Jeff VanderMeer - Authority

Fourth Estate

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers

1 London Bridge Street,

London, SE1 9GF, UK

www.4thestate.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate in 2014

First published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2014

Copyright © VanderMeer Creative, Inc. 2014

Jeff VanderMeer asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780007553464

Ebook Edition © May 2014 ISBN: 9780007553495

Version: 2018-09-26

‘A tense and chilling psychological thriller about an unravelling expedition and the strangeness within us. A little Kubrick, a lot of Lovecraft, [ Annihilation ] builds with an unbearable tension and claustrophobic dread that lingers long afterwards’

LAUREN BEUKES, author of The Shining Girls

‘A lasting monument to the uncanny … you find yourself afraid to turn the page … We are less than 200 pages in to the Southern Reach Trilogy … and already home is a distant memory’

SIMON INGS, Guardian

‘ Annihilation owes much to the explorations of psycho-geographical landscapes in early J. G. Ballard and also to the work of the old masters of weird fiction such as H. P. Lovecraft and William Hope Hodgson, with their love of nameless horrors haunting liminal realms. VanderMeer synthesises these influences to create a tale with a deliciously creepy atmosphere of dread’

JAMES LOVEGROVE, Financial Times

‘Immersive, insightful and often deeply bloody creepy, this is a startlingly good novel. If the sequels live up to it, then the Southern Reach series will be a major work’

WILL SALMON, SFX Magazine

‘A clear triumph for VanderMeer, [who] has suddenly transcended genre with a compelling, elegant and existential story of far broader appeal … A novel whose world is built seamlessly and whose symbols are rich and dark’

LYDIA MILLET, LA Times

‘A teeming science fiction that draws on Conrad and Lovecraft alike … The writing itself has a clarity that makes the abundancy of the setting more powerful’

PAUL KINCAID, Sunday Telegraph

For Ann

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Praise for the Southern Reach Trilogy

Dedication

Incantations

000

001: Falling

002: Adjustments

003: Processing

004: Reentry

Rites

005: The First Breach

006: Typographical Anomalies

007: Superstition

008: The Terror

009: Evidence

010: Fourth Breach

011: Sixth Breach

012: Sort of Sorting

013: Recommendations

014: Heroic Heroes of the Revolution

015: Seventh Breach

016: Terroirs

017: Perspective

018: Recovery

Hauntings

000

020: Second Recovery

021: Repeating

022: Gambit

023: Break Down

00X

Afterlife

Acknowledgments

The Southern Reach Trilogy Book 3: Acceptance

About the Author

By the Same Author

About the Publisher

In Control’s dreams it is early morning, the sky deep blue with just a twinge of light. He is staring from a cliff down into an abyss, a bay, a cove. It always changes. He can see for miles into the still water. He can see ocean behemoths gliding there, like submarines or bell-shaped orchids or the wide hulls of ships, silent, ever moving, the size of them conveying such a sense of power that he can feel the havoc of their passage even from so far above. He stares for hours at the shapes, the movements, listening to the whispers echoing up to him … and then he falls. Slowly, too slowly, he falls soundless into the dark water, without splash or ripple. And keeps falling.