You Should Read This: Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy

Cover of Acceptance

The publisher’s taken the unusual (increasingly less so, though) step of releasing all three books in one year — particularly awesome for those of us who hate waiting for the next installment to come out.

I’m timing this post to come out before I’ve finished the last book of the Southern Reach trilogy, ACCEPTANCE, so I haven’t read the entire trilogy yet. But I recommend the overall trilogy based on my utter enthusiasm for the first two books, ANNIHILATION and AUTHORITY.

VanderMeer is one of the finest writers alive*, in my opinion, able to craft worlds that are eerie and beautiful and intriguing and, above all, unlike anything you’ve read before. Both ANNIHILATION and AUTHORITY are full of moments that smacked me in the face with their perception and beauty in a way that still leaves me thinking about them.

The books have that sense of the weird that haunts other works, like House of Leaves or The Crying of Lot 49. As though one were viewing the everyday world with a new lens, one that slants them, puts them askew, renders them mysterious. And they do it beautifully.

The publisher’s taken the unusual (increasingly less so, though) step of releasing all three books in one year — particularly awesome for those of us who hate waiting for the next installment to come out.

*Full disclosure: Not only do I know Jeff, but we’ve co-written a novelette, The Surgeon’s Tale, together. But part of my pleasure in that friendship/co-authorship is a deep awareness of how very very good his writing is.

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About Cat

Cat Rambo lives, writes, and teaches by the shores of an eagle-haunted lake in the Pacific Northwest. Her 200+ fiction publications include stories in Asimov's, Clarkesworld Magazine, and the magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Her story, "Five Ways to Fall in Love on Planet Porcelain," from her collection Near + Far (Hydra House Books), was a 2012 Nebula nominee. Her editorship of Fantasy Magazine earned her a World Fantasy Award nomination in 2012. She is the current President of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA). She is currently working on Exiles of Tabat, the third book of the Tabat Quartet. A new story collection, Neither Here Nor There, appears from Hydra House this fall.
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