Swords, Sorcery, and Socialism - Annihilation

Episode Date: February 10, 2025

What happens when you can't trust your teammates, your senses, or even your own mind? Impenetrable secrets, deadly environments, and the nature of what can be known all await as Aurora and Ketho dive into the eerie and mind-bending scifi novella Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer.patreon.com/swordsandsocialismEmail: [e-mail] The Show: @SwordsNSocPodAurora: @Herbo_AnarchistKetho: @StupidPuma69

I'm literally just going to dive us right into it. Fuck him. That works. What's his what's his fucking name? The Jeff VanderMeer. Jeff VanderMeer. OK, I'll make sure I say it right. Bro Hello everyone and welcome back to Sword, Sorcery and Socialism, a podcast with the politics and themes hiding in our genre of fiction.

As always, I am Aurora and I'm joined by my co-host, Ketho. How's it going, Ketho? Howdy. And we are back today to talk about a sci-fi novella one that was made into a movie that was really popular that I have not seen Because I didn't want it to taint my interpretation of the book before I read it. We are talking about Annihilation by Jeff van de Meer. Yes. I will say this even if you did watch the movie I don't think it would color your interpretation of the book because I don't think I've ever read a book in a movie adaptation That are so dissimilar from one another cool because I did have I was under the impression that there was some sort of like, you know cosmic

Weirdness going on in this book and so I specifically didn't watch the movie Because the thing with cosmic horror is that it's trying to describe to you the undescribable cosmic horror is that it's trying to describe to you the undescribable often. That's kind of what it's trying to do. And so I thought, well, if I watch a movie adaptation that has to put form to something, so it might therefore, you know what I mean? Sort of, you know, inception and image into my head about

what I'm seeing before I read the book. And I didn't want that. I specifically wanted like a blank. I wanted my naturally blank slate brain to be able to come up with whatever on my own without having to be tainted by some director's idea. I mean, a lot of us have that problem. I mean, how many of us,

when you think of Lord of the Rings now are immediately think of the Peter Jackson movies and not how you imagine Aragorn in your head when you read the book, right? So I didn't want to do that with annihilation. But now you're telling me it doesn't matter anyway. I mean, the only distinction would be you'd probably think of the biologist as Natalie Portman.

I mean, I do I do like to think about Natalie Portman. So that's fair. No, I think actually, I'll run I'll run through just some notable things because I think it gives a good example of what the book is too compared to what the movie is. As a film, you have to create a more coherent narrative if you're creating a semi-blockbuster film because it wasn't like an art house film. This wasn't some tiny little film made for film festivals. This was a major motion picture release. So they make it have some kind of functional plot. You have characters that are named. You know, whereas in the book, there is.

Oh, it gives us names. I feel like that. I feel like that is immediately like changing one of the main themes of the novel by giving the character. Yes. The movie is more of a journey. Like they're trying to get to the lighthouse in area X in the in the movie. And then all these weird things happen to them and they're slowly picked off little by little as they go. Whereas in the book, they're pretty like the lighthouse is like a tertiary thing

that exists and it's less than a tertiary thing that exists. And it's less than a day's walk away from you can walk you can walk there, spend a few hours dicking around and walk back in the same day. And it's way more about the tower that's like underneath the ground right there by the base camp than it is about. And the funny thing is, is like they go into the tower in the first like 40 pages of the book. It's like they do it. They say, number two, it's a thing.

What's the thing they do the day after they set up base camp? They go directly into it. So which is important, which is important. It's important because the biologist has to get the spores in her goddamn brain so she can avoid the psychologist's fucking mind tricks. Yeah. So she can start essentially changing into not human anymore. Yeah. Into light. Yeah. And and like the the film and the and the book

also have a very different interpretation of this somewhat extraterrestrial, extradimensional thing that is existing in both places. In the book, it takes the form of the crawler. In the movie, it's like an alien thing underneath the lighthouse. It's like a ball of light. It's very bizarre. I won't get into any more about the lighthouse. It's like a ball of light. It's very bizarre. I won't get into any more about the movie. By the way, this movie was directed by Alex Garland. Same guy who did Ex Machina. Same guy who did Men.

The guy who did very much very much a hit and miss director for me. Ex Machina. Really, really good. Very good movie. Ex Machina. Very really, really good. Very good movie. Ex Machina is great. Civil War. What the fuck are you doing? Yes. Men. What the fuck? There's some of the most with the fudge.

What the fuck happened? Civil War that is we could do a bonus episode about that because I have some of the most incoherent politics I've ever seen in my life. So very hit and miss Alex Garland. So anyway. Yeah. But I will say that I think Annihilation is his second best film. Behind Ed Mockina.

But this book is way leans way harder into the cosmic core of it all. It keeps the information way more close to the chest and is less obvious about its messaging at points. I think that there is shared messaging between the two in certain points. This is the last thing I'll break up about the movie because it's not what we're here to talk about. In the movie, there's a scene where I can't remember the girl's name. She plays the Valkyrie in Thor Ragnarok.

Oh, yeah, it's Emma. Yeah, whoever it is. But she she like, starts changing, she notices that she's starting to change. And instead of resisting the change, she walks off into this field of human-shaped trees. And when the main character, played by Natalie Portman, runs after her, she disappears in this set of trees that she has apparently turned into one of. She essentially stops resisting the changing and accepts the changes that are happening, becomes something new and a part of area X in and of itself. And I think while they resisted a lot more in this book,

that's still a core theme is that this space is fundamentally transformative and the main character by the end of it accepts the transformation as as almost necessary. Well, inevitable, at least. Yeah. Yeah. At the very least inevitable. And she kind of embraces it and just says, you know what? I'm going to ride with this. I'm going to take it and I'm going to go up the coast. I'm going to try and find my husband.

Her husband, probably the dolphin. Maybe maybe possibly the dolphin. But I think fundamentally the book and we'll get into this, is like a lot of cosmic horror. And when I picked this, I wasn't necessarily expecting cosmic horror of this sort. Because that's a thing you could say about any Lovecraft story, is that thematically, they're very simple, but also hard to pin down. Like sometimes they don't really have like a greater message other than don't look into the unknowable because you will go insane. Yeah, I think as the guy who sort of invented the genre,

Lovecraft stories themselves sometimes end up being like, it's crazy just because it is. There's no like, there isn't actually any subtext to it. Besides, damn, don't look at the unknowable. You will go crazy. Like it's and of course, part of that was driven by him being afraid of his own shadow of being afraid of literally everything on earth. Like, I mean, there's subtext in like the what he was actually afraid of.

But I mean, like the story itself, there's no like underlying message. It's just like, wow. And if you did have an underlying message, it was the same as pretty much all of his other stories, which all had the same underlying message of, you know, the limits of human knowledge. And sure, not that this book doesn't have the limits of human knowledge as a core theme. It's very, very much does have the limits of human knowledge. They talk about that a lot with her being a biologist and talking about

the human urge to take and document and categorize everything. Like which the narrator can talk a lot about being a biologist. Like it's you find an animal, you study it, you look at it, and then you go, oh, it's one of these and it goes in this column in this row. Like it's very categorized and organized. And a lot of this book is the narrator coming to terms with the fact that she's in a place where that doesn't work. You can't, you fundamentally cannot do that.

Yeah, there's nothing. There's either not enough existing prior information for her to be able to make those choices, or the things are defying classification in such a way that when she looks at them under a microscope, they're appearing to be a fungus, but are also made out of human cells, and also made out of this and also and they're constantly changing, transforming and being manipulated to some degree to the point where everything just defies classification. People are turning into fungus in this. Yeah. And it like I think that's important.

