Annihilation

Jeff VanderMeer (2014)

  • 1. Initiation
    • derelict
    • hypnosis to cross the border
    • safe to live off the land
    • small rectangle of black metal
    • "The effect of this cannot be understood without being there. The beauty of it cannot be understood, either, and when you see beauty in desolation it changes something inside you. Desolation tries to colonize you."
    • no camcorders
    • "We had also been ordered not to share our journal entries with one another. Too much shared information could skew our observations, our superiors belived. But I knew from experience how hopeless this pursuit, this attempt to weed out bias, was. Nothing that lived and breathed was truly objective - even in a vacuum, even if all that possessed the brain was a self-immolating desire for the truth."
    • buffeted
    • "The anthropologist had once been an archtect; indeed, she had years ago survived a fire in a building she had designed, the only really personal thing I had found out about her."
    • perfunctory
    • Lovecraftian, weird, facsination + trepedition, characteristic of the weird
    • coquina
    • "ghosting through her syntax" -> reminds of Neuromancer's "punching through ice"
    • motes
    • "I tried to imagine the builder of this place but could not."
    • elation
    • "Where lies the strangling fruit became bathed in shadow and in light, as if a battle raged for its meaning. 'Give me a moment. I need to get closer.' Did I? Yes, I needed to get closer." What are they made of ? I hadn't even though of this, though I should have; I was still trying to parse the lingual meaning, had not transitioned to the idea of taking a physical sample. But what relief at the question! Because it helped me fight the compulsion to keep reading, to descend into the greater darkness and keep descending until I had real all there was to read. Already those initial phrases were infiltrating my mind in unexpected ways, finding fetile ground."
    • "Someone tricked into thinking that words should be read."
    • "I would have preferred the words be written in an unknown language; this would have presented less of a mystery for us to solve, in a way."
    • gullet
    • "For my part, I spent an hour observing a tiny red-and-green tree frog on the back of a broad, thick leaf and another hour following the path of an iridescent black damselfly that should not have been found at sea level. The rest of the time, I spent up a pine tree, binoculars focused on the coast and the lighthouse. I liked climbing. I also liked the ocean, and I found staring at it had a calming effect. The air was so clean, so fresh, while the world back beyond the border was what it had always been during the modern era: dirty, tired, imperfect, winding down, at war with itself. Back there, I had always felt as if my work amounted to a futile attempt to save us from who we are."
    • "It is one thing to think you might be receiving hypnotic suggestion and quite another to experience it as an observer."
    • "I now hid not one but two secrets, and that meant I was steadily, irrevocably, becoming estranged from the expedition and its purpose."
    • mercurial
  • 2. Integration
    • reverie
    • donned
    • "I wanted her embedded in the risk of the exploration, not standing at the top, with all the power over us implied by that position."
    • lurch
    • lodestone
    • "Neither of them seemed to possess the ability to focus on one thing for any length of time. Sometimes it felt as if I had been placed with a family rather than born into one."
    • brackish
    • banal
    • "So we proceeded, locked into our seperate imperatives."
    • "I liked most of all pretending to be a biologist, and pretending often leads to becoming a reasonable facsimile of what you mimic, even if only from a distance."
    • eschewed
    • palpable
    • "a kind of gentle sweetness, as of a muted nectar"
    • whorls
    • tensile
    • latticework
    • "mechanically, like a golem"
    • "Sometimes you get a sense of when the truth of things will not be revealed by microscropes."
    • "The bright, wet slickness of the new."
    • "her voice had a catch in it"
    • caustic
    • apparition
    • impetuous
    • "The feel of our boots as we advanced step by careful step through that viscous discharge, the way in which the stickiness seemed to mire us even as we managed to keep moving, would eventually end in inertia, as we knew. If we pushed it too far."
    • mire
    • body of the anthropologist, as opposed to the dude who was cut open and blossomed
    • predicted black boxed do nothing on pg. 61
    • erratic
    • impervious
    • "The map had been the first form of misdirection, for what was a map but a way of emphasizing some things and making other things, invisible?"
    • "a series of cryptic jokes with punch lines I didn't understand"
    • "I felt unmoored, drifting, once again"
    • faceted
    • welter
    • "It was entirely in keeping with his personality to become set on something and follow it, regardless of the consequences. To let an impulse become a compulsion, especially if he thought he was contributing to a cause greater than himself."
