May 24 2026, 22:43

Authority

Author: Jeff Vandermeer

First published: 2014

I read this in 2018 and thought I didn’t finish it. After the joys of Annihilation, I gave it another try, and what do you know, not only had I actually finished it last time, but instead of the dismissive frustration I remember, it was good. Really good. My brain tricked me. Memory cannot be relied on.

A new director of the Southern Reach, calling himself Control, arrives at the border of Area X tasked with investigating what happened to the twelfth expedition. The staff are wary, bordering on hostile, and the assistant director makes his life difficult from the outset. Control reports to a voice-camouflaged superior who directs him in his probing of the building and the previous director’s many decades of notes and reports. We also learn Control’s mother is a high-ranking leader in government who got him the role as a favour and a ‘last chance’.

I don’t know what my problem was in 2018, because I loved Authority in 2026, gulping it down over a few days. It must be something to do with my changing taste. All of the set pieces I remembered, that I was convinced were in the first half of the story, were spread evenly and effectively over the whole. Perhaps the final fifty pages could have been twenty, but hell, that’s nitpicking.

Where Annihilation was a report by the Biologist from inside Area X, Authority is more like an uncanny spy novel, with corporate intrigue, interrogations and weird science. It isn’t as pure perhaps—there’s a unique hit that comes with a reader’s first experience of the world of Area X—but it is fascinating in a satisfyingly different way. I'm going to wait a while before trying the last book in the trilogy (although it's hard to read Anita Brookner again after this).

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