Read Karen Joy Fowler’s new introduction for Annihilation, which still captivates a decade later

polygon.com:

Few works change the game as immediately as Jeff VanderMeer’s 2014 novel Annihilation. The first entry in the author’s Southern Reach trilogy introduced readers to Area X, a strange and unspecified location that defies all attempts by scientists to document it. The novel follows what’s designated as the 12th attempt to explore Area X by four unnamed women, which ends in catastrophe.

With Annihilation and its sequels Authority and Acceptance, VanderMeer crafted the definitive work of climate change speculative fiction, a trilogy that married weird fiction and eco-horror for an unforgettable experience. And it’s about to get stranger, as VanderMeer revisits the Southern Reach this fall with Absolution.

To celebrate the 10th anniversary of Area X and the forthcoming Absolution, the original Southern Reach trilogy is being re-released with beautiful new covers and new introductions by literary luminaries. Below, you can read the first of these: Acclaimed author Karen Joy Fowler’s new introduction for Annihilation, a celebration of one of the most indelible and unknowable new settings to captivate us in some time.

To let understanding stop at what cannot be understood is a high attainment. Those who cannot do it will be destroyed on the lathe of heaven.

—Zhuangzi (as translated by Ursula K. Le Guin)

For most of my reading life, mimetic realism was the admired mode of literature among critics, reviewers, and professors. The various literatures of the fantastic, those tales which prioritize the writer’s imagination above lived experience, have been, for reasons unclear to me, suspect— either childish or escapist or lacking in subtlety or deficient in characterization. That they are often none of these things had little impact on their reception. Fortunately, this has changed.

My own attachment to the imaginary has been lifelong, but I was well into adulthood before I noticed that my pleasure was often largely a matter of setting. Fantastical stories are the only ones