Area X: The Southern Reach Trilogy: Annihilation; Authority; Acceptance Hardcover November 18, 2014

Author: Jeff Vandermeer

Trilogies have more or less become the default form of science fiction these days. But even so, producing all three volumes of a trilogy in a year is not exactly a common occurrence. That, however, is what Jeff VanderMeer has done, and in doing so he has produced something genuinely spooky, intriguing, unexpected and oddly beautiful.Area X is a part of Florida where something strange happened years ago. Since then, the area has been closed off under the oversight of the Southern Reach Authority. Every so often they will send a team in to investigate, but the teams don't always return, if they do return they're not always in their right minds, and if they do report it doesn't always make sense. So mostly the Area is left to return to what passes for nature here.In the first volume, Annihilation, a team of four women is sent in. It is obvious from the start that something in the zone is affecting their perception, or at least their understanding of what they see. Because from the very first sentence we are seeing a tower that does not rise into the air but rather plunges into the ground. Later we will find a form of lichen on the walls of the tower that grows in such a way as to form cryptic messages. The second volume, Authority, concentrates on the Southern Reach Authority itself, a bureaucracy made helpless by the fact that it has no control over Area X at all. The barrier that closes it off, the lone doorway into the zone, all were created by unknown forces, possibly aliens although no-one seems to want to acknowledge that possibility. And the helplessness of the bureaucracy leads to Byzantine infighting and lots of ineffectual spy business.Finally, in Acceptance, the narrator of the first volume, presumed dead, reappears but insists on calling herself Ghost Bird, and we return to the zone itself to find a solution to some but by no means all of the mysteries. Jeff VanderMeer is one of the leading exponents of what is called "New Weird", a hybrid form that combines elements of horror, fantasy and science fiction. If, in this trilogy, the science fiction seems to predominate, the whole trilogy is still inflected with a perfectly balanced sense of the strange and wonderful and disturbing. It's a work to savour, even if it is not a work to be fully understood.

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Area X clearly owes a debt to Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky and Nova Swing by M. John Harrison, both of which you will find elsewhere in this top 100.

Other key works of New Weird that definitely should be read include Viriconium by M. John Harrison, a set of three short novels and several stories that tell of a city at the end of time that is almost forgetting its own existence, a place where an army from the past might rise up, where aliens can invade and can hardly be noticed, and where strange debilitating diseases sweep across the city. Haunting, spare, full of unexpected juxtapositions, this a work that inspired writers as varied as Iain M. Banks, Simon Ings, China MiÃ?Â©ville and others.

You also need to check out the Bas Lag Trilogy from China MiÃ?Â©ville, which consists of Perdido Street Station which won the Arthur C. Clarke and the British Fantasy Awards, The Scar which won the Locus and British Fantasy Awards, and Iron Council which won the Locus and Arthur C. Clarke Awards. Set in a world where horror and science fiction blend seamlessly, where there are people with steampunk contraptions grafted on to them, where aliens of every kind mingle, where building a railway is an act of political dissent. The novels are vivid, full of action and so richly described that every scene is crystal clear.