Authority

The first book was way cool (Annihilation), this one is a little less so, but still compelling. John Rodriguez aka “Control” is appointed new head of the Southern Reach facility. His mission is to make sense of what's going on. But he's not exactly given all the information available. He's also interviewing the biologist (from the first book) about her experiences and remembrances. And there's definitely some weird things at the facility and strange co-workers. And Central, his employer, what's up with that? Hard to describe this book. But I'm eager to finish the trilogy with the last book, Acceptance.

Though I quite enjoyed the first book in the Southern Reach trilogy, this second one took the plot in a much different direction, choosing to focus on the office politics of the staff of the Southern Reach, instead of examining Area-X itself. The language was still dreamy and ethereal, but I wasn't nearly as engaged as I was in the first book. I'll need to drag myself into the third and final novel, hoping it makes this previous one pay off.

When I finished [b:Annihilation 17934530 Annihilation (Southern Reach, #1) Jeff VanderMeer https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1403941587s/17934530.jpg 24946895], I noted that I'd like more information on the shadowy government agency running the expedition. And that's exactly what we get here - in a fun, satisfying way. It gives a lot of insight into the Southern Reach and Central, and just how much they're *#&@ing with people's minds and lives.Amusingly, this also has a lot of keen depiction of standard workplace dramas, which was fun for me as a corporate drone.Once again, we have a story about a creepy mystery and a clandestine government agency, told through the very personal, introspective story of the main character. I actually didn't like Control all that much, but I could sympathize with his situation. The creep factor accelerates as you progress, and there came times where I wasn't sure if Control was just hallucinating or things were really happening. But I mean that in a good way!This did answer questions and have some juicy revelations, and of course built up even more questions, which are poised to be answered (I hope) in the final volume, [b:Acceptance 18077752 Acceptance (Southern Reach, #3) Jeff VanderMeer https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1403941598s/18077752.jpg 25384096].

As strange and fascinating as the first book, but feeling more “complete” as a novel. It explains some things without spoiling the unnerving mystery of Area X, and I'm even more excited for the third book now.

The first book used science and exploration to solve a horror mystery. This one uses HR management to get some paperwork straightened out.

(You can also find this review on my blog.)

As some of you may remember, Annihilation clawed its way onto my all-time favorites list when I read it back in January. I finally picked up a copy of Authority recently and made my way back into the world of the Southern Reach. A friend of mine had warned me that the sequel was entirely different, and she was right. Authority is more of a behind-the-scenes look at the goings on of the mysterious government agency in charge of the expeditions. While some questions are answered, far more are dredged up.

He had not expected any of it to be beautiful, but it was beautiful.

Jeff VanderMeer blew me away with his writing once again. From the narrative voice to the characters, I found myself drawn into the story and into Control's mind. I was as desperate to untangle the secrets as he was. While the middle lagged a bit as far as interest goes, the end of the book pulls the reader down under a wave of action and tension. After turning the last page, I found myself shaken and thirsting for the next book.

You're a replica, but you're your own person.

Authority is a fantastic sequel, although it doesn't hold up to Annihilation in my book, mainly due to the lulls that made it hard to push through the middle. VanderMeer continues the captivating and enigmatic story of Area X and the Southern Reach and leaves you wanting more. I can only hope that Acceptance leaves me with a satisfying ending.

At almost double the length, Authority loses most of the eerie drive that made me devour Annihilation. It regained the feeling somewhat at the end, but for the most part, this book felt mired in small details.

