Annihilation (Southern Reach, #1) in Overdue Podcast

Dec 31, 2023 Colin Gooding rated it it was ok

This started off really strong, but at some point I lost ahold of the plot and nothing really came together in the end with it for me. There are interesting ideas to this world, but I never really got a sense of it's "rules", so it felt like anything could happen at any time. I think that would have been fine if I was really into the writing or the characters or something, but I was never truly invested.

I've seen the movie based on this, and while it's quite different in a lot of story beats, i ...more

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Aug 10, 2017 Snem rated it it was ok

Shelves: strange-unusual

This started out interesting and intriguing. It's a unique blend of sci-fi, fantasy and ecology. I did find myself often asking "what is that?" It's creepy, weird and a little unsettling. I was left with a lot of questions that may be answered in the rest of the series. I heard rumblings about a movie so there's that.

The characters were stripped down. Extremely so, to the point where they didn't even have names. This was clearly the author's purpose, but the lack of personality revealed in the ...more

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Jul 22, 2018 Natalia rated it really liked it

Reading this book took some getting used to initially. As much as my background involves a lot of academic reading, it has been a number of years since I read a book that challenged my vocabulary and sense of poetic style. The last time I remember feeling like this was when I read Lolita, but this book isn't like Lolita except that it speaks in a poetic-sort of language that makes you feel both philosophical as well as scientific. This book was really interesting to read, with that right off the Reading this book took some getting used to initially. As much as my background involves a lot of academic reading, it has been a number of years since I read a book that challenged my vocabulary and sense of poetic style. The last time I remember feeling like this was when I read Lolita, but this book isn't like Lolita except that it speaks in a poetic-sort of language that makes you feel both philosophical as well as scientific. This book was really interesting to read, with that right off the bat. A lot of the "action" is replaced by discourse on the nature and limitations of language, trying to describe something that is more feeling than visual, and the interactions of people who have been hypnotically trained and conditioned to have very impersonal relationships with each other.

We follow our main character, the Biologist. We never get her name, as she tells us, because the "Breach" does something weird to people's identities and using something like a function (Biologist, Anthropologist, Linguist, Psychologist) makes it more bearable, less likely for some unknown affliction to happen. The "Breach" is some unknown phenomena that seems to be an unimaginable, terrifying barrier between the real world and a version of that world that is devoid of technology and humanity, where mutation of DNA happens at rapid speed, and no one is completely sure what the hell it is. The Biologist seems to do the best in the environment but she's got a personal beef with the place(view spoiler).

Overall, a very interesting story that I was interested in seeing the next installment for, especially since it ends on a cliffhanger. Spoilers to follow.

(view spoiler) ...more

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