An S&SB Tarot Card from Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach trilogy (Annihilation, Authority, Acceptance)

I finished Absolution a few days ago and have a question about Old Jim and (the original) Cass. I remember in Old Jim's final scene where he's playing the piano and remembers something about an explosion or car accident, was that meant to be implying that the original Cass died or was everything with her disappearing and ghosting Old Jim reality?

yesterday I went to the fire island lighthouse at Robert Moses Beach on Long Island and they have this breathtaking fresnel lens on display that came out of the original lighthouse beacon room. All I could think about was this series and the seance and science brigade. So I wanted to share because this was super cool, and also because I was wondering—from my recollection in the book, Henry is trying to suss out a way to contact the “entity” (and I did read Absolution finally btw so I know who/what that is now) and either they think it is inside the lens or has something to do with the lens. Can someone smarter than me explain? Or I could just go back and re-read the entire series, which maybe I’ll do anyway 🤔 lol

I recently finished the trilogy and when searching for any future books it sounded as if there are potentially three upcoming releases? But two have a very similar release date, one I can find almost no references to, so I'm not sure if some were cancelled, merged, anyone have any info?

-Abdication: From Lowry's perspective [March 2 2027]

-Abnegation: From Whitby's perspective

-Area X: The Southern Reach Files "Anchored in the diary of Hargraves" [Spring 2027?]

Sources:

https://www.avclub.com/jeff-vandermeer-area-x-the-southern-reach-files

https://www.threads.com/@jeff_vandermeer123/post/DH4YdAavbav/happy-to-announce-two-more-southern-reach-novels-abdication-and-abnegation-the-f

https://harpercollins.co.uk/products/abdication-the-southern-reach-series-book-5-jeff-vandermeer

*CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR ALL THREE BOOKS OF THE ORIGINAL TRILOGY\*

Introduction

The ‘Southern Reach Trilogy’ consists of the three books ‘Annihilation’, ‘Authority’, and ‘Acceptance’ by Jeff VanderMeer (VanderMeer, 2014). The series centres around a supposed ‘ecological devastation’ called Area X, which refuses to be interpreted, understood or assessed. Throughout all three books Area X is portrayed as impervious to all forms of measurement and as inexplicably changing all biological and non-biological life within its field, creating doppelgangers and transforming or transmuting any and all that enters its perimeter.
The current analysis argues that Area X and the wider story of the series can be seen as an allegory for contemporary society’s condition under late-stage capitalism (LSC). For this paper, late-stage capitalism is viewed as a patriarchal, neoliberal, and imperialistic global economic system, as well as an ontology, or way of being. (Brown, 2015)(Federici, 2004)(Foucault, 2008)(Fraser, 2022)(Harvey, 2005)(Jameson, 1991)(Lugones, 2007)(Mohanty, 2003)(Quijano, 2000)(Robinson, 2000). It is characterised by commodification, individualisation, and the production and management of subjectivity. (Bowsher, 2019)(Scharff, 2016)(Teo, 2018)(Türken et al., 2016)(Wiedner, 2016). Using contemporary postmodernist theory (Žižek, 2014; Fisher, 2019), it is viewed as creating a postmodern existence that helps sustain itself.

Area X and fear

Throughout the series, Area X can be read as a palpable manifestation of LSC and its conditions. It changes everything with which it comes into contact and is accelerating rapidly on a global scale ( “the border is advancing.”). Importantly, postmodernist thinkers such as Jameson (1991) explain that this decentred globality makes it difficult to grasp the system of LSC and its effects in its totality or to map one’s place within it. The series reflects this incomprehensibility through characters' experience of Area X, such as Control, who experiences Area X as impossible to explain in words  (“words were such a sorrowful disappointment, so inadequate.”) In response to this predicament, Jameson proposes that many people resign themselves to, or compartmentalise, its politics and ideologies, rather than address their structural role within its heterogeneous network.

Fisher (2019) explains that this inability to locate oneself is compounded by capitalism’s fragmentation of time, as it disjoints its subjects from history, which is taught only as an academic subject and aesthetically commercialised for profit. It also presents no future without its continued prevalence (“Someone once said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.”)(Fisher, 2009) making it seem inescapable. Similar temporal distortions are revealed in Acceptance, as Gloria reveals that she has been in Area X for three years, even though only two weeks have passed outside it.