    • gregarious
    • reticence
    • "I told him point-blank, so there would be no mistake: This person he wanted to know better did not exist; I was who I seemed to be from the outside. That would never change."
    • forlorn
    • succint
  • 3. Immolation
    • aria
    • imbued
    • "I had to assume, or thought I did, that the Crawler didn't just live in the Tower - it went far afield to gather the words, and it had to assimilate them, even if it didn't understand them, before it came back to the Tower. The Crawler had to in a sense memorize them, which was a form of absorption. The strings of the sentences on the Tower's walls could be evidence brought back by the Crawler to be analyzed by the Tower."
    • "But there is a limit to thinking about even a small piece of something mounmental. You still see the shadow of the whole rearing up behind you, and you become lost in your thoughts in part from the panic of realizing the size of that imagined leviathan. I had to leave it there, compartmentalized, until I could write it all down, and seeing it on the page, begine to devine the true meaning."
    • porous
    • splotched
    • the dolphins w/ the familiar eyes
    • crenellations
    • penultimate
    • "discordant elements"
    • brackish
    • a pile of hundreds of journals
    • laconic
    • "a tough little squid I nicknamed Saint Pugnacious"
    • taciturn
    • "I enjoyed the bars, but not for the same reasons as my husband. I loved the late-night slow burn of being out, my mind turning over some problem, some piece of data, while able to appear sociable but still existing apart. He worried too much about me, though, and my need for solitude ate into his enjoyment of talking to friends, who were mostly from the hospital. I would see him trail off in mid-sentence, gazing at me for some sign of my own contentment, as, off to the side, I drank my whiskey neat. 'Ghost bird,' he would say later, 'did you have fun?' I'd nod and smile."
    • "Observation had always meant more to me than interaction."
    • "'Ghost bird, do you love me?' he whispered once in the dark, before he left for his expedition training, even though he was the ghost. 'Ghost bird, do you need me?' I loved him, but I didn't need him, and I thought that was the way it was supposed to be. A ghost bird might be a hawk in one place, a crow in another, depending on the context. the sparrow that shot up into the blue sky one morning might transform mid-flight into an osprey the next. this was the way of things here. There were no reasons so mighty that they could override the desire to be in accord with the tides and the passage of seasons and the rhythems underlying everything around me."
    • suffused
    • "After a while, a kind of unease came over me as I began to perceive a terrible resence hovering in the background of these entries. I saw the Crawler or some surrogate approaching in that space just beyound the thistle, and the single focus of the journal keeper a way of coping with that horror. An absence is not a presence, but still with each new depiction of a thistle, a shiver worked deeper and deeper into my spine. When the latter part of the book dissolved into ruined ink and moist pulp, I was almost relieved to be rid of that unnerving repetition, for there had been a hypnotic, trancelike quality to the accounts. If there had been an endless number of pages, I feared that I would have stood there reading for an eternity, until I fell to the floor and died of thirst or starvation."
    • "text in a logbook that reads as if it came out of the Old Testament, but is from no psalm I remember"
    • "By what impulse, by what shared fatalism?"
    • "With a kind of lurch in my stomach, I kept rummaging, knowing that it was inevitable that I would stumble upon, and I was right. Stuck to the back of another journal by dried blood or some other substance, I found it more easily than I'd imagined: my husband's journal, written in the confident, bold handwriting I knew from birthday cards, notes on the refrigerator, and shopping lists. The ghost bird had found his ghost, on an inexplicable pile of other ghosts. But rather than looking forward to reading that account, I felt as if I were stealing a private diary that had been locked by his death. A stupid feeling, I know. All he'd ever wanted was for me to open up to him, and as a result he had always been there for the taking. Now, though, I would have to take him as I found him, and it would probably be forever, and I found the truth of that intolerable."
  • 4. Immersion
    • "'Your mother is an alcoholic, correct? And your father is a kind of...con man?' I almost exhibited a lack of control at what seemed like an insult, not an insight. I almost protested, defiantly, 'My mother is an artist and my father is an entrepreneur.'"
