Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy shocked me out of a reading slump when it first sank its tendrils into me in 2021. I devoured Annihilation on my Kindle during subway commutes to a terrible reporting job I had, and tell anyone who hasn’t experienced it to dive into the whole trilogy and share theories with me along the way.
While I have Alex Garland’s 2018 film adaptation to thank for being aware of these stories at all, finally reading the book was a shock due to how much the novel’s story and adaptation diverged. The novel’s Biologist is much more of an unreliable narrator, and readers get a front row seat to how Area X infects and begins to change her with its format as her Expedition journal.
I don’t envy the task of adapting this book, looking back on it, but it first felt like a bummer to see that so many evocative elements from the book were changed or discarded in the film. One of the most haunting moments from the novel I remember isn’t the glimpse of the Lovecraftian Crawler or Area X’s cosmic revelations. It’s in the Lighthouse, when the Biologist discovers a rotting mound of journals, showing that far more than twelve expeditions’ worth of people have been sent into Area X, with little more to show for it than some useless notes.
The futility of this discovery was potent, and suffused even more dread through the following scenes. With that said, I can understand the instinct to move away from this imagery for an adaptation to a visual medium, and I don’t fault the suitably creepy Oscar Isaac camcorder scenes we got in the film as remnants from the last Expedition. In fact, as someone who watched the movie first, I am kind of happy that those moments were preserved for me to discover within the book’s pages. Garland took his own strides with the source material and created a unique experience that still has its roots firmly placed in the themes of the book.
Instead of the pile of journals, we see videos left behind (and really creepy ones, to be fair)
Authority: A Ticking Time Bomb of a Sci-Fi Thriller
Now onto Authority. For those who have only seen the movie or only read the first book, it’s a phenomenally unexpected sequel, letting the overt eco-horror of the first book simmer under the surface as we learn about the Southern Reach, the hopelessly under-equipped government agency studying Area X. Our new principal character is the agency’s new Director, John “Control” Rodriguez, a secret agent nepo-baby whose family is deeply enmeshed in the shadowy government organization just known as Central.
Authority is such a tight thriller, navigating between petty bureaucratic politics, confusing experiments by oddball scientists who definitely aren’t all going crazy, and the ripple effects of Central’s obscure, indirect influence. One early highlight scene in Authority is an old experiment from the 1990s Control is shown video of, where two thousand white rabbits are herded to the border by scientists in hazmat suits to see if a mass crossing could “short circuit” Area X. The scene is darkly funny but also unnerving, mirroring the futility of the human expeditions that have uncovered little more decades later.
These elements mesh beautifully with the uneasy feeling that Area X is coming for everyone. Take the worst office job you’ve ever had, and add the constant presence of an unexplainable cosmic phenomenon just beyond the walls, or maybe already in the walls, creating clones of the people you send in, and that’s the gig Control is stepping into with pretty much no support.
I don’t know how, but I need to see Authority on screen in some fashion. The scenes already leap off the page and kept me reading until the explosive finale. It would kick so much ass as a standalone movie, or even a mini-series that lets us sink more into the fascinating characters VanderMeer created to populate the Southern Reach.
You can’t tell me you don’t want to see that terrifying scene with Whitby realized on camera (if you know, you know). Authority would face the same adaptation challenges that Annihilation did, but I think the focused location of the isolated government agency, right on the border of Area X, would help anchor it as an engaging episodic narrative.
In an interview with Ben Fry for Clarkesworld, VanderMeer said the genesis of the series came to him as a nightmare he had when he was sick with bronchitis.
One night I had this nightmare where I was walking down into a tunnel, and as I walked into the tunnel, I saw these living words written in some living material on the walls, and they were getting fresher as I went farther and farther down, which meant whatever was writing them was actually down there as well. At a certain point, I saw kind of a weird light, and I knew if I turned the corner, I would actually see whatever was down there. At that point, I think it was that my writer brain decided to airlift me out, because if I’d seen whatever was there, I wouldn’t have written the story.
Authority reads like a nightmare that Control can’t wake up from, and knowing that one of the most arresting images in the whole trilogy came to its author in a nightmare drives that home even further. Even if my hopes for seeing this nightmare onscreen are never realized, I am delighted that VanderMeer has been writing more Southern Reach stories beyond the initial trilogy. 2024’s Absolution was an absolute treat with some of VanderMeer’s best and weirdest writing yet.
He also announced another book titled The Southern Reach Files, which teases a multimedia angle expanding on the world with images, diaries, and other data collected over 30 years of Area X expeditions.
Maybe some night soon, VanderMeer will have another dream where he foresees an AppleTV deal to adapt Authority. It’s been over a decade since Annihilation, and I truly believe the Sci-Fi freaks and government conspiracy thriller sickos could really unite under the Authority banner if somewhere gives it a chance.
Image Credits:
Annihilation Images – Paramount Pictures/Skydance
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