Jeff Vandermeer's Annihilation is speculative fiction at its best. I hesitate to call it science fiction because the genre carries such a weight of comic book action heroes. There is some shooting and running about but character and description are the core of this story which forms the first part of the Southern Reach series of books. The lead character is a biologist who is sent across the border into alien territory where very little is known about the inhabitants and their world. What she encounters there challenges her understanding and, at times, the description of the author. That is what I like about it - that Vandermeer tries to describe something which is indescribable. That trope used to be the mainstay of horror: that there was something lurking in the dark rather some psycho with a chainsaw in the full glare of light. So it is with this genre that the speculation about alien ecosystems is so alien that we struggle to describe it. Even the architecture is strangely symbiotic and contradictory as we have a lighthouse tower but the main tower in the story is really an underground tunnel. The only thing I didn't like was the fact that we were so obviously setting up a sequel and maybe even a prequel. I felt that all the stories in any sequence should be able to stand alone as self-contained. Publishers disagree. They want the repeat of the familiar but that isn't what this kind of fiction is about.