That's like an important sort of early cosmic horror theme that carries over is I did enjoy his interpretation of the limits of human knowledge. It's not like Lovecraft books, you know, where it's like a researcher reading a forgotten tome. This is a biologist who is like, no, I take things, I study them and I classify them. And I observe how they interact with the rest of the natural world and the little ecologies. And then being put into something that is clearly an ecology of some kind, but that is so alien that she she can't put it in her boxes and it's her coming to terms with the fact that she won't be able to put it in a box or classify it the way she could literally everything else

in her job and in her life, like she can no longer classify and organize and compartmentalize. And I think that's like one of the key themes here is her just her giving into the change. I think it's also her giving into the fact that we're beyond the capacity for classification in the in a scientific sense. And at a certain point, she starts to realize that she is part of the area now. Like she's just part of area X and doesn't. And it was probably never in the cards for the Southern Reach to ever let them come back in the first place. Yeah, that they were never coming back.

It's possible that the door at the bottom of the freaking spiral at the bottom of the tower is the door they possibly came in through. So it's like like at least that was my initial interpretation is that that door is the door that the southern reach. I don't know if it's the I don't know if it's the same door, but it's a kind of door. She does say she like looked back at the door when they first came into the area. So you could look back from the one in the tunnel.

But I do. But that's the other problem is that I don't immediately move on to another topic. But we have an exceedingly unreliable there rate. Oh, very much so. And but she didn't know what the hell was going on and not unreliable that the narrator is lying to us. Not that kind of unreliable, unreliable. The fact that even she admits that the things she sees and the things she thinks she sees are actually happening. She can't guarantee that what she's describing to you

actually is true in an ontological sense. Well, at the very first moment where I think I started to realize that so whole, Lee was after she inhaled those spores and she came back up. The second time she goes into the tower, she realizes that they have been hypnotized by the psychologist into thinking the walls of the tower are made out of stone and not fleshy pulsating living tissue. And I mean, I have a practical question where I think I don't know if they were

they were conditioned into thinking that at first or if the way it works is that's how their brains interpreted it as for at first. And then when they told the psychologist, that's what they saw. She hypnotized them into continuing to see that so that they couldn't awaken to the possibility that makes sense. Because I think again, like a lot of the interpretation. Yeah, like a lot of the things in here, as you learn with the crawler, what you see is a lot of times it area X is showing you something

that your brain can kind of understand or it's trying is showing you something that your brain can kind of understand, or it's trying to show you something that your brain can understand. So it would know to show them concrete or stone or whatever. And so when they said that the psychologist was like, great. That is definitely what you saw. Continue to see that please don't go insane, please. And I would have to look again at what is being written on the walls. But it's nonsense.

It's not anything. Yeah, it's I I fundamentally believe that the stuff being written on the walls doesn't matter. I mean, it might be a red herring. And up explicitly to make you think about it for a while. I very specifically think it's a thing meant to drive you, the reader and the characters insane and that the words it's writing to me feels like area X, whatever it is, has absorbed human knowledge, like human writing over time and is trying and is like trying to express it somehow. But it it's like it's like chat GPT.

It doesn't know. Let's just say it's generative AI on the walls. It's generative AI. It doesn't know what sentences are or how they're supposed to be or syntax or context. It just has strings of words and phrases and it just spits them out along the wall because it that's the way it's expressing itself. It it's trying to interpret human language and via just reading books and journals. And clearly one of the first things it read was like the fucking Bible.

And so now it simply just spits out things onto the wall that drive you mad because they're not actually cognizant thoughts. I and what I interpretation that that's a really fantastic interpretation, because I think that's the same thing. The like that's what's happening to a degree with the biologist is she keeps thinking of these things, because she's trying so hard to understand what is being written on these walls, that when things happen, she immediately thinks of some of the things that have been written on the wall, hoping to make a connection

that just isn't there. It's like, it's driving her completely nuts. And it's really funny. I genuinely did attempt to send the linguist in, but the linguist backed out at the last second. Well, as far as we know, backed out at the last. I think the linguist got got by the. Yeah, the linguist probably got got by I would argue maybe the crawler. You think they just handed the linguist over to the crawler to start with? I have no idea, no one knows. Did they get hypnotized into coming in and then she already disappeared and then they hypnotized them again?

Again, when I go back to what we're talking about with like the the unreliable narrator, I mean, she admits it as much that she can't be sure that even the things from previously that she believes to be true are true. Like she fully admits that like and the psychologist, as the psychologist is dying, tries to insinuate that her memories about her previous life might be fake implanted memories. Either way, is that scene with that might be one of my favorite scenes in the book is the scene of her going down to talk to the psychologist as the psychologist is like turning into

fungus and and the first thing the psychologist does when she approaches is says annihilation annihilation over and over again, then you later From her notes that annihilation was like the self suicide but to try and get Someone who's hypnotized to kill themselves and it's she's trying to get the Look, it's so good She's trying to get the psycho. She's trying to get the biologist to kill herself as like her final act before she dies She's trying to get the biologist to fucking kill herself It's at first joy. What the fuck is this lady shouting? And then you're like, oh my God, like, what if I the psychologist

the book because the biologist is so has so much animosity towards the psychologist. There's very much a you hate this woman. Well, yeah, you're supposed to hate her. Yeah, because she's just adding to the ambiguity of the space. Like there's there's there's so many questions that could be answered if the psychologist weren't hypnotizing people to how much could you believe you could believe a lot more if she wasn't there because you could believe

that like that there's still some objectivity to like that. Maybe the world is unexplainable, but like the people are still trying to look at it rationally or something. Yeah, but because of this, the role of the psychologist, you can't know that anything the biologist described or saw or thinks in advance of this is true. And then but on the flip side after you get spored, you can't

entirely be sure that everything the biologist is describing afterwards is true or accurate in any, like, again, ontological sense, because she's been spored by area X. She's transforming into something more than human. So she's not. It's not like she's unreliable previously because of hypnosis and unreliable after that, because of the transformation at no point in this story. Can you be 100% sure that the biologist is telling you anything that is objectively true?

That is an impressive feat, I think. To pull that off somehow. And I want to say that about this book, because I didn't I didn't say it at the start and I'm hoping to have an answer to my question by the time we finish this episode is Do it did I like this book and I but we said to each other yesterday Which I think we both kind of regret and was I think I like it, but I'm not sure. Oh my god It's like the book itself That's the medic in that.

I think that's kind of what he was going for. Yeah. Is that you should feel uneasy and unsettled about the book after you're done with it. And so what I say, I don't know if I liked it or not, is I'm not sure if I enjoyed it particularly, but I know that it was good at what it was trying to do. What he was attempting to do to unsettle you and make you feel uncomfortable and ambiguous and unsure, knocked it out of the fucking ballpark.

Great, did a great job at that. And so as we were saying, the fact that because of the situation that gets set up, you can't know if your narrator is telling you an objective truth at literally any point in the narrative. That's great storytelling. Do I like that? I don't know yet. And I'm hoping I have an answer by the end of this recording to determine if I like this or not. Yeah, maybe it's just, you know, an impossible question. You know, it's, it's a limit of human knowledge. We can't I can't actually know if I like this.

Okay, so there's like a lot of I think little commentaries in this book. I'm having, I think we mentioned this outside of the recording, but it's very difficult to pin down any greater messaging from the book in terms of if Vandermeer is trying to say something in particular, which again, to his credit, I think is part of the point, or at least part of the goal. He wanted it to be as ambiguous as possible. One thing I will say that I just realized and I shouldn't have just realized is an inherent distrust of the government. Inherently be like, damn, the Southern Reach is shady as fuck. But in terms of like, that one's fairly obvious. That one's just like, you know, you can't trust a

darn thing that that the Southern Reach has told you. You can't trust that they don't know what's going on here. When she finds that mountain of books, of journals, you realize that there have been way more than 11 or 12 expeditions into this place. It's like everything they've ever told you is a lie. Like just straight up. Even the size of area X is a lie. Like they didn't tell anybody.

Like people think it's this small little pocket, but it could be miles wide and growing. It is growing. At least we're told that it is. We're told that it's growing. We don't know where the entrance is. We don't know how far away from the start point it's gotten. And there's no definitive entry or exit. It just kind of stops at some point because the husband, the husband and his

surveyor, what like went north up the coast towards the island for like days. We're talking like four or five days. It was like seven days or some shit. They went north and they never got to before before they got to the island. And even then, that's not the edge because, you know, the island is mentioned in journals from previous expeditions, like the people that ended up being besieged in the lighthouse. Well, they knew about whatever came out of the water.