Wow! I just can't stop reading these books. I enjoyed the first book, though I felt somewhat confused about it all, but this second volume (although not answering everything) does put things in a much sharper perspective. The narrative switches from the unnerving, unknowable Area X from the first book to the outside world and to Southern Reach itself - the company/research facility responsible for sending the expeditions through into Area X. Following a man named ‘Control'- some sort of operative sent in to put Southern Reach back on track, after disastrous expeditions and a seeming falling apart of the ranks among its employees - the story is seen from his perspective and is much like the readers. He has no previous knowledge of Southern Reach and must become a type of detective digging in to find answers and to understand the nature of Area X and every piece of information regarding it that is known from the people involved in the company. He must sift through what little bits and pieces he can scrounge together to get an idea of the ‘bigger picture'. But nothing is ever as it seems and soon we are once again falling down the rabbit hole, as it were, into the bizarre essence and weirdness of Area X and its influence on Southern Reach and its unusual employees. Some answers are gleaned from the first book, but a whole cavern of new mysteries take their place. I was flipping pages as fast as I could, following Control, eager to get answers and yet at the same time, not sure I actually want to know them. The creepiness that pervaded the first book doesn't really get going until the last quarter of the book, but the build is like a puzzle you're trying to complete in order to find out what the picture is. I must say I enjoyed it! References and tie-ins to the first book were not just superfluous and had actual weight and meaning, drawing the two stories together in unlikely, but interesting ways. The disturbing and ominous atmosphere really does get under your skin after a while. VanderMeer has a fantastic way of letting it seep in and sit there in your brain, not really ever quite settling there though. I'm really looking forward to reading the final book 3! Highly recommended!

Pros: interesting characters, interesting mystery

Cons: drawn out, boring at times

John Rodriguez, or Control, as he prefers to be called, is assigned as the new director of the Southern Reach project, the organization that oversees Area X. His assistant director, Grace, is openly hostile, while the remains of the science team are a helpful, if slightly unhinged bunch. Even his handler, the mysterious Voice, whom he phones reports in to daily, becomes antagonistic towards him as the days pass. Control isn't sure how he's supposed to bring the agency under control considering the opposition, especially when it becomes clear that secrets have been kept from him.

While it's not essential to read book one in order to understand the majority of this book, the biologist does play a role and some information from Area X makes more sense if you have read that book.

I have mixed feelings about this book. I enjoyed getting to know Control and seeing the inner workings of the Southern Reach. While I understood some of Grace's resistence to his being there, her continued undermining of his job started to grate on my nerves. Indeed, about 200 pages into the book I began to realize that I didn't like any of the characters and no longer cared if Control succeeded in his mission.

I really wanted to learn more about the organization and Area X, but the book's more interested in the inner working of Control and how the various revelations affect his mental state. While the mystery was interesting, so little was uncovered by the 3/4 mark and in such roundabout ways (scenes intercut with other scenes, making it hard at time to piece together what was present and what was past) that I found myself getting bored and no longer caring what was going on. Things picked up in the last third of the book, getting first fascinating, and then kind of boring again.

The book brings up a lot of new questions but doesn't answer many. I'm wary of reading the third book for fear that no answers are coming.

Could and should have been half as long. Drags and turns a creative premise into a slog. The first was great and still worth reading.

This series is full of mysteries that are sometimes frustratingly opaque (in a good way). This second book starts to answer some, and raises a few others, like any good second installment should do.

eeeeeeee, second part of the the series takes place in the controlling office for the original mission after all the stuff from the first book went down and Control/John the fixer is trying too figure stuff out and everything gets weirder! Yay!

A worthy successor to Annihilation. It was tough to put down and I had no choice but to read it much faster than I had originally planned. I just couldn't stop. I am most definitely looking forward to Acceptance.

This was a slow read. I did enjoy the first part of the trilogy, this was... well, not as interesting. The ending, however, was interesting and weird enough that I will continue to the third part (especially as it happens to be in my bookshelf).

Area X over the horizon bounded guarded The Southern Reach is the institution given the task of investigating which it has done by probing with little to show. We see the operation of Southern Reach from its newly appointed director. His task to work out what is happening given the mystery surrounding its last director. The reader this time is able or rather the author has the luxury of enabling the reader to relate to the director initially nameless but for his role ... Control.
Are there answers or more understanding amidst the few strange facts. Yes but well no maybe by the end have a better understanding of where we are in relation to Area X and its still bleak.

Third volume on my shopping list, I want answers.

The most boring book without any meaningful plot i have ever read.
Could be summed up in an epilogue to the first book. What a waste.
Horrible.

I'm enjoying this series so much. Vandermeer does a neat trick of implanting the suspicion that the books' reality might have been compromised, in one of several ways, from a very early stage in the story. Here he takes this a bit further still. Everything is unsettling. Yet the compounding of mysteries never feels like too much (think late seasons of Lost).

I found this to be rather boring until the tail end of the book.

