
Annihilation
Southern Reach Trilogy, Book 1
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Narrated by:
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Carolyn McCormick
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By:
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Jeff VanderMeer
About this listen
A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE FROM ALEX GARLAND, STARRING NATALIE PORTMAN AND OSCAR ISAAC
The Southern Reach Trilogy begins with Annihilation, the Nebula Award-winning novel that “reads as if Verne or Wellsian adventurers exploring a mysterious island had warped through into a Kafkaesque nightmare world” (Kim Stanley Robinson).
If J. J. Abrams, Margaret Atwood, and Alan Weisman collaborated on a novel … it might be this awesome.
Area X has been cut off from the rest of the continent for decades. Nature has reclaimed the last vestiges of human civilization. The first expedition returned with reports of a pristine, Edenic landscape; all the members of the second expedition committed suicide; the third expedition died in a hail of gunfire as its members turned on one another; the members of the eleventh expedition returned as shadows of their former selves, and within months of their return, all had died of aggressive cancer.
This is the twelfth expedition.
Their group is made up of four women: an anthropologist, a surveyor, a psychologist—the de facto leader—and a biologist, who is our narrator. Their mission is to map the terrain and collect specimens; to record all their observations, scientific and otherwise, of their surroundings and of one another; and, above all, to avoid being contaminated by Area X itself.
They arrive expecting the unexpected, and Area X delivers—they discover a massive topographic anomaly and life-forms that surpass understanding—but it's the surprises that came across the border with them and the secrets the expedition members are keeping from one another that change everything.
Cover artwork © Paramount Pictures. All Rights Reserved.
©2014 Jeff VanderMeer (P)2014 Blackstone Audio, Inc.Listeners also enjoyed...
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Editor's Pick
Perfect if you want something weird
"This is my one pick that I feel I need to stand up for, because if you check the title page you’ll see some mixed reviews. Annihilation is profound literary sci-fi that doesn’t fit any formula. So a lot of people looking for the same old story might not find it here, but that doesn’t mean this isn’t an amazing series. It will blur your sense of reality and make you question the alien nature of language itself."
—Michael D., Audible Editor
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- By TD on 11-03-23
By: Calvin Kasulke
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This World Is Full of Monsters
- A Tor.com Original
- By: Jeff VanderMeer
- Narrated by: Vikas Adam
- Length: 1 hr and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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An alien invasion comes to one man’s doorstep in the form of a story-creature, followed by death and rebirth in a transformed Earth, in this Tor.com Original science fiction tale from Jeff VanderMeer, the New York Times best-selling author of the Southern Reach trilogy.
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weird weird weird... so good
- By Ryan on 09-18-19
By: Jeff VanderMeer
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Hummingbird Salamander
- By: Jeff VanderMeer
- Narrated by: Lisa Flanagan
- Length: 11 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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Security consultant “Jane Smith” receives an envelope with a key to a storage unit that holds a taxidermied hummingbird and clues leading her to a taxidermied salamander. Silvina, the dead woman who left the note, is a reputed ecoterrorist and the daughter of an Argentine industrialist. By taking the hummingbird from the storage unit, Jane sets in motion a series of events that quickly spin beyond her control.
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If this is how the world ends, bring a gameboy.
- By interlinKED Media on 04-11-21
By: Jeff VanderMeer
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There's No Such Thing as an Easy Job
- By: Kikuko Tsumura, Polly Barton - translator
- Narrated by: Cindy Kay
- Length: 9 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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A young woman walks into an employment agency and requests a job that has the following traits: It’s close to her home, and it requires no reading, no writing, and, ideally, very little thinking. Her first gig - watching the hidden-camera feed of an author suspected of storing contraband goods - turns out to be inconvenient. Her next gives way to the supernatural: announcing advertisements for shops that mysteriously disappear. As she moves from job to job, it becomes increasingly apparent that she's not searching for the easiest job at all but something altogether more meaningful.