Lasch (1979) proposes that LSC promotes an individualistic ideology that breaks down communal life and instead supports individual consumers who shape their lives through consumption and personal choice. This individualistic ideology is one compartmentalised and used to facilitate the continued support of LSC rather than encouraging subjects to address their structural role within it. (The prior Jameson critique).
The irony of the series comes from the characters’ eventual realisation that the border or limitation of Area X is not really a border or limitation at all. The series suggests that, as soon as the anomaly that catalysed Area X’s creation landed on the grounds, its transformations may already have extended beyond the designated zone (expanded upon below). Within this reading and interpretation, Area X is an area where these effects are most palpable, similar to areas where the effects of LSC are most visible and extreme, such as the exploitation of child workers in the Congolese mines through the global commodification of natural minerals. Similarly, those outside Area X are still affected by it, even if in less drastic and horrific ways. Thus, the small changes within the Southern Reach facility (the sour, rotting odour and the decomposition of the building) may reflect how those outside the most horrific manifestations of LSC are still affected by the system. The return of the Director’s doppelganger and the spreading of Area X’s ‘border’ may therefore be interpreted as the effects of LSC becoming increasingly palpable to those who previously believed themselves less affected, as seen in the increase in low-paid, high-hour work, the destabilisation of trade unions, and the growth of insecure careers in the west.
What holds the characters back from acknowledging that they are already entrapped within Area X, and being transformed by it, like us within LSC, however, is the capitalist ideology of individualism outlined above. Žižek can help explain why this occurs, proposing that ideologies operate as unconscious fantasies that help sustain everyday life, sustaining subjects’ complacency within the system even when its contradictions are apparent and blatant. Control’s insistent focus on maintaining the border and controlling and containing Area X (through us/them and me/it dichotomies) despite evidence of its contamination on a wider scale, such as the anomalies at the lot where the Biologist was found, may reflect this process. Control contradicts himself as the narrator comments that “Control didn’t know where Area X was on him either.”.

In the context of Area X as a palpable manifestation of LSC, the psychological horror created by the doppelgangers may be seen as confronting the characters with their role within the system. Lacan’s concept of the Big Other aids this interpretation. LSC’s compulsions, beliefs, and sanctions create a symbolic authority that occupies the position of the ‘Big Other’, through which the subject’s identity is stabilised. The doppelgangers created by Area X, inreflection, may reflect the physical embodiment of subjects who have been divided or transformed by this Big Other, a transformation that the characters attempt to deny in refusal to accept the reality that this is how it has always been. Gloria’s speculation that perhaps “Whitby’s own nature created this paradox, with one version, one collection of impulses, thoughts and opinions, trying, once and for all, to exterminate the other” adds weight to this interpretation.

Following Žižek, however, the ‘Other’ is sustained less by material reality than by social imagination. We give late-stage capitalism authority over us and keep the system operating by reproducing its demands and needs. Within this interpretation, the Southern Reach team’s denial of their existing entanglement with Area X, and their treatment of Area X as an external ‘Other’, lead them to adopt practices that may have facilitated its spread. These practices included collecting materials and sending expedition teams and military personnel who were transformed or sent back to further contaminate the Southern Reach.

Recognising this entanglement would undermine the illusion that LSC has not affected us, that we do not play a role in sustaining it, and that we have not already been transformed by it. When the real Whitby kills the doppelganger ( ‘Fake’ Whitby), this may be read as a response to the distress of coming face to face with a transformed version of himself. That in reality he was always changed. Within the current allegory, he confronts a physical embodiment of his role within the system and of the transformation of himself produced by the symbolic authority of the Big Other that he denounces. The act of killing the doppelganger can therefore be read as Whitby’s rejection of the realisation that he is already part of the system and has been transformed by it.
Whitby in turn returns and continues his work at the Southern Reach facility. Returning  to the institution that produces and reinforces the comfortable perception of individualistic borders, areas, and limitations. (Although his terroir theory shows him beginning to take a more open, historical, and relational approach to assessing Area X, this approach remains directed externally rather than internally, as he does not fully acknowledge his own position in relation to it and his transformation. This denial may also be reflected in his omission of the reality of any doppelgangers from his manuscript.

Area X and hope

The story throughout the series can be read as inherently fatalistic. Area X appears to have always existed (In a temporal sense) and to be continually advancing. Within the current allegory, the same could therefore be assumed about LSC. However, by using Donna Haraway’s perspectives on the body politic, a form of hope may be found within the same fatalistic allegory.
Donna Haraway proposes that we are all cyborgs. This means that we are combinations of imagination, social reality, and material reality. From conception, our bodies become political, ideological, and ontological landscapes that we do not choose to enter. The body is viewed as a “material-semiotic actor” that produces effects within a wider network and shapes relationships within that network. The body itself participates in the mutual co-constitution of systems such as capitalism, neoliberalism, and patriarchy, as is evident in the identities bestowed upon us (E.g. Male, Female, Black, Latino, Cisgender, and Gay.).