    • pejorative
    • the psycologist said that she was a flame, the flame element
    • "I tried again. 'And your fall? Pushed or an accident or on purpse?' A frown appeared, a true perplexity expressed though the network of wrinkles at the corners of her eyes, as if the memory were only coming through in fragments. 'I thought...I thought something was after me. I tried to shoot you, and couldn't and then you were inside. Then I thought I saw something behind me, coming toward me from the stairs, and I felt such an overwhelming fear I had to get away from it. So I jumped out over the railing. I jumped.' As if she couldn't believe she had done such a thing. 'What did the thing coming after you look like?' A coughing fit, words dribbling out around the edges: 'I never saw it. It was never there. Or I saw it too many times. It was insde me. Inside you. I was trying to get away. From what's inside me."
    • "I interpreted the frenzy of her disassociation as part of a need for control. She had lost control of the expedition, and so she had to find someone or something to blame her failure on, no matter how improbable."
    • "'The thing reacted. It killed her, wounded me.' 'Which is why you looked so shaken the next morning.' 'Yes. And because I could tell that you were arlready changing.' 'I'm not changing!' I shouted it, an unexpected rage rising inside of me. A wet chuckle, a mocking tone. 'Of course you're not. You're just becoming more of what you've always been And I'm not changing, either. None of us are changing. Everything is fine. Let's have a picnic.'"
    • "'If it was a disaster, you helped create it.' I realized that as much as I mistrusted the psychologist personally, I had come to rely on her to lead the expedition. On some level, I was furious that she had betrayed us, furious that she might be leaving me now. 'You just panicked, and you gave up.' The psychologist nodded. 'That, too. I did. I did. I should have recognized earlier that you had changed. I should have sent you back to the border.'"
    • "That was ghost bird's castle keep, and it was inviolate."
    • haunches
    • pg. 129, black boxes did nothing, called it!
    • they don't say the border is advancing until near the end of the book, while it's at the beginning of the movie
    • relenting
    • "The psychologist had written a name on the envelope; at least, it looked like her hardwriting. The name started with an S. Was it her child's name? A friend? A lover? I had not seen a name or heard a name spoken aloud for months, and seeing one now bothered me deeply. It seemed wrong, as if it did not belong in Area X. A name was a dangerour luxury here. Sacrificed didn't need names. People who served a function didn't need to be named. In all ways, the name was a further and unwanted confusion to me, a dark space that kept growing and growing in my mind."
    • vanguard
    • detritus
    • husk
    • sloughings
    • "ponderous bulk"
    • "plaintive keening"
    • talisman
    • jounced
    • "Pathetic words, placating words."
    • "glutinous plop"
    • "She was in plain view for less than a second, and then would be gone. I didn't think. I didn't hesitate. I shot her. Her head jolted to the side and she slumped soundlessly into the grass and turned over on her back with a groan, as if she had been disturbed in her sleep, and then lay still. The side of her hace was covered with blood and her forehead looked grotesquely misshapen. I slid back down the incline. I was starting at my gun, shocked. I felt as if I were stuck between two futures, even though I had already made the decision to live in one of them. Now it was just me."
    • "Solitude could press down on a person, seem to demand that action be taken."
    • bereavement
    • extremis
    • "I knew not to trust this feeling of well-being, that it could simply be the interregnum before another stage. Any relief that thus far the changes seemed no more radical than enhanced senses and reflexes and a phosphorescent tint to my skin paled before what I had now learned: To keep the brightness in check, I would have to continue to become wounded, to be injured. To shock my system."
    • prosaic
    • "Cleaning up a little later, a fit of laughter came out of nowhere and made me double up in pain. I had suddenly remembered doing the dishes after dinner the night my husband haad come back from across the border. I could distinctly recall wiping the spaghetti and chicken scraps from a plate and wondering with a kind of bewilderment how such a mundance act could coexist with the mysetery of his reappearance."
  • 5. Dissolution
    • "the thousand ways it presaged our destruction"
    • "But, later, the parallel helped assuage my anger at his leaving, and then my confusion when he came back in such a changed form...even if the stark truth is that I still did not truly understand what I had missed about him."
    • "In this new phase of my brightness, recovering from my wounds, the Tower called incessantly to me; I could feel its physical presence under the earth with a clarity that mimicked that first flush of attraction, when you knew without looking exactly where the object of desire stood in the room."
    • "Nothing about my husband's journal was expected. Except for some terse, hastily scribbled exceptions, he had addressed most of the entries to me."
