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mburnamfink 's review for:
Authority
by Jeff VanderMeer
Second books are hard. I think everyone knows that. But I've rarely seen a second book splat as hard as Authority.
In the wake of Annihilation, the biologist, the surveyor, and the anthropologist have return via mysterious means, their memories erased and likely ridden with cancer like the other returnees. And of course, we know that two of them are dead in Area X, and the third transformed. With the new book, we also have a new main character, Control/John Rodriguez, a veteran intelligence officer from a dynasty of spies, and new director of Southern Reach, the shadowy government agency that studies Area X, and a new viewpoint, a tight third person.
The viewpoint shift matters. Annihilation felt intimate, for all its horror and unraveling mystery it was happening to you. Control is an ironic cipher, a manager who is very much not in control, a walking collection of John le Carré cliches and vague inferiority. He is not a protagonist, barely a character.
We meet the employees of Southern Reach, scientists and bureaucrats gone mad grappling with the insane, and the situation falls apart. Rather than existential dread, we get jitters of personal revelation and the literary equivalent of jump scares. The Southern Reach office building is full of creepy objects, half discarded. The psychologist from the last book was actually the Director of Southern Reach. And she was not some random academic, she might be the daughter of the Lighthouse Keeper, who survives transformed as the singular intelligence of the Crawler.
It is unfair to judge a book by what is not written; by what should have been written instead, but there is ample room for horror in bureaucracy that VanderMeer just misses. Bureaucracy is about routine, distribution of responsibility, institutional continuity. Yet Area X is a puzzle immune to every method of scientific investigation. The purpose of Southern Reach is to sacrifice expeditions to Area X. I'm particularly thinking of Charles Stross's Laundry Series, and what he has to say about the overlaps between bureaucracy and literal brain-eating monsters from outside the universe, and I just wish VanderMeer had thought a little more systematically about his system of politics and power.
In the wake of Annihilation, the biologist, the surveyor, and the anthropologist have return via mysterious means, their memories erased and likely ridden with cancer like the other returnees. And of course, we know that two of them are dead in Area X, and the third transformed. With the new book, we also have a new main character, Control/John Rodriguez, a veteran intelligence officer from a dynasty of spies, and new director of Southern Reach, the shadowy government agency that studies Area X, and a new viewpoint, a tight third person.
The viewpoint shift matters. Annihilation felt intimate, for all its horror and unraveling mystery it was happening to you. Control is an ironic cipher, a manager who is very much not in control, a walking collection of John le Carré cliches and vague inferiority. He is not a protagonist, barely a character.
We meet the employees of Southern Reach, scientists and bureaucrats gone mad grappling with the insane, and the situation falls apart. Rather than existential dread, we get jitters of personal revelation and the literary equivalent of jump scares. The Southern Reach office building is full of creepy objects, half discarded. The psychologist from the last book was actually the Director of Southern Reach. And she was not some random academic, she might be the daughter of the Lighthouse Keeper, who survives transformed as the singular intelligence of the Crawler.
It is unfair to judge a book by what is not written; by what should have been written instead, but there is ample room for horror in bureaucracy that VanderMeer just misses. Bureaucracy is about routine, distribution of responsibility, institutional continuity. Yet Area X is a puzzle immune to every method of scientific investigation. The purpose of Southern Reach is to sacrifice expeditions to Area X. I'm particularly thinking of Charles Stross's Laundry Series, and what he has to say about the overlaps between bureaucracy and literal brain-eating monsters from outside the universe, and I just wish VanderMeer had thought a little more systematically about his system of politics and power.