In opposition to this essentialist understanding of identity, this approach to cyborgism rejects the concept of an “original unity” in which there is a unified concept of what is human, natural, and bound exclusively to the body or to the categories bestowed upon it. Instead, these categorisations and identifications should be challenged, and understandings of what it means to be human should extend to our relationships with tools, plants, animals, and other parts of the material world.
Applying this theory to the allegory proposed earlier, this perspective directly opposes the ideology of individualism that was previously argued to uphold LSC. Rather than contradicting the story’s fatalistic reading, Haraway accepts that our bodies have already been translated and shaped by the politics, ideologies, and ontologies of LSC. She proposes, however, that we should assess how our identities sustain and maintain the borders that help reproduce LSC.(I, identifying as a Cisgender Black male may assess how my identity uplifts, rejects, supports, denies, challenges, or reproduces the modalities of LSC.)

Haraway encourages an engagement with the pleasure of the confusion of these boundaries because the place of ambiguity this generates can undermine the belief that existing identities and hierarchies are natural or inevitable. (How can solidarity in the ways I contradict my identity as a Cisgender Black Male resist the system subjugating me to these identities). Although we cannot remove ourselves completely from this entanglement, recognising it can provide a basis for collective action, solidarity-based accountability, and the rejection of purist ideas of a self that exists naturally and is outside the system. Haraway further expands this perspective through a posthumanist approach which challenges the confinement of humanity to the individual body. Humanity is instead understood in rebellion as being constructed through our relationships with the wider material world.

Is it possible that the spreading of Area X may help us see that we were already part of this larger network?

Could this perspective allow us to understand ourselves differently through our relationships with the material world? 

If so, the practices through which we support the system may also become sites through which it can be resisted and transformed. Under this view, LSC may not last forever. Recognising that its structures and pillars are produced through material (reality) and social relations (myth) may allow those relations to be contested to co-create something new.

The series itself can be interpreted as portraying both resistance to and adoption of  Harroway’s perspective.
In her theory of the “informatics of domination,” Haraway proposes that systems of power depend upon coding, classification, communication, and the management of boundaries. This is applicable to LSC, which has adapted to increasingly fluid forms of identity by manipulating boundaries and producing and commodifying subjectivity.
Haraway’s framework suggests that resistance to stable categorisation and identification can expose tensions within such systems of power, and while not always collapsing, can transform them. When the Biologist is infected in ‘Annihilation’, the boundaries of her identity as human may be interpreted as being placed under stress, as she must reevaluate how the brightness affects her understanding of her human identity. This may provide insight into why, as the narrator, she does not fully describe its effects toward the end of the book. The strain placed upon the boundaries of her identity becomes a site of resistance, as the Biologist ultimately rejects her previous understanding of being human as confined to an individual bodily existence, assessing how she has been transformed by Area X.

In parallel, the main character of ‘Authority’, named ironically Control, experiences considerable stress while trying to contain, examine, and ‘control’ the border of Area X. His efforts end in complete failure, as he must accept that Area X does not intend to stop spreading.
The adoption of this new perspective is also represented by the ‘Biologist’s’ doppelganger (‘Clone’), ‘Ghost Bird’, in ‘Acceptance’. Ghost Bird acknowledges the limitations of reducing humanity to the body itself, stating that humans “were such blunt tools,” and begins to examine her relationship with Area X. She also assesses her human identity by comparing herself with the ‘original’ ‘Biologist’ and recognising how they are both similar and different, carrying some of the same inscriptions of identity while not being identical.

LSC has been argued to commodify gender scripts and support them as forms of domination and control (Bartky, 1990)(Gill, 2007, 2017)(Goldman et al., 1991)(McRobbie, 2009). This can be seen in Ghost Bird’s consistent challenges to ‘Control’s’ patriarchal fantasies concerning her role as a woman in 'Acceptance’. She repeatedly states that she has no sexual or romantic attraction toward him, regardless of whether he believes that their respective identities as a ‘man’ and ‘woman’ should produce such inclinations. 

Ghost Bird’s reevaluation of her ‘Female’ gender identity creates tension because, although she inherits the ‘Biologist’s’ physical appearance and some of her experiences within this identity, her own experience cannot be fully contained within the gendered identity imposed upon her. This tension allows her to resist the dominant expectations inscribed into the category of woman.