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I LOVED it
- By Rose on 09-29-21
By: Kikuko Tsumura, and others
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A Peculiar Peril
- The Misadventures of Jonathan Lambshead
- By: Jeff VanderMeer
- Narrated by: Raphael Corkhill
- Length: 22 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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Jonathan Lambshead stands to inherit his deceased grandfather’s overstuffed mansion - a veritable cabinet of curiosities - once he and two schoolmates catalog its contents. But the three soon discover that the house is filled with far more than just oddities: It holds clues linking to an alt-Earth called Aurora, where the notorious English occultist Aleister Crowley has stormed back to life on a magic-fueled rampage across a surreal, through-the-looking-glass version of Europe replete with talking animals (and vegetables).
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A book with "all the things in it"
- By Bruce on 01-25-21
By: Jeff VanderMeer
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The Employees
- A Workplace Novel of the 22nd Century
- By: Olga Ravn
- Narrated by: Hannah Curtis
- Length: 2 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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Funny and doom-drenched, The Employees chronicles the fate of the Six-Thousand Ship. The human and humanoid crew members complain about their daily tasks in a series of staff reports and memos. When the ship takes on a number of strange objects from the planet New Discovery, the crew becomes strangely and deeply attached to them, even as tensions boil toward mutiny, especially among the humanoids.
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I think this was a story?
- By Jordan on 07-02-23
By: Olga Ravn
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Annihilation Aria
- By: Michael R. Underwood
- Narrated by: Chris Andrew Ciulla, Caitlin Kelly
- Length: 12 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Max is a cheery xeno-archeologist from Earth, stranded and trying to find a way home. Lahra is a stern warrior of a nearly extinct race, searching for her people's heir. Wheel is the couple's cybernetic pilot, running from her past and toward an unknown future. On Wheel's ship the Kettle, the trio traverses the galaxy, dodging Imperial patrols and searching ancient temples and ruins for anything they can sell. Back on the Wreck, their home and base of operations, they're deeply in debt to the drifting city's most powerful gangster, and she wants her money back.
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Underwood at his Best
- By David on 08-18-20
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The Circle
- By: Dave Eggers
- Narrated by: Dion Graham
- Length: 13 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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When Mae Holland is hired to work for the Circle, the world’s most powerful internet company, she feels she’s been given the opportunity of a lifetime. The Circle, run out of a sprawling California campus, links users’ personal emails, social media, banking, and purchasing with their universal operating system, resulting in one online identity and a new age of civility and transparency.
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A solid, just not great social network dystopia
- By Darwin8u on 10-10-13
By: Dave Eggers
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Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
- By: Haruki Murakami
- Narrated by: Kirby Heyborne
- Length: 14 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Across two parallel narratives, Murakami draws listeners into a mind-bending universe in which Lauren Bacall, Bob Dylan, a split-brained data processor, a deranged scientist, his shockingly undemure granddaughter, and various thugs, librarians, and subterranean monsters collide to dazzling effect. What emerges is a novel that is at once hilariously funny and a deeply serious meditation on the nature and uses of the mind.
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Highly recommend
- By Amazon Customer on 07-23-18
By: Haruki Murakami
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Walking Practice
- A Novel
- By: Dolki Min
- Narrated by: Nicky Endres
- Length: 4 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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After crashing their spacecraft in the middle of nowhere, a shapeshifting alien finds themself stranded on an unfamiliar planet and disabled by Earth’s gravity. To survive, they will need to practice walking. And what better way than to hunt for food? As they discover, humans are delicious. Intelligent, clever, and adaptable, the alien shifts their gender, appearance, and conduct to suit a prey’s sexual preference, then attacks at the pivotal moment of their encounter.
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Odd on every level but not terrible
- By cindi marsh on 02-09-25
By: Dolki Min
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The Hand of the Sun King
- Pact and Pattern, Book 1
- By: J.T. Greathouse
- Narrated by: Jeremy Ang Jones
- Length: 14 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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Wen Alder was born into two worlds. On his father’s side, a legacy of proud loyalty and service to the god-like Sienese Emperor spanning generations. And it is expected that Alder, too, will follow this tradition by passing the imperial exams, learning the accepted ways of magic and, if he serves with honor, enhancing his family's prominence by rising to take a most powerful position in Sien—the Hand of the Emperor. But from his mother he has inherited defiance from the Empire, a history of wild gods and magic unlike anything the Imperial sorcerers could yet control.
