This follow-up to the Southern Reach series again explores the mysteries of Area XTen years ago, Jeff VanderMeer published the three volumes of the Southern Reach trilogy, which between them charted the incursion of the otherworldly into a stretch of Florida coastland. In Annihilation, scientists venture into what has been dubbed “Area X” and quickly find themselves physically and psychologically transformed. Authority follows a middle manager who, in the wake of this mission’s failure, is dispatched by the shady “Central” to evaluate the people who have made studying Area X their life’s work. Acceptance jumps between timelines: the days preceding Area X’s creation, the weeks preceding the departure of the mission in Annihilation, and the aftermath of Authority, in which Area X breaks its bounds and seems set to transform the world.VanderMeer had until this point been a respected fantasy author, a stalwart of the New Weird alongside such authors as China Miéville, KJ Bishop and Steph Swainston. The Southern Reach trilogy, despite shifting its register into science-horror, utilised many of the same techniques as his previous novels: it took the queasy sense that there is an under layer to reality from City of Saints and Madmen (2001); the Nabokovian intercutting of text and commentary from Shriek: An Afterword (2006); the transformation of a familiar, rational space into an uncanny one, in which the boundary between human, animal and plant is no longer discernible, from