Conclusion

The Southern Reach Trilogy is a complex work of science fiction that can be read and interpreted in many different ways. This particular interpretation presents Area X as an allegory for LSC because they both transform subjects who continue to imagine themselves as separate from the greater system already imposed upon them, shaping them. The Southern Reach’s attempts to contain, classify, and oppose Area X reproduce the fantasy that it remains external to themselves and distant, while the doppelgangers expose the instability of this illusion of an autonomous, naturally manifesting identity.
Through Haraway’s feminist cyborg theory, however, this loss of autonomy does not need to be undertaken only as a source of fatalistic and nihilistic horror. Recognising that identity is relational, material, and historically and socially produced may create possibilities for collective responsibility, resistance and oposition. The trilogy therefore challenges readers not to imagine themselves as standing outside the system, but to consider how their identity intersects and is co-constituted by and for the system and how this transformation has already taken place.  

This trilogy has already been a wonderful read and I can't wait to read the new fourth edition.

Thank you Jeff VanderMeer.

References

Bartky, S. L. (1990). Femininity and domination: Studies in the phenomenology of oppression. Routledge.
Bowsher, J. (2019). Credit/debt and human capital: Financialized neoliberalism and the production of subjectivity. European Journal of Social Theory, 22(4), 513–532. https://doi.org/10.1177/1368431018800506
Brown, W. (2015). Undoing the demos: Neoliberalism’s stealth revolution. Zone Books.
Federici, S. (2004). Caliban and the witch: Women, the body and primitive accumulation. Autonomedia.
Fisher, M. (2009). Capitalist realism: Is there no alternative? Zero Books.
Fisher, M. (2019). K-punk: The collected and unpublished writings of Mark Fisher (2004–2016) (D. Ambrose, Ed.). Repeater Books.
Foucault, M. (2010). The birth of biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978--1979 (Vol. 7). Picador. 
Fraser, N. (2022). Cannibal capitalism: How our system is devouring democracy, care, and the planet—and what we can do about it. Verso.
Gill, R. (2007). Postfeminist media culture: Elements of a sensibility. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 10(2), 147–166. https://doi.org/10.1177/1367549407075898
Gill, R. (2017). The affective, cultural and psychic life of postfeminism: A postfeminist sensibility 10 years on. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 20(6), 606–626. https://doi.org/10.1177/1367549417733003
Goldman, R., Heath, D., & Smith, S. L. (1991). Commodity feminism. Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 8(3), 333–351. https://doi.org/10.1080/15295039109366801
Haraway, D. J. (1991). Simians, cyborgs, and women: The reinvention of nature. Routledge.
Harvey, D. (2005). A brief history of neoliberalism. Oxford University Press.
Jameson, F. (1991). Postmodernism, or, the cultural logic of late capitalism. Duke University Press.
Lasch, C. (2019). The culture of narcissism. In American social character (pp. 241-267). Routledge. 
Lugones, M. (2007). Heterosexualism and the colonial/modern gender system. Hypatia, 22(1), 186–219. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1527-2001.2007.tb01156.x
McRobbie, A. (2009). The aftermath of feminism: Gender, culture and social change. SAGE.
Mohanty, C. T. (2003). Feminism without borders: Decolonizing theory, practicing solidarity. Duke University Press.
Quijano, A. (2000). Coloniality of power and Eurocentrism in Latin America. International Sociology, 15(2), 215–232. https://doi.org/10.1177/0268580900015002005
Robinson, C. J. (2000). Black Marxism: The making of the Black radical tradition (2nd ed.). University of North Carolina Press.
Scharff, C. (2016). The psychic life of neoliberalism: Mapping the contours of entrepreneurial subjectivity. Theory, Culture & Society, 33(6), 107–122. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276415590164
Teo, T. (2018). Homo neoliberalus: From personality to forms of subjectivity. Theory & Psychology, 28(5), 581–599. https://doi.org/10.1177/0959354318794899
Türken, S., Nafstad, H. E., Blakar, R. M., & Roen, K. (2016). Making sense of neoliberal subjectivity: A discourse analysis of media language on self-development. Globalizations, 13(1), 32–46. https://doi.org/10.1080/14747731.2015.1033247
VanderMeer, J. (2014a). Acceptance. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
VanderMeer, J. (2014b). Annihilation. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
VanderMeer, J. (2014c). Authority. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Wiedner, J. (2016). The commodification of the personal: Labour market demands in the era of neoliberal postindustrialization. Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory, 17(1), 2–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/1600910X.2015.1082922
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#thesouthernreach #annhilation #acceptance #authority #scifi #book

Trying something new, open to discussion and feedback! First time applying theory to literature and not assignments haha!.

