'Absolution' reminds us nature is not what it seems

This month, I’m revisiting a blog post I wrote a decade ago about the biology underpinning Jeff VanderMeer’s wildly popular novel Annihilation, the first installment of the Southern Reach Trilogy. Over the holidays, I finished the latest missive from Area X: Absolution, a prequel set 20 years earlier. Absolution opens with the sort of surreal nightmare fans of the Southern Reach series will find familiar. A team of biologists are sent into a spooky swampland to conduct research. They witness a bunch of stuff they can't explain with science, and slowly lose their minds. Later, an aging secret agent is dispatched by "Central," a faceless bureaucratic agency, to figure out what happened to them.

Absolution plants the seeds for Area X, showing us how the ecological invader at the heart of the series' mystery—here referred to as "the Rogue"—first took root. Like its sequels, the novel offers no easy answers, instead inviting readers to decide for themselves what sort of force might cause a pack of bunnies to become ravenous cannibals, or turn wildlife cameras into living creatures. Also like the other novels, there's a lot of speculative biology underpinning the supernatural horror.

I explored that biology in a 2014 ‘Science of Fiction’ blog post published on the now-defunct Gawker Media’s blogging platform, Kinja. I had to visit the Internet Archive to find it!  My writing was a bit clunkier at the time, so I’ve edited the post for brevity and readability.