Hmmm... Hmm... Book two in this series is definitely a bridging book. I didn't enjoy it quite as much as Annihilation possibly because the narrator wasn't as interesting to me and the action was a lot slower paced, but I still enjoyed it. This book explores Southern Reach as it relates to Area X as well as the cast of mentally unstable people who work there. Hypnosis, misinformation, and cryptic artwork once again combine to create an unreliable narrator (and narrative) and a conspiracy that swirls deeper with every chapter. The ending is once again ambiguous, and means I really have to read the third book before I can properly sort my feelings on the series.

Still recommended for fans of Haruki Murakami, Joe Hill, Mark Danielewski, and the “New Weird” in general.

These are easily the most mainstream-ish books Jeff has written. Comparable to a book version of the frustration of watching Lost. These are not for everyone, though for those that can understand and enjoy them - they are magnificent fun.

Stories like this are not about answers. They're not even about the questions really. They just are, and that's what makes them enjoyable... to those who are ok with that.

I wish it was better — the first book was so good. But I will read the final — it is a great story. This one dragged a lot IMHO

From the expansive, Lovecraftian eco-horror of the first book exploring Area X, we move to the claustrophobic and paranoid office politics of book two in the Southern Reach trilogy. Jeff VanderMeer's Authority sees John Rodriguez brought into the secret government agency to make some sense of what's going on. He insists on being called Control, reports into The Voice and is manipulated by his mother. It's like we're reading for a TV serial here.

It's about getting the pieces in place for the final act. There's lots to examine and pull apart, like the notion of terroir they keep coming back to, but it's a little forced for my liking. Despite a few surprises it was a bit plodding. I'm still in for the final book however and am curious how VanderMeer pulls it all together.

(Who just up and decides to call themselves Control? Especially an office suit like Rodriguez. It was probably hard enough for Sting or Bono to convince their mates, but coming from a momma's boy like Rodriquez seems a bit of an extraneous stretch)

I might be in the minority, I'm not sure. I really, really, really liked the first book and zoomed through it. This one took forever. It's a bit more of a thriller/procedural, and I'm not really into that. I felt as though it were making tenuous connections for Control/John to find the truth. And it was a little more dull. That said, it's still decent enough, and I'm excited to see what happens. OF COURSE, I bought the last one as soon as I could get to Barnes and Noble.

But dagnabbit, I wouldn't have left Chorry.

One knows that a concept or an idea has become firmly established as a trope once it becomes the butt of jokes and satire. This is what???s happened to the concept of the ???shadowy government agency???. Once upon a time, the mere idea of secret agencies and men in black would have sent chills up and down a person???s spine at the mere thought. Nowadays, when one says ???men in black??? one is apt to imagine Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones chasing down aliens while making wisecracks along the way. Not to say that???s a bad thing, of course, but it just goes to show how some ideas that once elicited fear can have their sting taken out of them over the course of time.

However, there are some writers who can still take a trope like that and make it work in terms of horror - not in the way it used to be used, but by turning it inside out and making it seem stranger and more eerie than it ever did. That???s what Jeff VanderMeer does in the second book of his Southern Reach Trilogy, titled Authority.

Taking off after the events of the first book, Annihilation, Authority is told primarily from the point of view of Control, real name John Rodriguez, who???s been assigned to the Southern Reach by his bosses in order to figure out what???s really going on. However, he quickly realises that there are secrets within secrets, and that getting to the bottom of it all isn???t going to be easy - least of all when there are secrets buried within himself that he???d much rather leave alone.

Right from the start, Authority shows itself to be a very different beast from its predecessor, though they also share quite a few similarities. Both novels play on the fear of the unknown, but they do so in very different ways. In Annihilation, the ???unknown??? was the vast wilderness of Area X, of what lived in it, and what happened to it and to the other expeditions that had gone before. In Authority, on the other hand, the ???unknown??? manifests as the byzantine workings and dark corners of the Southern Reach, as well as Control???s strange past and the events that happen around him as he proceeds with his investigation. Also, much of the horror in Annihilation is external, something that happens to the biologist, whereas in Authority it???s internal, something Control experiences in his own head.

