Annihilation Jeff Vandermeer Analysis

Jeff Vandermeer creates an obscure and intricate ecological system in his 2014 novel Annihilation, and names it Area X. The main character, a female biologist, joins an expedition to investigate this expanding and changing zone, and finds out “the Event,” which appears that humankind will eventually be transformed into other organisms in Area X, is “arriving like a kind of wave” (190). Many critics see Annihilation as an allegory for humanity’s situation in the face of a rapidly changing environment, whose essence shares a deep connection with the environmental philosopher Timothy Morton’s ecological discourse on “hyperobject,” -- a refined term to describe long-lasting, “super high-dimensional,” and inexplicable things massively distributed in time and space, which requires humans’ obligation and instant action (2). The correlation between the biologist’s initiative and Area X as a hyperobject in the Annihilation will serve as a …show more content…
399-401). Though Shakespeare could not have thought about, we can find a surprising link with Jeff Vandermeer’s Annihilation and Timothy Morton’s Hyperobject. Hyperobjects, described as “melting mirrors” that “they leak everywhere (and) they undulate back and forth, oozing spacetime all around them” (153), are in any form of the tempest controlled by magic, the strange ecological system-- Area X, and the sea-change outside the bottle, tends to turn human into “something rich and strange”, which the ending of human inside Area X provides an exact exemplification. Regardless of the various forms, it is worth to believe that all the effort during the interaction with the hyperobject will be preserved in certain way, and human, “nothing of him that doth