When people talk about the great science fiction novels of human environmental destruction, they often talk about John Brunner's The Sheep Look Up. I wonder if one day the Southern Reach Trilogy will be talked about the same way? It's much more elliptical in its approach, but the three books are drenched in landscape and environment, in the atmospheric conditions of the natural world. All the more to accentuate the unnatural ecology of Area X, the eerie strangeness it exerts om all the characters and all the readers, but Area X is not just an invasive environment, it is a cleansing one, a transformative one. The inability to grasp the secrets of Area X matches the inability to act as custodians for our own world, even that failure is as destructive as anything Area X can do. Only Ghost Bird can operate without secret strategies or hidden agendas or fixed objectives. Without those the others - Control, Grace, the Director - are lost, struggling to grasp something that cannot be comprehended. Obsessed with conquering something that cannot be conquered, spying on something that can spy back, taking samples of things that takes samples of its own, obsessing over something that that barely notices them at all, instead of living with it. In the world that reads the Southern Reach trilogy from the outside, we are Area X.