This water was so dark we could see our faces in it, and it never stirred, set like glass, reflecting the beards of gray moss that smothered the cypress trees. Triggered by a disturbance in the flow of air, a nodule in the W chose that moment to burst open and a tiny spray of golden spores spewed out. I’ll go first and see what’s down there,” the surveyor said, finally, and we were happy to defer to her.

As if that was the signal to disband, we went back to our own quarters to be alone with our thoughts. I still didn’t like the anthropologist very much, but mostly in the context of the mission, not anything she had said to me.

We assumed that the structure in question was a lighthouse because the map showed a lighthouse at that location and because everyone immediately recognized what a lighthouse should look like. The inspiration for Annihilation and the Southern Reach Trilogy was a 14-mile (23 km) hike through St.

Perhaps she meant merely to reassure us, but I would like to believe she was trying to reassure herself. We are less than 200 pages in to the Southern Reach Trilogy by the end of this first volume, and already home is a distant memory, and an unreliable one, too: for who's to say that home was not always X at heart? The tower, which was not supposed to be there, plunges into the earth in a place just before the black pine forest begins to give way to swamp and then the reeds and wind-gnarled trees of the marsh flats.This transference had taken place across a period of eighteen months, and it was not something that had been experienced by prior expeditions. The day before we arrived at the camp, this mood was briefly shattered by the appearance of an enormous wild boar some distance ahead of us on the trail. There was no time for the psychologist to prepare any hypnotic suggestion designed to keep us focused and in control; in fact, all she could offer was “Don’t get close to it! They are the 12th expedition; the previous expeditions have been fraught with disappearances, suicides, aggressive cancers, and mental trauma. Our most outlandish equipment consisted of a measuring device that had been issued to each of us, which hung from a strap on our belts: a small rectangle of black metal with a glass-covered hole in the middle.