Yeah. By whatever came out of the water, which again, sorry, good throwback to general cosmic horror. We're just going to have some creepy shit come out of the ocean. All right. Well, I was immediately thinking of Kua Toa. Good. We have the Kua Toa and the Sahagin are coming out of the ocean together. Yeah. But like, that's very that's very that's very just straight up lovecraft.

And I'm like, it is. That's a throwback to the beginnings of a cosmonaut as a genre is that just shit comes out of the ocean and fucks with your shit. Like, I'm sorry, that is great. We're building to be like, here's a lighthouse that's fortified, but the main fortification faces the ocean like that's great. Love good, good, good, good touch on that one, Jeff. But like the husband and his his surveyor, if their journals are to be believed, went north for like a week.

But then when they came back, it only took four days. Even distance gets completely manipulated here. It's like, how big is it? You can't know how is it expanding? You can't you think so, but you can't be sure the author or the narrator. The biologist implies at the very end of the book, the area X is bigger than you think it is because it's not just the area that they're in that. Like those little pockets of wild animals. biologist implies at the very end of the book, the area X is bigger than you think it is because it's not just the area that they're in, that like those little pockets of wild nature inside human inside the human normal world

are pockets of area X. That was kind of the way I interpreted it when she talks about, like, you know, the pond in a pool or, you know, the mud in an abandoned lot, she's sort of implying that those are in some way little tendrils or extensions of area X. In which case, I think that that's that point. I think it's very clear the area acts as meant to be just like nature. Well, if you think about it, that's nature in and of itself is in a lot of ways really incomprehensible. Like it's everything is so dramatically interconnected,

borderline impossible to predict. It's kind of especially if you're not like a biologist, it is. Well, I think that's why it had to be a biologist too, because you had to give somebody who spent their life trying to find the, trying to explain the interconnectedness and now realizing that they spent their whole career failing to do so. And I think that's honestly, probably one of the more core things the book is trying to say. There's an eco, like an ecologist or ecological reading of this book that's pretty straightforward,

I think. Well, it's straightforward to understand that there is an ecological reading of this book. What that reading might be is a little more complicated, but the book is so interconnected with the biologist's view of nature and how it works that I know I'm going to go insane. I know he's trying to say something about it. Can I say that that's one of my things about this book is it feels to me, I get the impression that he is very much trying to tell me something, but either intentionally or because he just did such a good job at making you feel unsettled and ambiguous that I feel like I can't quite figure out whatever the fuck it is he's trying

to tell me. And that's why I think- You know what I mean? Like it feels like you're on like one key piece of information away from figuring out what the message of the book is supposed to be. And that's infuriating because either that means one, I'm a little too dumb to figure it out or two, that was the point.

And the whole book is about not being able to understand. And that understanding is always just around the next quarter. But every time you turn the corner, you figure out it's actually one more corner away and you can never actually know it despite the fact that it feels like you almost can, which is just like the writing on the fucking walls of the tower. Even the crawler itself, when she gets to the crawler, there's, I think, two things

that stand out to me about it. It's first of all, the description of the crawler is, in my opinion, much better than anything Lovecraft ever came up with. Oh yeah. It's not just tentacles. Yeah, it's not just tentacles. This is like a weird pulsating, shifting ball of light that has humanoid but not humanoid form.

It moves around in goop, but it's also not goop. It kind of looks like you're looking through an oil slick, but you're not looking through an oil slick. There's like a bunch of weird nonsense going on. Glass that's kind of... I think my interpretation is because like everything else is like sort of referencing earlier, what it is, whatever it is, has to be made in a way you as a human are looking at it. And so your brain and a combination of what it's doing, it's trying to express itself in a way that is perceivable by you. And because it's just rifling through random human memories, random human experiences, random bits of the human world,

but not in a way that's comprehensible to it because it doesn't understand what it's mimicking or to you because you don't know what you're looking at. It just keeps manifesting in flashes of various things that would make sense if it was actually that. Does that make sense? It kind of looks like a lantern because it's seen a lantern before, but it can't really hold that shape because it doesn't know what a lantern is so it can't really hold that shape because it doesn't know what a lantern is. So it can't show you a lantern. It kind of looks like a person, but it doesn't really know what people are like or about. So it can't really show you a person.

It's seen snails and slugs because those exist in the environment. But it really isn't a snail or a slug. So you can't really, truly see it as a snail or a slug. And so I think why it keeps changing is because it keeps trying to reinterpret how you, you as the viewer are witnessing it to make it perceptible. And I think that's the problem. Right.

It's there's, um, that's the first part is I really love how ambiguous the description is while simultaneously being semi concrete, like there's more to it than Lovecraft who would be like, it's got tentacles and you can't conceive it. And then he would move on. But also on top of that, the general audit, almost automatic, and what's the word I'm looking for? I just had an indifferent reaction to the biologist being there. It kind of like eventually gets there and tries to figure out what the heck the biologist is in a way that makes me think it almost can't comprehend what's going on around it either. But it's not like it's generally indifferent

to everything about the biologist. It's just like must under stand. And then it burns almost burns out her brain in an attempt to understand what she is. Yeah. And then, uh, but it's, it doesn't feel malicious. It just feels like that's just the byproduct of what happens when it does it. Like it's not, it's, it's not malicious. It doesn't have intent really. It's just there. And my brain is kind of running right now trying to formulate how I feel about, or like what I think this is kind of saying. Well, that's also very like, obviously, cosmic horror staple is the fact that like the thing isn't malevolent to you specifically.

It actually doesn't really care about you. It's just that it's entire its existence is harmful to you by accident, more or less. Yeah. Cosmic horror is, I hesitate to say deeply existentialist, but it very much is like, no, the universe is cosmically indifferent to you. Like, if it harms you, it's because that's what it does, not because it intends to. It's just, that's just what it is. It's not hurting you because it wants to hurt you. It's hurting you as a byproduct of it simply doing its thing.

Yeah, of a being. It doesn't have a choice. It's not making a rational conscious decision. It's just happening. And this is very little different from that. But I feel like the the idea that the crawler is kind of an amalgamation of everything it's consumed, or attempted to understand up to this point, is attempted to understand up to this point is I think in a way because you had mentioned like you know human perception and human trying to understand human thoughts and human this like my thought is this is this kind of like a

interpretation of how humanity kind of affects the areas around it just by being there, but also nature does the same thing in the other way. It just takes longer. But I think one of the things I had mentioned, not yet, but that I had written out a little bit earlier, was the idea of this being kind of like, of area X being kind of like if a, if a pigeon or an animal that's living in a city tried to understand what the city was, like, it can't, it doesn't get it. And it's not going to understand it. But it's part of it. So that the pigeon is still living in it, the pigeon is still trying to exist within it and is being forced to adapt to these new circumstances. But it can't really comprehend what the building is for and what the pavement is there for. To me, it seems

utterly incomprehensible and it just exists as it needs to. And I feel like that's kind of what the crawler is getting at. If nothing else, it's like the sort of automatic, indifferent transformation that people participate in, that nature participates in, where we're all kind of part of how the world has transformed and how humans have affected the world. But we don't like, we're not like individually comprehending or like collectively comprehending what we're doing. It's like human society is basically AI generated garbage written on the side of a wall. It's slapped ash together through little tiny bits and pieces of knowledge in a universe we can barely comprehend that that we're trying to force into some form of order so that we can exist within it and without like going insane

because the universe is just so incomprehensible. Also, you know, at a practical level, I think that's why the Southern reach bans all technology beyond a certain point, because they know that the crawler like absorbs or like evaluates anything it comes in contact with. Right. Yeah. So like anything that it's been introduced to, they know it will. Ingest isn't the right word, but you know what I mean? Like it will assimilate, basically assimilate whatever it comes into contact with.

So they don't want to send in computers or fancy guns or anything new because that will give the crawler and then I think therefore area acts as a whole newer different stuff to work with. And the Southern Reach is trying to limit the amount of information, in a way, limit the amount of shit that the crawler has access to assimilating. So they need to know more about it. So they're sending more people in, but in a way that it's not introducing as many new things to the crawler and to the tower. crawler and to the tower. I don't know if this is a spoiler or not, because I only saw it in drawing form. And I'm assuming it was a drawing made by somebody who had read the future books, which is maybe my mistake for seeing it.

Okay. So if you don't want a potential spoiler for, cause there are like three more books in this series. So if you don't want a potential spoiler for that, tune out for a second. Yeah, someone drew their interpretation of the tower as a strand of DNA. And the crawler is kind of like how RNA splits the DNA and then reads and copies it. Yep. It's like, it's almost like a weird DNA sequence for all of area X If that makes any sense, like that's what I interpreted that The writing could be drawing writing is also the the writing is also made up of other little organisms Which DNA is made up of little building blocks, you know

No acids and but it's all made out of organics, like a big organic computer. It's like area X in that sort of interpretation is it is one sort of large organism. Yeah. And if it's and that's something that I did get from the book a little bit and not just from the drawing is this idea of oneness. And I think I'm primed to do that because that's so common in media, I think. Especially now, I don't think this is inspired by Eastern philosophy necessarily, but that's really common in pieces of media

that showcase Eastern philosophy especially. I think of Avatar, the last Airbender, constantly ramming down your face that all organ is like, everything is connected, all things are one. And I like she essentially, by the end accepts that she's becoming part not of, she's not becoming something new necessarily, she's just becoming part of the area X that is like, this sort of one thing. It's almost like area X itself is just one organism that has all these different pieces to it. Well, it goes along with our interpretation of ecosystems

that it's ecosystems need. Every ecosystem needs all of its constituent parts to be a whole. So the same way that the pool in her backyard was a hole or that that little pond in the dirt lot near her house was a hole. Area X is a hole. It's just that it has sort of a larger sort of guiding sort of guiding hand. And it's so alien to us and so seemingly unnatural that we refuse to see it as like a natural function,

even though in essence, that's what nature is, too. It just unlike area X, it happens over millions of years instead of weeks. Days. So yeah, I feel like there's, again, it's so hard to grasp. It's so intentionally open to interpretation. But I feel like there's something being said there about oneness, about nature being connected and the sort of inevitability of it all. Like it's going to outlast us. That's for sure. And no matter what we do, inevitably, inevitably will reclaim the world at some point.

It very much feels in the sort of like we can destroy ourselves and a lot of the natural world. But in the end, the natural world is going to reclaim everything. And this very very X feels very much like this is the natural world reclaiming itself in a more active sense. Yeah, it's like doing it intentionally. itself in a more active sense. Yeah, it's like doing it intentionally. And there's no way I mean, the book kind of implies or at least makes the biologist think that the crawler could be extraterrestrial. But there's nothing actually in it that says that it is. And that's

the thing about the I knew I said it was the last thing I'd say, that's one of the things I don't like that much about the movie. The movie, the soundtrack to the scene where they encounter the thing under the tower is called The Alien. Oh, okay. It's a great track, by the way.

I listened to the soundtrack to the movie while I was reading the book, and just in the background, and that track is actually really good. I highly recommend it to anyone. If you like movie soundtracks, that movie's got a good soundtrack. But, yeah, it's a lot more explicit about it,

even if it's still in hidden text, essentially, where they're like, this is an alien. And in this case, there's no knowing. Like you don't know what this thing is. Is this natural? It also kind of implies that it might have come from a military base that was in the area. Yeah, like it could have been human experimentation that created something like this. But like, but like, like, but like the biologist says,

the only thing she knows is that like the history is different and that the government from the jump was trying to confuse and change what people's interpretation of area X is like from the jump. So there's no way to know how it actually started because you have no way to know when it started. Yeah, you can't know when it started. You can't even really know where it started, though. It's implied to be around the lighthouse.

And you like at what point did everybody in that space start to approach the crawler because it seems noticeable that like the lighthouse keeper did either approached it or was approached. But because of the implication is that the crawler isn't always down there and has to like emerge to gather new material to make more DNA out of. I'm just going to call it DNA now, like to make more DNA out of it needs to bring in more information.

And that seems to be when shit happens, like attacking the people in the lighthouse, because it needs to assimilate new information. So it like emerges from the tower to go assimilate, I guess, you know, so like at some point it went to the tower. It went to the lighthouse and like, you know, got attacked and killed people and assimilated them. At some point it was in the village, right? And it assimilated the people in the village or killed them

or turn them in the mold or whatever. So like, you know, whenever it assimilates things, it doesn't seem to like consume it so much as transform. Whenever it. Yeah. It doesn't like, you know, eat it and absorb it. Like it just like it sort of takes it over, rummages through it and then like spits it back out and lets it be transformed. Yeah, it's rummaging through you kind of messes with your DNA.

And I think my OK, my interpretation of the lighthouse keeper being inside the the crawler is I don't think the crawler is like the the start of the change. I think that's the tower personally. And I think the tower being not particularly mobile needed something in its environment to bring sustenance, nutrients, information, DNA to it. And so it assimilated the lighthouse keeper

because it needed a form of some kind to take over and animate. It's like the lighthouse keeper is inside the crawler because the crawler needed something to latch onto to have a form that could interact with the physical world. Now, it's different now. It's changed and it does all sorts of weird shit. But at its core, there is something naturally organic because it needed something to form around like the way a pearl forms

around a grain of sand. Yeah. It needed something to form around. And I think it formed around the lighthouse. Yeah. Well, that would make sense. And the fact that the thing kind of that it's lit up the way it is because he was a lighthouse keeper. His thing was creating light. So they fundamental. It's a fun. When she sees herself as light, when she's changing, she gets viewed as like a fire

as a light by the psychologist. I think all that is I don't think light. I don't think being seen as light or viewing it as light is like an intentional choice by the crawler or the tower. I think it's because the being that it latched onto as its physical manifestation was a lighthouse keeper whose life was about light that now in the way that evolution works, light is now an intrinsic part of the change, but not because light was necessary, just because light was there at the start with the first being it took over. Yeah.

You know how like how you end up like we have like appendixes and shit, right? We don't need that. But it was there at the start. And now it's a part of us because it was just always there. I think because the lighthouse keeper, when whatever the first thing was assimilated, the lights at lighthouse keeper, like went into his brain and rummaged around. One of the most important thoughts in there was light. And I think because light was one of the most important parts of the lighthouse keepers being that from it became a foundational building block to all

other assimilation that goes forward from there. Not because light's important in and of itself, but because it was important to the first creature that it assimilated. That's my theory. Like if it had assimilated somebody else, it would have been a different thing. They wouldn't have seen themselves as light. They would have seen themselves as like if they had assimilated a ship's captain first, maybe they would have seen like the biologists would have seen the change as becoming water. I know I see that. Again, that I'll be with you. That is a theory I've come up with as we've been discussing it

as normally happens in these episodes. I don't think that's that's the wonder of doing something like this kind of off the cuff is that we can open stuff as we go. And I think a book like this kind of only can get, you can only get somewhere by talking about it with somebody else. If you can come up with this stuff on like, the only ideas I came up with, I came up with because I looked up some people's interpretations of it online. And I don't think people necessarily came up with their interpretations on their own.

So it's like. Yeah, by just by discussing, it's the only way you can try to pull meaning from it. Yeah. What one thing we haven't talked about yet. The moaning creature. You know, I actually really love that scene. That's terrifying. That's the most legitimately uncomfortable scene in the entire book. The question about the bone in creature.

What is it? What's its function? I think or maybe you should tell me if you have an interpretation of the moaning creature first, because I don't know if there's like I don't have an existential explanation, but I think I have a practical explanation for what the I mean, it would be the simplest like in universe explanation would be it was someone from one of the previous expeditions, but it's so postal, like relative to everything else in the zone. Now, I really don't have a good thought onto what it is other than.

I think it's space. I. I think it is multiple someones from previous expeditions and previous humans that were in area X that either were not directly assimilated or resisted assimilation in different ways and were not found useful and were discarded. I think it is itself an assimilation, like a Borg of all of the people that were there that were not useful. I think it's essentially like a garbage pile of people that were not useful to the tower or the crawler.

Does that make sense? Like it's people that were discarded, not like not immediately transformed or fought the transformation or deemed not necessary for transformation. I think it is itself like an amalgamation of like the refuse of change. Because if you're changing something, you're often pulling parts off, breaking it apart and remaking it. As anyone who's ever built a fucking Lego set knows, when you break something and then rebuild it, you're going to end up with spare pieces.

You didn't know where they came from. Like, I think I think the moaning creature is an amalgamation of the detritus and cast off pieces of change that have just sort of rolled into like a ball and made a little wallowing home in the marsh that it is. It's the refuse of of chain. And in a way, it mirrors the human world because we have like garbage dumps. It's I think the moaning creature is the garbage dump of refuse of change

from the tower and the and the crawler. That's what I think. And that's why it's so goddamn angry because it's not really a thing. It's not it's not it shouldn't be. It just is just a that it's so uncomfortable. Because I think you see faces in it and stuff because it's the faces of the people who have now become part of it. Yeah. When it's it's a great example of like a Chekhov's gun situation where the the moaning is happening the entire story every night.

You hear the moaning and then as soon as she's like, I got to walk back in the middle of the night. I'm like, you're gonna walk through that read patch. And I think the sorry, go ahead, go ahead. Well, no, you did. No, I was just gonna say, given the fact that the the village is really close by. And there's trace elements of people in the foxes and in the yada yada and there's like what happened to all those villagers? Well, some of them got turned into mold like in their living room. Yeah. And it had to have happened fast if they got turned to mold in the living room.

Like that would have to have been like point of origin stuff. Which I think. Another thing that shows that the the the the moaning monster is like cast off or part of leftovers from the change is that it can't actually hurt the biologist. It gets like yoinked away at the last second't actually hurt the biologist. It gets like yoinked away at the last second from actually hurting the biologist. And I think it's because the biologist has become by that point to assimilate it. Yeah, that she's no longer different from area X.

She's no longer just a human interloper who would be free to be killed. She's assimilated enough that when it tries to kill her, it gets deflected from doing so by Area X, by the, whatever you want to call the overall intelligence of the area, the tower. Like, in a way, she is protected from the crawler, or not the crawler, from the moaning monster, because she has already begun to accept the change.

Yeah, it just doesn't recognize her as something different from it. It's environment and itself. It like what it like wants to, but as soon as it gets close, that's why I don't think it gets yanked away. Can't hit her because it's just suddenly no longer a target. Yeah. Yeah. She's become too much like the rest of the zone at that point. She's become too much like the rest of the zone at that point. She's literally glowing.

I mean, maybe in her head, but. I mean, she does. She says that the next morning when she wakes up in the tree, her skin is phosphorescent, but she sees it. She sees it as phosphorescent. Does it? Does she actually? Who fucking knows? Does seem to. To the one does seem to make her more of a target

during the firefight, but it does. You shout out to the one normal person in the entire expedition, the surveyor and the surveyor is just freaking the fuck out and is like, you are crazy. I'm going to go home. Normal person, one normal motherfucker in the entire expedition. The only one who has normal human reactions to anything that happens. Yeah, that's the thing. When you think about it, from the perspective of the biologist, it's like, oh my God, why is the surveyor suddenly attacking? I mean, the biologist

knew it was probably going to happen. But then you think about what would you do in this situation? If you were the only sane person in what seems to be a space of completely insane people who are turning into fungus monsters, I'm going to shoot them and leave. them and leave. I would also shoot. I would also shoot. I'm saying I would also shoot the biologist. That is also something I would do, especially because the biologist comes back without the psychologist. So your only thought is okay. Did you potentially glowing potentially actively glowing and we can't we can't see the biologist face her face may be different her face may be Fungified at this yes, she could be Unrecognizable as a human being at this point

Yes, so the surveyor tries to kill her Just which is also what I would do Yeah, and the thing is is that the weird fungus prevents her from dying from the bullets. Like, yeah, the fungus heals her. Yeah. Or at least keeps her from experiencing the pain. Yep. Who knows? Like it was probably the right call, but also gives her preternatural reflexes and senses

to be able to kill the surveyor. Yeah, this is she admits later. She doesn't say in the chapter where she does it, but she admits later that her senses were heightened. She could hear her shift in her boots. She could hear her sweat. She could smell her. Yeah, she's becoming more well in tune with area with area x area x is just if you're becoming part of this one thing, you'd be able to feel and smell and sense things that are just in the space that are on you essentially

So it'd be I guess it'd be like the equivalent of if you're really paying attention and there's like a fly crawling on your arm So you'd be able to know if you were paying attention and focusing on that you could tell where the fly is moving So then you're just like well like she could and focusing on that, you could tell where the fly is moving. So then you're just like, well, like she could. The area X is like telling the biologist everything she needs to know about the surveyor to survive. Yeah. Who knows if it's. Again, shout out to surveyor. The one normal motherfucker in this whole place.

And and poor anthropologists who get hypnotized into touching the crawler and then getting smurfed into a puddle of goo. I also think, I think I agree with you earlier that the crawler isn't necessarily inherently violent. I think that she did surprise it and that it reacted the way it does and just she did not have the power of the spore infection that the biologist has later, when the biologist gets over. I think the anthropologist got overwhelmed the same way the biologist did, but she wasn't

strong enough to withstand it. Yeah, no, she was just down there, just a normal person. She didn't even, she was hypnotized. She didn't even know what she was looking at. Like she didn't even have the ability to comprehend anything she was doing, so she wasn't aware. There was no awareness, no agency. Whereas when the biologist does it, she essentially does it on purpose. But like she knows what's about to happen.

Yeah. Yeah. And then it gets crazy almost kills her and then moves on. And again, she only survives because of her own internal willpower and her transformation. Yeah. So the, the anthropologist had none of that. And then she comes back out of the towers.

Like I have not going back down there. And then, uh, it says, I'm going to go up the coast and see if I can find my husband and I'm gonna go find my dolphin husband. Goodbye. Find my dolphin husband that I kind of loved and kind of didn't. And that I love more now than I ever did before. Yeah. Now that I actually understand him,

took me coming all the way out here to understand my husband. Yeah, took me being assimilated by a weird fungal growth puffing in my face. To understand what it was like to actually open up to somebody. Yeah. I guess to make sense as the story is going on, she's becoming more and more open to area X and she starts seeing opening up to other people and opening up to her husband

as like something that organisms do to their natural environment in order to survive. So you cannot be isolated from your environment. Yeah. So she starts to understand what it means to be part of an environment or something and how human relations are very similar. You got to be willing to give in order to get that. Also shout out to her husband, her husband apparently being a normal person. Yeah, her husband being a normal person

who just was genuinely concerned about his wife. Genuinely concerned about the sort of self isolationist tendencies of a woman he loved. Because she describes him as being like super extroverted. But then but then when she describes it, it's like this is just like a person. Yeah, I think he seems super extroverted to her. So yeah, compared to you, he's super extroverted. Yes. Compared to you, everyone's super extroverted.

Miss Miss, I'm going to go stand at a title pool for seven hours. Lady. No, I think she's a really interesting character. I mean, she's I don't know if she's likable, but no, I think she. But she knows that like she's very aware. Oh, she's not likable. She very well knows that she's not. Yeah, it's it's way more tolerable that way. It's not like the writer was intending for you to like really think this person was like

someone you'd like to hang out with. This this person is very self aware of what their problems are. And that they're not personable. Yeah. But it's interesting because it is kind of like she does kind of become more personable as the story gets towards the end because she's becoming more part of something else. She's opening up to the environment, even if she did just kill somebody. Yeah.

As you do, you know why she killed the person, but you also know why the person was trying to kill her. So at the same time, you're sort of like, all right. And also you have to know that there's no way the surveyor was making it out of that. No, I mean, there's noveyor was making it out of there. No, I mean, there's no way anyone could make it out of there. No, I don't think I don't think any expedition is ever intended to return. No, absolutely not. And I think that I think I think the Southern Reach also, it

seems like most a lot are a lot of the more recent ones are led by psychologists to do like the hypnotizing on people. And I think the Southern reach even lies to them because I think the psychologists or the team leaders are told that they will at least come back. Yeah, I think the psychologist was under the impression that she would get to go back and then nobody else probably would yeah, that like it.

I think she was under the impression that it was likely that no one else would return, but that she would because somebody would have to, you know, deliver the reports, right? Yeah, it doesn't. And so I think the question is how the Southern Reach gets any information out of this. I think there's a way they're observing what's happening somehow. Somehow maybe those little boxes that are duds actually do something. Yeah. And like, who knows, they might send in teams at some point. They just go in, go to the lighthouse, get journals and get out. We don't know.

We're told that it's really difficult to get in there and it's really difficult to get out. We are told that. But we're told that by the Southern Reach. Yeah. So you can't trust them. Can't trust anything. You can't trust them. It might be possible that the Southern Reach has a way to like, you know, go in, you know, make it, make it to base camp, make it to the place, retrieve the information they need to retrieve and then leave. Exfil without hanging around. It's possible that they know how to do that. It's possible that they have like secret cameras and shit set up in area X where they're watching people.

It's possible that like different team leaders have come back. That psychologists or leaders from other teams have come back. I think that's also possible. Maybe they're even getting information directly from the crawler somehow. Like it's possible. There's nobody knows, especially if that possible theory of the crawler coming from a military base or the area starting from a military base is that base might still be in there.

Yeah. So might still be giving them information. I guess the later books would probably answer some of those questions, but I don't know if I want those questions answered. So screw that. Because I love the cover of this anniversary. The cover is sick. It's sick. Can I say that in closing?

I want that to actually be our final point. So something you and I were talking about before we started recording is is is the the value of an explanation now, because this were to touch out this book. But it's also going to reference, you know, we were talking about this in reference to other properties is the value of an explanation to things. So this book does a fantastic job of explaining absolutely nothing. You get a lot of context and a lot of details, but none of it is ever truly explained to you.

And that leads the mystery. And that is what a lot of people love about this. They love the fact that nothing is explained. It is simply a thing that happens. What I was told is that the later books do actually kind of explain what area X is, where it came from and how it works, and that this made a lot of readers mad because they, as you just said, prefer those questions unanswered. And before we started this recording,

you and I were talking about a different property, maybe I will remain nameless at this moment, which had a recent installment that made a lot of people, myself included, really upset because it explains away a lot of stuff in a way that removes the mystery and the mythology from its world. A thing that previously was the realm of religion and myth gets explained in concrete, direct terms. And like me, a lot of other people were really upset by that. Like you took this wonderful, mysterious world building and said, no, here's why it happened. Here's how it worked.

All of all of what you believed up to this point was lies. And what you believe at this point being something that we told you up to and this book doesn't do any of that, but it's apparently some of the later books do. And so I think there's a conversation to be had about the value of explaining your shit and whether that's a worthwhile to be had about the value of explaining your shit and whether that's a worthwhile thing to do. This is something that I think is really integral to any world building is

figuring out how much you want to explain because that's the thing about thriving fan communities is that half the fun in those sorts of things is theorizing is coming up with ideas is thinking about what these things could possibly be. And in a way that mirrors what a lot of old people who had a lot of time on their hands used to do about reality is sit around to be they used to sit around to be and think. is sit around to be they sit around to be and think.

Yeah. It's like and discuss really hard about what is all this? Like, what does this mean? And no one has ever come to any concrete conclusions ever. So and we're not going to just just going to put that out there. I mean, I don't believe we're ever going to. So but it's really fun to think about. Just just gonna put that out there. I mean, I don't believe we're ever going to so But it's really fun to think about And it's what makes it it's part of what I think makes reality reality and makes it so interesting and

But it's also I think a driving force behind why people want Sometimes why people want to do that in their books or in there? I think this happens a lot, at least in my experience with video games more than anything else. Mm hmm. But explaining away content is in a way like trying to give an answer to something. But in the real world, you don't get an answer to anything. So it's it's more interesting to think about. But I mean, that same drive is the drive that drove the fucking scientific

revolution is the drive to explain everything. Yeah. And there's a really drive there. I think. And then there's there's at least rationalist philosophers to some degree that argue then about what the limit on human knowledge is because there's some limit to what we're ever going to be able to know for certain. Yeah, a limit to what we can know a limit to what at the very least our senses are capable of knowing like we're able to perceive

in general. And I, I, there's I think that even within a human nature in each one of us and humans, I know human nature as a concept is fraught. Don't leave me on on that one for now. The humans as societies and as individuals often have a mix or a balance, some sort of the desire to know and the desire to be filled with awe and wonder. Now, some people need more of one than the other. Like nobody is the same.

Some people would prefer everything rationally explained. Some people just don't want to know their explanation for anything. OK, I think that explains why a lot of people are somewhat more inherently religious than others, why some people more inherently inclined to like rational sciences than others is because I think we we have both drives within us, the drive to be amazed, the drive to be filled with awe, but also the drive to have explanations for everything, for the things that happen to us and the things that happen to the world around us. But I think you can end up being too much of one or the other.

I think a world that is entirely awe and wonder with no explanations leaves you vulnerable to exploitation and to simply having worse lives because knowing how things work is good. Like, knowing how our bodies work is great because we can do science and medicine. On the flip side, I'm also a strong advocate of the fact that if you have a life with no awe, with no wonder, with no magic, magic, not in the concrete sense of casting spells, but magic in terms of like the unexplainable, I think that I think that's also unhealthy for your mental state to have everything have everything in the world have a rational explanation

because I think our brains need to have a little bit of that magic to keep life interesting. And I so I think that in these sort of cultures is like writing the cultures of like making video games or writing a book. You have to strike that balance between how much of your book is going to is going to be sort of unexplainable, magical awe and how much of it is going to be hard science explained. I've always thought of this debate in the difference of the way books, fantasy books do magic systems. So on the one hand, you've got soft magic systems like Lord of the Rings in a way.

Like how does Gandalf do magic? He just fucking does. He just does shit and shit happens like light comes out of his staff. He summons fire. Just some shit happens. How does he do that? It's just part of his being. Galadriel even says to the hobbits, like what you consider magic is just kind of part of who we are as elves. We just sort of do stuff that's part of our nature.

You call it magic because you can't do it right and you can't explain it. That's like sort of your soft magic. Well, how does someone do magic? It just sort of happens even like the magic of like the Witcher, even though you can like learn it and try that it's super vague about where it comes from and how you like actually control it. It's super vague about where it comes from and how you like actually control. It's more it's more like a it's an internal self control of how you use magic. Right. The flip side is you have like everything written by like Brandon Sanderson,

where it's like the magic is explained down to the scientific detail. Like, oh, you bend metals or stone or whatever. But like the type of stone or the type of metal it is matters. And you can manipulate the world because you know that there's like fragments of that material in the air and then you can manipulate the air because it has that in it. You know what I mean? It's very highly scientific, like very highly explained. Both of those have their place, but some people prefer more of one than the other. So again, some magic systems are very much like, no, this is the science behind. It's like George Lucas trying to introduce midi chlorines, midi chlorines.