Since narrative style changes a lot about how the reader experiences the story, it???s interesting to note that the point-of-view narration used in the two books is very different, as well: Annihilation is told from first person point of view, while Authority is told from third person limited point of view. I find this shift interesting, especially given the nature of each book???s take on horror as mentioned above. One would think that Authority would be better served if it were narrated in first person: after all, a lot of it occurs inside Control???s head, and who better to talk about that sort of thing than Control himself? But using third person narrative style in Authority adds what I think is a necessary amount of distance. The reader wants to know what???s going on in Control???s head, of course, but knowing it too intimately also ruins the storyline, and what would otherwise be scary devolves into mere hysteria. On the other hand, first person narrative style works well with the Biologist in Annihilation, because the intimacy of that narrative style creates a sense of incompleteness about the narrative, and therefore enhances the sense of fear one feels while reading the novel. The reader only experiences what the Biologist experiences, and since any experience of something the same magnitude as what happens in Annihilation must, necessarily, be incomplete, the reader is left to fill in the gaps with some truly horrifying imagery and ideas.

It is this ability to suit the type of narrative to the desired effect is one of the reasons why I think VanderMeer is an excellent writer of horror and weird fiction. He could have chosen to write Authority from the first person perspective, if only to keep it uniform with Annihilation, but instead chooses to tell the story in a way that creates the greatest amount of fear possible. As someone who prefers her horror to be more cerebral than visual, that???s something I can readily appreciate.

I also find the story itself intriguing in the way it turns the typical ???shadowy government agency??? trope inside out. Part of what makes shadow agencies so scary is that no one knows what goes on within them. They are opaque to the outsider, who only knows them as a looming threat that can do whatever it thinks necessary in order to protect what it needs to protect, to hide what it needs to hide. They are scary because no one can understand them beyond the influence they exert on the outside world. But Control???s involvement shows the nature of a shadow agency from the inside out. He shows the decrepitude, the decay, and the destruction that occurs to such an agency from within. He shows that, even when the agency was new, it was already falling apart, because by its very nature such agencies are doomed from the very beginning. If they are not destroyed from without, they are destroyed from within, eaten alive by the secrets they try to keep. The keeping of secrets as large as the one the Southern Reach tries to keep is impossible, and it is a poison that, at the end of the novel, implodes the Southern Reach itself and effectively ends it. This is, I think, quite scary, because this process isn???t limited to fiction: it???s something that can happen to any organisation, anywhere, at any time. While the view from the outside looking in can be terrifying, sometimes seeing things from the inside looking out can be just as frightening. Intertwined with the above are Control???s own secrets - not least his involvement with the Southern Reach???s parent organisation, and the fact that he is a pawn of that organisation. Control is, himself, stuffed full of secrets, and when he gets to the bottom of those secrets he is shattered, and he has to pick up the pieces of himself again, to find himself again - much like Ghost Bird, in fact. This is just as scary as the gradual unraveling of the Southern Reach - scarier, maybe, in some respects, because Control???s fears, his ???madness???, could easily be our own.

However, while I did enjoy reading Authority, and did think it was scary, it wasn???t without its problems. This book felt very much slower than the first one, and while I understand that that???s just the nature of the narrative being what it is, I do wish it had been a bit faster. It dragged something fierce in the middle portion, partly due, I think, to VanderMeer???s language. While I understand that the language was necessary to convey the strange, dreamlike nature of Control???s existence, I did find myself skimming over a lot of it and finding out that I hadn???t really missed anything by the time I got to the end of the novel. Some tightening up could have been accomplished there, I think, without sacrificing the nature and goal of the narrative.

Overall, Authority is very much in the spirit of its predecessor, albeit it does so from a different perspective. The connections between it and Annihilation might not be immediately apparent, but they become clear once one gets past the first chapter. It is also very much a scary read, though for different reasons than Annihilation. However, on the whole it feels like a weaker book than the first one, sagging as it does in the middle third. Hopefully, though, the third book will pick up the slack, and bring this series to an appropriately creepy conclusion.

This book is an odd duck–on the one hand it's about world-changing events, but on the other hand it has nice little moments where the protagonist goes for a jog. I like the mixing of scope. Not only does it make the protagonist more interesting, it centers the horror/weirdness in a personal way. A page turner where, frankly, not a whole lot happens until the end–and yet still a page-turner.

My only complaint is that, while the first book was clearly a set up for a trilogy, it at least had a solid ending. This one has a very Empire Strikes Back ending, which isn't a bad thing in itself, but I love it more when authors can give us a contained story and still make us want to read “the next one”.