? Oh it's one thing to write a book, it's another thing to be able to summarize the argument concisely by chapter?

Not sure if the point generalizes to fiction, although it in turn reminds me of something I've noticed in fiction book reviews: reviewers often give plot summaries that are wrong. Or when the plot summary is technically true, its emphasis may seem to misrepresent the book, etc. Perhaps synopsizing is harder than it looks!
posted by grobstein at 11:12 AM on February 15, 2016 [2 favorites]


I'm just about to finish Authority and will definitely read Acceptance, so this is an article I'll come back to shortly. Curious why people considered it a slog as opposed to Annihilation: Both just read as fabulous unreliable character studies to me (a la Nabokov, as mentioned earlier).
posted by solarion at 11:39 AM on February 15, 2016 [1 favorite]


I'd like this (evocative and fun enough) hot mess of a trilogy's downward spiral into incoherence a bit better if I knew that it really was composed by a man in the midst of a Goodfellas-style breakdown, but this is pretty soft stuff. A moldy car, a bum knee, and a few self-doubts amid much self-praise aren't what I'd call a "surreal journey."
posted by RogerB at 11:43 AM on February 15, 2016


Donaldson's 10-book, three-series Thomas Covenant saga

I am delighted to learn that Mr. Donaldson found his purpose in life, but—having fought my way through the first two series once upon a time, there's no way I'm ever signing up for a third.
posted by octobersurprise at 12:09 PM on February 15, 2016 [3 favorites]


Which is to say, they won't add synopses to books because then readers will know which is the most absurd to me. I'd love to see series come with a good ol' star wars style scroll at the beginning.

Really, even for YA trilogies? Usually they announce FIRST IN A NEW TRILOGY everywhere. (I assume that they also tell the authors not to write these synopses and put them on their own personal websites?)

I'm talking about those kinds of books, not the style of mysteries with the same detective but no overarching plot. I am anal so I tend to run back to find book one, but I'm not terribly upset if it turns out that I read the fifth book in Unicycling Juggler Solves Murders On The High Wire first.
posted by jeather at 12:55 PM on February 15, 2016


I loved the series. I actually don't remember much of the ending, but Acceptance had one of the best love stories I've ever seen, between two very different creatures, which I really can't mention much of without spoiling the soup. It would fit in very well with today's happily placid marriage thread.

I can see why Authority would cause an unpleasant reaction in some. It's kinda like Season 2 of the Wire. Changes the tone abruptly and for some people it's hard to deal with. But I loved it.

It's got two strong influences: the nightmare bureaucracy stories of Stanislaw Lem, and the parts of Roadside Picnic which described the government infrastructure built around the contaminated zone. Maybe there's a bit of Stross's Laundry series too. I think there's something wonderful when the mundanity of government agencies & processes try to make sense of and contain something ultimately unknowable. Of course the agencies fail, over and over, but they continue the slog. Dutifully writing their XJ15 reports, carefully cataloging and re-cataloging the artifacts, dealing with interference from Washington, the usual office politics, romances, and squabbles over the coffee maker. Trying to pretend everything's normal while the zone and its terrors are just steps away.
posted by honestcoyote at 1:05 PM on February 15, 2016 [4 favorites]


The main problem with Authority is that it's not Annihilation Part 2, it's a totally different style. So a lot of people (me included) kept waiting for Annihilation to kick in again. If you can accept it on its own terms, it's a lot better. I can totally sympathize with people who never made it to the third book, though.
posted by dfan at 1:06 PM on February 15, 2016 [2 favorites]


The main problem with Authority is that it's not Annihilation Part 2, it's a totally different style.

I mean, yeah, that's sort of the point, it can't be Annihilation Part 2. Vandermeer's always struck me as someone who's put a TON of thought into how how he's telling the story, not just what story he's telling, and loves to play with that aspect of his craft. I think there's a certain type of reader that really appeals too, and another type it drives away.

Honestly though, compared to the Ambergris Trilogy, the shifts weren't anywhere close to as drastic.
posted by Gygesringtone at 1:41 PM on February 15, 2016 [3 favorites]


I thought all three books in the Southern Reach Trilogy were fantastic. Easily among the best novels I read that year.
posted by kyrademon at 4:26 PM on February 15, 2016 [2 favorites]


Honestly I could have used a bit more of the normal world stuff, the slow unveiling of the former director's life and obsession was great. Although I had just recently read Tim Powers' Declare when I started reading the Southern Reach Trilogy so I was pretty well primed to enjoy that whole aspect of the thing.
posted by jason_steakums at 4:30 PM on February 15, 2016 [1 favorite]


I am delighted to learn that Mr. Donaldson found his purpose in life, but—having fought my way through the first two series once upon a time, there's no way I'm ever signing up for a third.

Don't be anile. It'll be fine as long as you don't clench.
posted by mordax at 10:00 PM on February 15, 2016




IIRC, Portman is playing the biologist? Disappointing bit of white-washing there, as she's supposed to be half-Asian in the book. Ditto for the rumour about Jennifer Jason Leigh, cast as the psychologist, who is supposed to have some Native American heritage, though I don't think that came up until Acceptance.
posted by tobascodagama at 7:26 AM on February 16, 2016


It's true that Ambergris has enormous shifts in style between or even within books, but it stays weird and novel throughout so there's always something interesting to keep me moving along. Annihilation fits comfortably alongside that. Authority was tough for me to get to because it wasn't in some weird alien landscape, and it felt very slow moving on top of that. There was some interesting weirdness very late in the book, but I'd been reading a little bit at a time for so long at that point it was hard to be invested.

I haven't made it more than a chapter into Acceptance yet, I'm letting myself read other stuff I'm more excited by for now, but I might circle back around to it at some point.
posted by vibratory manner of working at 10:02 AM on February 16, 2016


Acceptance stands as sort of a hybrid form between Annihilation and Authority - it spans a wide stretch of time both before and during "Area X" and fills in a lot of the blanks between the first two books, while still containing significant amounts of 'action' (as opposed to Authority's more contemplative pace... barring the ending of course). If anything, my one qualm with the resolution of the trilogy was that it explained *too much* - Annihilation had a very Tony Burgess-esque quality of lucid nightmare in the story and the writing itself, events and the descriptions thereof sliding around like malevolent grease spots. Removing large chunks of that ambiguity, or at least in the fashion that they were removed, works to deflate the fevered horror a bit.

That being said, still very good books and thoroughly recommended. Altho it's interesting that he talks about all the things that he was experiencing and how they influenced the book, and then he doesn't mention 'Roadside Picnic' at all - the parallels are fairly overwhelming (altho not in a plagiaristic fashion).
posted by FatherDagon at 12:12 PM on February 16, 2016 [2 favorites]




That's a really great alternate perspective.
posted by tobascodagama at 11:37 AM on February 19, 2016


omg, I can't believe I confused Elizabeth Bear with Elizabeth Moon.

Elizabeth BEAR has a more clear-headed take on the author's labor etc.
posted by infinitewindow at 12:35 PM on February 19, 2016


« Older It's time to liberate you from the shackles of...   |   Long Lunch Newer »


This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments