#authority by jeff vandermeer

[raideoarts]

"Is there something in the corner of your eye that you cannot get out?"

[likopinina]

death stranding + authority

[frakensteinapologist]

So far Authority is so vastly different from Annihilation but I feel like it works. It still is very much in the same world and it is continuing the story just from a different perspective.

Yeah there isn’t as much fucked up swamp/forest lands, however there is something so delicious about things being fucked up underneath the surface and the character knows it and the audience knows it but the character doesn’t see how much they themselves are changing and being changed by it. Why the hell does Control keep smelling rotten honey? why does he not think anything of it? Those are the questions that we are going to get answered.

[autumnbell32]

“…the story that anchored Control as a kid soon revealed as just a brief moment set against a landscape of unhappiness. Not unique: the kind of depressingly familiar painting you’d find in a seaside antique store but never buy.”

-from, “Authority,” by Jeff Vandermeer

[deermouth]

Scavengers Reign (Joseph Bennett, Charles Huettner, 2023) // The Southern Reach Trilogy, from Authority and Acceptance (Jeff VanderMeer, 2014)

[greatlakesrebel]

I finished the southern reach trilogy can you tell

[12thbiologist]

what can you do when your five senses are not enough? ... what occurs after revelation and paralysis?

- jeff vandermeer, annihilation

[erythriina]

my dealer: got some straight gas this strain is called ‘the southern reach’ youll be zonked out of your gourd beyond what any man can bear, but whether it decays under the earth or above on green fields, or out to sea or in the very air, all shall come to revelation, and to revel, in the knowledge of the strangling fruit

me: yeah whatever. I don’t feel shit

5 minutes later: dude I swear I just saw a rift in reality in the tunnel tower

my buddy Control, pacing: The Voice is lying to us

[judgeitbyitscover]

Southern Reach series (10th Anniversary Editions) by Jeff VanderMeer

Cover art by Pablo Delcan

MacMillan, 2014-2024

Annihilation (2014)

Area X has been cut off from the rest of the world for decades. Nature has reclaimed the last vestiges of human civilization. The first expedition returned with reports of a pristine, Edenic landscape; the second expedition ended in mass suicide, the third in a hail of gunfire as its members turned on one another. The members of the eleventh expedition returned as shadows of their former selves, and within weeks, all had died of cancer. In Annihilation, the first volume of Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach Trilogy, we join the twelfth expedition.

The group is made up of four women: an anthropologist; a surveyor; a psychologist, the de facto leader; and our narrator, a biologist. Their mission is to map the terrain, record all observations of their surroundings and of one another, and, above all, avoid being contaminated by Area X itself.

They arrive expecting the unexpected, and Area X delivers—but it’s the surprises that came across the border with them and the secrets the expedition members are keeping from one another that change everything

Authority (2014)

After thirty years, the only human engagement with Area X—a seemingly malevolent landscape surrounded by an invisible border and mysteriously wiped clean of all signs of civilization—has been a series of expeditions overseen by a government agency so secret it has almost been forgotten: the Southern Reach. Following the tumultuous twelfth expedition chronicled in Annihilation, the agency is in complete disarray.

John Rodríguez (aka "Control") is the Southern Reach's newly appointed head. Working with a distrustful but desperate team, a series of frustrating interrogations, a cache of hidden notes, and hours of profoundly troubling video footage, Control begins to penetrate the secrets of Area X. But with each discovery he must confront disturbing truths about himself and the agency he's pledged to serve.

In Authority, the second volume of Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach trilogy, Area X's most disturbing questions are answered . . . but the answers are far from reassuring.

Acceptance (2014)

It is winter in Area X, the mysterious wilderness that has defied explanation for thirty years, rebuffing expedition after expedition, refusing to reveal its secrets. As Area X expands, the agency tasked with investigating and overseeing it—the Southern Reach—has collapsed on itself in confusion. Now one last, desperate team crosses the border, determined to reach a remote island that may hold the answers they've been seeking. If they fail, the outer world is in peril.

Meanwhile, Acceptance tunnels ever deeper into the circumstances surrounding the creation of Area X—what initiated this unnatural upheaval? Among the many who have tried, who has gotten close to understanding Area X—and who may have been corrupted by it?

In this last installment of Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach trilogy, the mysteries of Area X may be solved, but their consequences and implications are no less profound—or terrifying.

Absolution (2024)

When the Southern Reach Trilogy was first published a decade ago, it was an instant sensation, celebrated in a front-page New York Times story before publication, hailed by Stephen King and many others. Each volume climbed the bestsellers list; awards were won; the books made the rare transition from paperback original to hardcover; the movie adaptation became a cult classic. All told, the trilogy has sold more than a million copies and has secured its place in the pantheon of twenty-first-century literature.

And yet for all this, for Jeff VanderMeer there was never full closure to the story of Area X. There were a few mysteries that had gone unsolved, some key points of view never aired. There were stories left to tell. There remained questions about who had been complicit in creating the conditions for Area X to take hold; the story of the first mission into the Forgotten Coast—before Area X was called Area X—had never been fully told; and what if someone had foreseen the world after Acceptance? How crazy would they seem?

Structured in three parts, each recounting a new expedition, there are some long-awaited answers here, to be sure, but also more questions, and profound new surprises. Absolution is a brilliant, beautiful, and ever-terrifying plunge into unique and fertile literary territory. It is the final word on one of the most provocative and popular speculative fiction series of our time

[petitedeath]

I started this drawing and it was fine in just ink. And the it was fine when I water colored it but then I accidentally ruined it. And just kept going. Oh well. I combined it with some experiments I did with paint pouring and peeling.

I finished reading authority last week and just loved the concept of the mouse/plant in the drawer and the concept of terroir. I'll have to try drawing it again.

[southern-reach]

boss makes a dollar i make a dime that’s why i put dead mice and plants in desk cabinets on company time

[gorgynei]

has there always been someone like me to bury the bodies, to have regrets, to carry on after everyone else was dead?

[scaryvampirelady]

the charm of control rodriguez is not in that he's a nepo baby, it's that he's a nepo baby in an extremely unique and highly sought after position and he just fucking sucks so bad at it

[littledeadling]

I know it’s not the lunar new year yet for a while, but all this rabbit talk has got me thinking about Southern Reach again 💛

[perigilpin]

“It is superstition," she admitted. "But it might be true.”

Jeff VanderMeer, Authority

[toytulini]

Americans will measure in anything but the metric system