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Spectacular
- By Jenny T on 07-09-22
By: J.T. Greathouse
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Market Forces
- By: Richard K. Morgan
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 15 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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What do you buy and sell when the global markets reach saturation point? The markets themselves. Thirty years from now the big players in global capitalism have moved on from commodities. The big money is in conflict investment. The corporations keep a careful watch on the wars of liberation and revolution that burn constantly around the world. They guage who the winners will be and sell them arms, intelligence, and power. In return for a slice of the action when the war is won.
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Good easy listen
- By GGodman on 06-07-05
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Invasion
- Alien Invasion, Book 1
- By: Sean Platt, Johnny B. Truant
- Narrated by: Caitlin Davies
- Length: 8 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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They are coming. The countdown has begun. First visible only as blips on a telescope image, the discovery of objects approaching from Jupiter's orbit immediately sets humanity on edge. NASA doesn't even bother to deny the alien ships' existence. The popular Astral space app (broadcasting from the far side of the moon and accessible by anyone with Internet) has already shown the populace what is coming.
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"terrible, absolutely terrible"
- By Andre M. Nel on 08-02-18
By: Sean Platt, and others
I highly recommend Annihilation. I found Carolyn McCormick's reading of the book a little monochromatic but it's certainly not bad and there are moments where the placid tone she uses really works in the novel's favor.
A Strange, Surreal Delight
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I need to listen to that last chapter again.
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I have a feeling that this is the type of trilogy that will only be understood as complete set, each book revealing more and more and hopefully ending up with a full picture of what the f is going on. That being said, I am sure tantalized to read more.
I'm suppressing the urge to gobble up the second installation right away because I have to wait til September for the final book. Trying to space it out so that I get to savor this trilogy.
Would make a great film.
can't wait for the rest of the trilogy!
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Merely not a fan of this story telling method.
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Potentially Great, Overall Meh
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This is a novel of weird fiction.
The strange takes precedence over character.
The bizarre is more important than plot.
It is written with the intention of unsettling you, feeling as though the world is just to the left of where you thought it was before. Nearly every decision Vandermeer makes in this novel is done to unsettle the reader in this way.
For example, the novel is almost entirely absent proper nouns. Characters are called by their job title, such as "anthropologist" or "linguist." If there is a restaurant in the novel, it is a restaurant. It is not Jake's Chinese BBQ.
There is a plot, one I find deeply disturbing, but if you are expecting a whiz-bang revelation that neatly ties up everything, you're looking for a mystery or a thriller, not weird fiction.
The narrator of the book has perfectly adapted herself to the alien beauty of Vandermeer's prose. Like the character whose words she reads, she can at times seem to be distancing herself from the very wonders and horrors she is relating. Those who fault her performance in other reviews I again hold do not understand weird fiction, and this novel. Did you want her to hoot and scream at every shock and peril like a bad actor?
You might say I am being elitist. Perhaps I am. Or perhaps the weird novel is simply not something that can find a wide audience. After all, the most famous purveyor of the weird, HP Lovecraft, has really never seen a successful translation of his work to any medium other than the role-playing game.
So if you find yourself gaping in wonder at the beauty of a dead leaf on a rainy sidewalk, if you would watch in fascination as the spider drained the trapped fly, if you consider the contemplation of your own death a sort of mental pushup which leaves you stronger than you were before, then perhaps this novel is for you.
If you have no fascination for the macabre, then move on friend. There are plenty of other books in the world, and you can leave the wonder of the weird to us...
Possibly Greatest Weird Fiction of 21st Century
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Loved it
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if you do want to read the whole series be aware that audible does offer all three for a single credit
Surprisingly Deep and Thematic, but Avoid the Sequ
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Exploration and Sci Fi Lovers Will Enjoy This
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3 and a half to 4 maybe 4 and a half.
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