    • sullen
    • tenuous
    • impinging
    • "Went to the tunnel. Do not look for me."
    • "Seeing all of this, experiencing all of it, even when it's bad, I wish you were here. I wish we had volunteered together. I would have understood you better here, on the trek north. We wouldn't have needed to say anything if you didn't want to. It wouldn't have bothered me. Not at all. And we wouldn't have turned back. We would have kept going until we couldn't go farther."
    • "Slowly, painfully, I realized what I had been reading from the very first words of his hournal. My husband had had an inner life that went beyond his gregarious exterior, and if I had known enough to let him inside my guard, I might have understood this fact. Except I hadn't, of course. I had let tidal pools and fungi that could devour plastic inside my gaurd, but not him. Of all the aspects of the journal, this ate at me the most. He had created his share of our problems - by pushing me too hard, by wanting too much, by trying to see something in me that didn't exist. But I could have met him partway and retained my sovereignty. And now it was too late."
    • "After reading the journal, I was left with the comfort of that essential recurring image of my husband putting out to sea in a boat he had rebuilt, out through the crashing surf to the calm just beyond. Of him following the coastline north, alone, seeking in that experience the joy of small moments remembered from happier days. It made me fiercely proud of him. I showed resolve. It showed bravery. It bound him to me in a more intimate way than we had ever seemed to have while together."
    • "In glimmers, in shreds of thought, in the aftermath of my reading, I wondered if he kept a journal still, or if the dolphin's eye had been familiar for a reason other than it was so human. But soon enough I banished this nonsense; some questions will ruin you if you are denied the answer long enough."
    • cloying
    • "You understand, I could no more have turned back than have gone back in time. My free will was compromised, if only be the severe temptation of the unknown. To have quit that place, to have returned to the surface, without rounding that corner...my imagination would have tormented me forever. In that moment, I had convinced myself I would rather die knowing...something, anything. I passed the threshold. I descended into the light."
    • denizen
    • "People my entire life have told me I am too much in control, but that has never been the case. I have never truly been in control, have never wanted control."
    • "I was the queen of the tidal pools, and what I saw was the law, and what I reported was what I had wanted to report. I had gotten sidetracked, like I always did, because I melted into my surroundings, could not remain separate from, apart from, objectivity a foreign land to me."
    • "But the fact is, even though I didn't deserve it - did I deserve it? and had I really just been looking for something familiar? - I found something miraculous, something that uncovered itself with its own light. I spied a glinting, wavery promise of illumination coming from one of the larger tidal pools, and it gave me pause. Did I really want a sign? Did I really want to discover something or did I just think I did? Well, I decided I did want to discover something, because I walked toward it, suddenly sobered up enough to watch my steps, to shuffle along so I wouldn't crack my skull before I saw whatever it was in that pool. What I found when I finally stood there, hands on bent knees, peering down into that tidal pool, was a rare species of colossal starfish, six-armed, larger than a saucepan, that bled a dark gold color into the still water as if it were on fire. Most of us professionals eschewed its scientific name for the more apt 'destoyer of worlds.' It was covered with thick spines, and along the edges I could just see, fringed with emerald green, the most delicate of transparent cilia, thousands of them propelling it along upon its appointed route as it searched for its prey: other, lesser starfish. I had never seen a destroyer of worlds before, even in an aquarium, and it was so unexpected that I forgot about the slippery rock and, shifting my balance, almost fell, stadying myself with one arm propped against the edge of the tidal pool. But the longer I stared at it, the less comprehensible the creature became. The more it became something alien to me, the more I had a sense that I knew nothing at all - about nature, about ecosystems. There was something about my mood and its dark glow that eclipsed sense, that made me see this creature, which had indeed been assigned a place in the taxonomy - catalogued, studied, and described - irreducible down to any of that. And if I kept looking, I knew that ultimately I would have to admit I knew less than nothing about myself as well, whether that was a lie or the truth."
    • eviscerated
    • unctuous
    • "This part I will do alone, leaving you behind. Don't follow. I'm well beyond you now, and traveling very fast. Has there always been someone like me to bury the bodies, to have regrets, to carry on after everyone else was dead? I am the last casualty of both the eleventh and twelfth expeditions. I am not returning home."

Page last revised on: 2024-02-23