It's trying to put a it's trying to put a science on the magic of the force. Which is so wild when you consider where the force got its inspiration from coming from things like the Dow. Yeah. Where it is entirely mystical. It is entirely. It's a, it's the, it's the life force that connects all things. And then he's like, but what if the life force that connects all things were

microbes in your blood? Stupid. Everyone hated that because he tried to put it. I think if you start, I think part of the problem is, you know, if you start from a ground level of rational explanation, then fans are fine with rational explanations throughout the whole story. You know, like the miss the Mistborn starts from a foundation of hard science of your magic.

It is a thing you can study and practice and learn but if you start from a foundation of mystical of the wondrous if you then go on to try and explain it later i think that makes people more upset. I mean i think it would work the same way the other way around to like if brand if brand Brando Sando suddenly decided that someone was going to break his rules and have no often explanation as to why people would freak out. Yeah, because again, because you've introduced a rule set. If people can now break the rules with no explanation, that's going to make people really mad. It's all about expectations. If you expect the world to be soft, you need to keep it soft.

If you expect it to be hard, it needs to stay hard. And I think that is the problem we've discussed with. It happens with particularly sci-fi video games, fantasy video games between some of the game series you and I were discussing in advance. I mean, it's far enough. We're out now that we can say one of them was Mass Effect explaining the Reapers. The Reapers were originally like a Lovecraftian horror

that was beyond comprehension. And then they like as the game goes on, as the series goes on, they like try to explain them in a rational sense, which fails spectacularly. Yeah. I would say. And I. But yes. But yeah. but yeah. But like magic the same way.

And I think that's the problem I can see happening with later books of the series after Annihilation because it starts in such an unexplainable place, such a soft and like I say magical here, not like casting spells, but, you know, the the fairy of it all, if I can borrow a Tolkien term, you know, the fairy of it all. Because it starts there, you can't take it into a rational explanation because that's not what people want. That's not what they're expecting. They don't want the government to come out and go, well, the crawler actually came from a science experiment that we did because we are experimenting with radiation and it's actually an evil version of Dr. Manhattan. Like nobody wants that explanation because that's not what they signed up for.

That's not the world they bought into after the first book. At least that's my interpretation of it. That's my interpretation of world building as a whole is you need it. Once you pick your lane for your style of world building, you need to kind of stay with it because otherwise setting up expectations generally like, you know, you can't set the expectation. Like imagine if like with how soft Le Guin's magic system is, if you actually sit down for like 30 seconds with Earthsea and think about what that magic could do. You're like, Oh my God, like this could you can you can transform reality. You can flip it upside down on its head. But with like with with with the certain knowledge, you can literally transform reality. I think you also have that same problem with like

Harry Potter magic. If I if I if I may mention the cursed world Harry Potter magic, if you think about the things that because at the beginning anyway, Rowling was doing such soft world building with despite the fact you have to learn spells. The magic is the world is very soft. Oh, yeah, there's there's not like hardline detailed rules about how the magic works. But so but then what it does is it by the fact that she just keeps coming up with shit. That's plot convenient

It you start to think about it for more than two seconds and none. It's insane. None of it makes sense Oh, you could just a third year student at school can create a potion or a second year student at school Can create a potion that lets you perfectly mimic another human being. That's insane. Ethical ramifications of Polyjuice potion. That you can, that like a high school kid can create a potion that is literally just a date rape drug. It's insane.

If you think about it for more than 10 fucking seconds and Le Guin's world the same thing Earthsea if you actually think about how the magic works too hard The Swiss cheese of it all appears which is which is really funny because I think To bring up a similar world to Earthsea I think that Aragon's setting tries to do a Brandon Sanderson to Le Guin's world building. Le Guin's magic. Yes, it tries to put a person put a hard, hard rules on Le Guin's name based magic. Because because but the only rule he really added is that if you use magic to do something, it will take the same amount of effort as if you did it physically. So it's like the way you run things is really important because if you run something as like move that tree, you might die because the tree might be too

heavy for you to literally move. But if you're like move that earth so that the tree rolls or something, it'll work a lot better. So it comes down to like how you word things, which is I think really interesting for a 16 year old to come up with. You have to come up with like, I put a physical limitation on this magic system so that you can't just do whatever. Like it has to be like within a and that way also you can make yourself stronger in such a sense that you can do stronger magic because you've been practicing and literally working out working makes you better you can just

you can lift your you can fucking pump iron your way into being better magic user yeah but which is kind of brilliant as and and I give it credit for being that halfway point between like hard magic and soft magic But it but it makes sense why he would have to do that too For the type of story he was trying to tell Where it's this action oriented thing? You have to have limitations on the magic or else what's stopping the main character from saying Kalbatorix dies and he just dies. What's stopping Galvatorix from being like Aragon dead?

Yeah. So there has to be limitations on it. Whereas in Earthsea, it's more like parables than it is, or like fables. Yeah, fables and also our main character isn't ever trying to kill anyone with magic. It's like you. There's the the the presence of it is not an action story. It's more of a philosophical tale. Yes. Like like a fable. It's more like a like a historical account trying to teach a lesson. The Earthsea is like fables.

The first book is like, again, coming to terms with like the use of power and and like responsibility for your own actions. Otoan is like a tale, like a coming of age tale about learning yourself and escaping the oppressive situation from which you were born into and being transgender. Like the the the final one, I won't tell you what it's about because we haven't read it for the podcast yet. But it's also just a fable. It's a parable. But you're right. Aragon Aragon is like we're doing an action adventure story that has magic.

So you have to have rules on it. That makes sense. And Brandon Sanderson stories are like action adventure. Yes. That's the only way they need to have. They need to have. And I think that's why, but that's why you don't need, you don't need rules in, in Lord of the Rings because that's not the point. Gandalf isn't doing magic. Yeah. And the main characters don't have access to it. Anyways.

The only person you talk to who has access to it is Gandalf. Yeah. Everybody else is just a guy. to it is Gandalf. Yeah, everybody else is just a guy. Yeah, she's like, that's and that's the whole point of Lord of the Rings, too, is that it was literally done by the most unassuming, humble type of person that did this. The whole point is that the most powerful people who have access to magic don't actually have the capacity to save the world because being

that powerful means inherently you can't. Yeah, it has to be. It has to be Samwise fucking Gamgee, the most average motherfucker to ever live, except for the fact that he's incredibly stubborn and loving. It's just like, so it ends up coming down to like the point that your stories are trying to tell that because if someone tries to sit there and analyze the world building of Le Guin and is like, this is bad because X, Y, Z, because it's not this and that. And I get agitated because I'm like, that's not the point of what's going on.

If I can, if I can, if I can pull out my fucking high powered rifle right now to take a shot at George R.R. Martin. Oh, no, we don't hear what Aragorn's tax policies are. That's not the point, you dumb motherfucker. Aragorn's tax policies are. That's not the point, you dumb motherfucker. People love to throw that quote around. Shut the fuck up, George. You can't even write a book. Shut the fuck up.

And the thing that confuses me so much about it is what George is writing is different from what Tolkien was trying to write. They're basically not in the same genre anymore. It's just the fact that there is dragons. And you know what? I don't really want to go too far into it because that's not what this episode is about. But it's like the word fantasy as a genre is such a very broad freaking term. Same thing with science fiction. It's like, what does that even mean? And then people are it's like you tell me that Tolkien and Martin are in the same category. These stories have nothing to do with one another.

Just the set dressing makes them simpler. That's it. Yeah. It's just this has dragons in it. Dragons and swords. Yeah. If you didn't have dragons in Westeros, what makes it fantasy other than the fact that it's made up? It's just a fiction story.

It's just that could just be historical fiction. Just what keeps it from being historical fiction is the dragons that did a continent that doesn't exist. That's really it. It's upside down Europe with dragons. I mean, upside down England with dragons. Yeah. Anyway, I think we'll wrap it up now because this is a conversation we could have for quite some time. I think.

