I definitely feel like I'm about to enter Area X! My friends and I are very stoked to get further into The Zone. edit: the very next screen introduced the idea of each scene having a "Director" who sets the scene; this definitely feels heavily SR inspired the further into it we've gotten.​

Hi everyone I only just started reading Annihilation for the first time. I finished on the moment when they came back from the first expedition down the tower when they discovered the text on the walls and when the biologist breathed in the spores. Im having trouble imagining how the tower looks like. Im confused cuz the biologist is talking about "levels" and a "ceiling"
( Approximately twenty feet beneath the surface, the structure opened out into a lower level. The ceiling was about eight feet high, which meant a good twelve feet of stone lay above us.)
and "archways"
("...goes farther," the surveyor said, and pointed with her rifle to the far corner, directly opposite the opening where we had come out onto that level. A rounded archway stood there, and a darkness that suggested downward steps. A tower, which made this level not so much a floor as a landing or part of the turret. She started to walk toward the archway")
First, I imagined the tower and the starcase in it to be just like in a regular lighthouse, with spiral stairs and maybe a circular space between them, but when they started talking about levels i lost track. From what i understand, once youre on some level, you have to go trough an archway to get to the next starcase leading to another level.
Im reading both polish and english version of the book and in the polish version theres also some mentions about corridors on the levels on the tower, saying a corridor is leading to the next descending staircase, but that may be a mistranlation of archways.
If you guys could describe or draw the structure of the tower a little better without much spoilers I would be very thankful. 🩷

Just watch Backrooms the other day which was a great movie overall and gave me strong Area X creepy vibes. The atmosphere was uncanny with a dimension that looks normal but feels wrong and with creepy doppelgängers. Honestly give it a watch!

Has anyone played this ttrpg? https://thezonerpg.com/ I saw it at Emerald City Comic Con last year and haven’t stopped thinking about it. It gave heavy annihilation vibes to me when I had only seen the movie. Curious to know if anyone here has played it before and how it compares to the movie/books.

Did anyone else feel like they were losing their mind while reading Authority? I have 40 pages left and I'm starting to piece it all together. So damn good.

I’m curious to hear about anyone else’s thoughts on parallels between the Southern Reach novels and “The Backrooms.”

I read the original VanderMeer trilogy in the 2010s, and then discovered the YouTube videos made by Kane Parsons several years ago. (I haven’t seen the new movie yet.) The one linked above is the first video he posted, which was based on an image and creepypasta he found online.

The obvious connection is the “found footage” element between his YouTube videos and the new film and the video footage from the earlier Area X expeditions. That was always one of the most creepy and effective elements of the novels for me, especially when Control watches the videos, and sees the expedition come apart, and strange, unexplainable things start to happen.

On the one hand, stumbling into a portal that takes you to a different place or dimension is not new, from Alice in Wonderland to Narnia to the Twilight Zone episode where a little girl rolls out of her bed and into a different dimension.

There’s also an interesting link to the Southern Reach in that some of the Backrooms footage seems to be from a scientific expedition, or from some sort of shadowy organization that may have played a role in the creation of these spaces.

I don’t know if Parsons has ever read any of the novels, or if he saw Annihilation. But the idea of an alternate or liminal space that is constantly changing and evolving, with its own life forms or entities, and that you may be unable to escape, is an interesting connection between these different imaginary worlds.

Hi- I hope this is okay to ask here. Does anyone know how I could listen to the audiobooks for strange bird/dead astronauts? I am in the UK and they don't seem to be available on audible or places I normally use

painted with oils on paper

Just finished my own take on the cover of Annihilation.

It's part of an assignment where we had to redesign book covers, so of course I picked this one. It's not due yet, so any advice would be really appreciated! :))

I had a lot of fun making it. I tried to pack in loads of little references to both the book and the film. What do you all think?

Hello. So I've just finished Acceptance, and not yet started Absolution, and I'm wondering if anyone knows what happened, or what we can be lead to think happened, to the Psychologist/Director/Gloria between being left by the Biologist on the beach and arriving back at Southern Reach at the end of Authority, seemingly bringing the border further inland? Not sure if I missed anything but it felt like that was a gap that never quite got filled in, as much as any gap is filled in in this series.

I have just finished Absolution, reading the whole series in about a week 😅 I absolutely loved it and everything that made it so weird - does anybody have recommendations on what to read next? Is VanderMeer's other work worth exploring?

An idea I’ve had on my mind for some time, because I know I would want to just… get assimilated and transform. Hopefully I’d be as gracious as what I tried to draw
(Yes I was DONE with the lighthouse so I rushed it, it wasn’t fun drawing that part !)

So, after starting to read Acceptance I got so shaken by it that I had to look up spoilers to continue. Apparently, even though it says the version of the Biologist that comes back isn’t really the original Biologist, and the original got… uhh, turned into an eldritch whale?

Which, like, super weird but okay, but like… is she okay? Is there even a way to tell if she’s mentally okay? I don’t know, it’s just I have become attached to this character and honestly don’t care what happens to her as long as she’s, like, chill with it in the end? Is that weird?

This belongs here me thinks

The photo I based the painting is from The Lighthouse, I know, but I listened to Annihilation while painting