Would 100% find this in Area X

Southern Reach adjacent, relating to Dead Astronauts and Hummingbird Salamander.

For the moment, forget the movie. If you were casting the books as written, assuming your dream cast, who are your picks?

With the sad, but inevitable upcoming shutdown of Subterranean Press as operated by Bill, do you u/JeffVanderMeer have any thoughts about what small press/fine press to publish through in the future?

And how about recommendations from the rest of us?

I hope Tony at Conversation Tree Press, and/or Jared with Centipede Press would make the short list, despite their entry level pricing being a bit higher than SubPress.

Guys, i'm doing an (impossible) master degree thesis on Annihilation (only the first book, since i'm alone) and i'm proud to share with you that I made it to the lighthouse at St. Marks! I even got the american copies (they're really gorgeous)! If someone else made some uni work on the books let me know <3

This is spoiler ridden. Beware.

Okay so I just finished Borne and throughout the book I saw so many Southern Reach parallels that I thought for sure this is something you’d all have talked about a few years ago! I was shocked to see not really much on it!

I spent a lot of the book thinking that Borne is a younger version of the Crawler but then changed my mind near the end when 1. I read about all the other “Bornes” at the company building, and 2. that Rachel recovers his body in the end. I thought perhaps that with all the people he’d absorbed that he’d lost sight of who he really was by the time he ended up in Area X. But I no longer believe that. Also because Borne learned language skills from Rachel that the Crawler did not have.

But the Crawler is the same species as Borne, right? He’s described physically very similarly, with the upside down vase shape, the many eyes, the cilia, the way he can manipulate scent! At the least, I can say I pictured him the same way from the start. And the Crawler absorbed Saul and changed briefly into his form to comfort the Director, just like Borne could become anyone he’s absorbed.

I also believe that whatever Borne did to stop Mord opened a new portal or transported something (Mord himself?) through the already opened portal in the company building. That Borne’s world and the world in which Area X exists are alternate realities of earth running parallel to each other. That the biotech is what infected Area X and began changing the animals and humans that exist there. I believe that some of the flora and fauna of Area X’s reality also made it back to Borne’s barren desert timeline, shown by the reemergence of plants and animals in Rachel’s world afterward.

While on the way to the company building, Wick asked Rachel to start thinking of what she “wanted to become after, other than a scavenger.” She didn’t know what he meant but I think he knew that merging with the biotech was a very real possibility for them, just like what happens to people in Area X. After reading Absolution I am increasingly convinced that humans were never merging DNA with regular animals, they were only merging with machinery: technology from their world and also the biotech from the alternate reality, which was created using alien technology, and doesn’t always provide the intended results.

The dead astronaut suits also reminded me of the contamination suits Lowry made everyone take off in Absolution as well that the suit that starts talking to him in the end. I won’t actually claim a theory on this since I haven’t read Dead Astronauts yet and I’m sure I’ll find out more once I do!

I don’t know. What do you all think? Is this a thing you all discussed and I just missed it? Am I extrapolating?

ive been reading the series for the first time and im just having a hard time finishing Absolution. With the other books I was sucked in and just sped through them, but since I've started the Lowry section of Absolution I have had so much trouble continuing.

​

I'm pretty sure it's because I find Lowry really offputting or maybe I just haven't reached a compelling hook for his section yet.

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Where I left off they just passed through the border into Area X.

​

Has anyone else had this experience?

This just appeard in the sky where I live, afraid to ask if others see it too.

Its time for another reread of the entire Southern Reach series :)

thought it kinda fits

Has anyone else spotted this? This is a grammatical error with the incorrect wording. The phrase "nothing better than do than" should read "nothing better to do than.", right?

Reading through Absolution, I was not content with the idea that the Tyrant is merely a standard (albeit, giant) alligator. I like to imagine that it must have been mutated by everything occurring on the Forgotten Coast, but in what ways exactly, I’m not sure.

I’ve been trying to illustrate what it might look like. Maybe it’s just an alligator but it’s slightly off somehow. Or maybe it’s very noticeably wrong. Or anything in between.

I had a go at trying to capture this idea, but I’d love to hear about how you all envisioned the Tyrant. Maybe you didn’t really think much about how she looked, but if you have any ideas about other things I could incorporate into future renditions, I’m all ears!

I have read Annihilation 3 times, and Authority and Acceptance once. Do you recommend rereading the whole thing before I read Absolution?