Yes. Yeah, but we've been going for a little while and I think what I want to wrap it up is to bring it back to annihilation is that I can see why people would get frustrated in later books if he makes that turn if that's true and he's making that turn into explanation, I can see why that would frustrate fans, because the expectation you set up in in annihilation is that this is all essentially unexplainable. That like all you have to do is like figure out the edges of it

and the contours of it, and you can either fight it or give into it. But that's really all there is to it. There's no understanding it and then to come out later and be like, but this is the explanation that would frustrate me just even though my rational brain wants to know the answer. That's what I mean at the beginning when I said I wasn't sure if I liked it because I don't know the answer. I think I have come around to the fact that if I did it

would be a whole it would be a different story. And I think if he does make that turn, that's somehow missing the point of his own writing. Like this book has so many and Cosmic Core in general has so many lines about the epistemic limits of human thought. Ultimately, it's like, what can you perceive? What can you know about anything? At the end of the day, what do we know about nature? What do we know about the universe? This is stuff people have been talking about since Plato. But I hate to keep bringing up random philosophers. I've really been doing deep diving over the last like month and a half.

Okay, one of one of us has to do smart one of us has to do smart stuff. But but like these are almost like like cosmic horrors almost like this this contian like you can't know anything beyond what your senses are able to know. And then if something does encounter, if you do somehow encounter something like that, you wouldn't know that you encounter something like that. Because you can't, you can't know anything outside of sight, you know, then, and then, and even then in like annihilation, the narrator cannot trust her senses. Yeah, you can't trust any of them.

So at the end of the day, what do you know about it? And it misses the point to try and explain any of it, because if you do explain it, then it's saying that there isn't really a limit to human knowledge and understanding, which isn't true. Yeah. Well, it's saying that like this thing that you thought was beyond understanding actually actually is it's just a different human thing. Yeah. And that kind of dodges the point. That sucks. Yeah, that kind of sucks. It's really disappointing. Like it's ultimately would be disappointing if somebody did

that. Which, but all we can say is that it doesn't do it in annihilation. And I think that is what makes it good. Yeah, I think, I think this book, and I think I mentioned this maybe before we started recording, I can't remember. But we, I mentioned that this feels very much like a standalone book that ended up getting sequels because it was popular. It feels like it was supposed to be something that was published as a series of shorts in a sci fi magazine, you know, like.

Yeah, I can see this being like journal entry one. Yep. You know, in a old science fiction pulp magazine. Like every week, every week you get a different you get the next journal. Journal entry one. Yep. You know, in a old science fiction pulp magazine. Like every week, every week you get a different you get the next journal entry every week. Yeah. Because this book has chapters in quotation marks, but they're they're they're actually relatively long chapters. chapters. And instead, they're just broken up by individual what I assume to be individual entries, but broken up solely by little marks in the book that notate like a page break, essentially. Otherwise, the chapters are like super long, relative to the size of the book.

They're like, there's only five chapters. So each chapter would be like close to 50 pages long. So it feels like a standalone novella and the fact that it got sequels. Yeah, it feels very much like the now I have to come up with more story for this story that didn't initially have story. Some books, some books you read and you can tell from the start that they were intended to be more. Yes. I think Trevor and I mentioned this in our episode about city of brass, as you're

reading it, you're like, Oh, the author knew from the start that this was going to be a trilogy and that these, these storylines would not be resolved in this book. That they, that they intend to be resolved, but not here. Like you could tell from the start, the city of brass was meant to be the first part of a trilogy, like you can tell from the way the city of brass was meant to be the first part of a trilogy. Like you can tell from the way it's written, but you read annihilation and it's like at most at the best you could expect is an anthology. Yeah.

Oh yeah. This is at the end of the book. Everybody's essentially dead. Everyone's dead, but heard it's like whatever expedition comes next. We'll read this journal. And that's who's not going to write anymore. So you're not getting these characters again. You're going to have to start with something brand new.

Yeah. So yeah. Anyway, I I do recommend if you like science fiction, if you like cosmic horror, but don't like H.P. Lovecraft, give this book a go. I think I've come more to the conclusion as we've gotten through this episode that I like it. Roderick Lignolet Yeah, same. Aaron Norris And I think it's just because if you have someone else to read it with and then talk about it, do that. Because this book in a vacuum is very hard to piece together. Like, like, I know we talked that normally on this podcast,

like we come up with a lot of our like good conclusions and ideas while we discuss it. And we do that a lot. But oftentimes we come into that we come into these recordings with like a general outline of specific sort of like ideas that we want to hit on, you know, like we sort of know, well, we want to discuss this sort of like this theme and that theme as we come into the episode, but I was like walking, like walking the dog yesterday and like thinking about this book and what I wanted to talk about it. I couldn't even really formulate exactly what I wanted to say about it because I

didn't know how I felt about it or like what it was trying to tell me. And it wasn't until we were doing this recording that I hit upon, you know, some of those big things I came across that we've discussed in this episode. I didn't know that until we were having a back and forth about it. And I think it's really interesting from a meta perspective, because that means you can't actually it's harder to understand the book in isolation and that you actually have to open up to a wider community in order to get a better understanding of what was happening in the book. And that to me feels like an incredibly meta way to look at this story. Yeah, that really is.

I think this book does what it sets out to do in a almost flawlessly in terms of what it wants. And but at the same time, not even necessarily just because the future books might make too much of an explanation. But I don't even know if even if they didn't do that, if I'd want to read them. I don't want I don't know if I need more that happens in area X. Like I got a lot and I got a good amount of like what the fuck is happening. And to leave it ambiguous, I think feels better. Yeah, this is this is a really great standalone book. So if you and it's really short, too.

So if anybody is worried about book length, this book is like 200 pages. No, the audio book was like, I want to say like six hours, maybe. This is just a little bit longer than Tombs of Atuan. Yeah. And Tombs of Atuan I read in like an hour and a half. Yeah. I mean, this is like, this is like, we're talking the same length as like, it's, this is similar to like a song for the wild.

Yes. Yes. Um, I think maybe part of the reason I read, uh, Tombs of Atuan so quickly is the more I think about it, it's in like my top five books, maybe ever. So you're welcome. You're fucking welcome. So that that book, despite being about the same length as this one, I read in like a night and this one took me like a week. I did the audio. I did the audio book for this one in a across a work day. That's because it's the holidays and I have like 12 hour workdays. And so I just listened to the book in like a single day.

But I think right now for everyone who's listening, who doesn't know, I'm still rebuilding stuff from a fire that happened. And I think right now what I'm going to do is I'm going to start buying every book that we read for a short time so that I can build up more of a collection. But on the shelf. Yeah. So I actually have something to put on a shelf, which, you know, I shout out to Canticle

for Lebowitz. I'm already ordering another copy of that one because I need my. That's right. Right. Yeah. So I feel like forever a cataclysm for Lebowitz is going to be our weird little like totem. Yeah. Of the book that we really like that nobody that like not that many people have read and that we're always just going to reference it and have most of the time people won't know what we're talking about. Right. If you're a new listener and you don't know cataclysm for Lebowitz, go back to like episode number fucking two or three, technically, I think. Because Red Wall still splits.

Yeah, we still split those into parts. Yeah, like go back to like episode number three. Our audio might not be great. That back then it was Kethel and some other host who's gone now. But I think the discussion was still really good. So you should go back and listen to Canical for Leibowitz. You can learn about our sweet boy, Francis.

I was I was asked. I'm getting so off topic. But I was asked what my favorite books were by my parents before Christmas. And I I gave a list and the first two books I thought of, and I know the first one we genuinely disagree on, but that's how it works. The first I put was The Dispossessed,

and then the second that I put was Cannibal. Because the video was like, Cannibal. And then Tombs of Atuan, and I couldn't come up with what I couldn't come up with the last one. So I just threw in ones that I was like, this is a really good book. And if they gave me something related to it, so I said like the fifth season and yeah, Catholic propaganda for the win. Let's go catical for Lebo wins. Anyway, this has been wonderful. Thank you all for listening.

It's time for us to go. Thank you. Thanks for hanging out with us. We'll be back soon with something else. Bye. Bye, bro. Thanks for watching!