This made sense on another level: We did not know what had happened here, what was still happening here, and any preformed theories would affect my analysis of the evidence as we encountered it. Moreau (1896), VanderMeer weaves together an otherworldly tale of the supernatural and the half-human . Photograph: Graham Whitby-Boot/Allstar/Sportsphoto Ltd Weird science … VanderMeer's scene of invasion is a lasting monument to the uncanny. We’ll repeat this schedule every day until we think we know enough about the tunnel and how it fits into Area X.

I hadn’t even thought of this, though I should have; I was still trying to parse the lingual meaning, had not transitioned to the idea of taking a physical sample. VanderMeer’s first foray into Area X is a beautiful, subtle and incredibly atmospheric read which resonates with a sense of the unknown and the unknowable.Lighthouse Pictures has a charge arrangement registered with UK Companies House regarding the matter. Thankfully the other two had no desire to talk as we waited, and after just fifteen minutes the psychologist awkwardly pushed her way up out of the stairwell and into the light, blinking as her vision adjusted. For weapons, we had knives, a locked conta But I was more attuned to solitude than any of us, and I would have characterized that place in that moment of our exploration as watchful. The psychologist nodded, appeared to consider these opinions, and asked, “Does anyone yet have even an inkling of a sensation of wanting to leave?

Our expedition was the first to enter Area X for more than two years, and much of our predecessors’ equipment had rusted, their tents and sheds little more than husks. My voice must have seemed calmer than my actual thoughts because there was no hesitation in their response. I’m excited by this discovery,” the psychologist interjected before we had discussed the tower much further.We were confident that eventually we would photograph it, document its behavior, tag it, and assign it a place in the taxonomy of living things. This doesn't even get to the question of being able to see our environment with a fresh eye--so that we no longer think in terms of being stewards or despoilers but some other philosophy altogether. How predictable, and yet perhaps prescient, for the anthropologist to try to substitute a safer, more comfortable option.

Yet as soon as I saw the staircase, I remembered the lighthouse on the coast and had a sudden vision of the last expedition drifting off, one by one, and sometime thereafter the ground shifting in a uniform and preplanned way to leave the lighthouse standing where it had always been but depositing this underground part of it inland.

Together with a psychologist, an anthropologist and a surveyor, the twelfth expedition makes its way into this strange and mystifying land only to find that danger is as likely to come from within as without; no one remains the same in Area X. Our most outlandish equipment consisted of a measuring device that had been issued to each of us, which hung from a strap on our belts: a small rectangle of black metal with a glass-covered hole in the middle. Location filming by Lighthouse Pictures Ltd occurred, starting in late April 2016 in South Forest, Windsor Great Park.

This is a tale of discovery and quiet observation, a preternatural mystery which should be slowly savoured until you are nothing but lost in the wilds of VanderMeer’s imagination. It is one thing to think you might be receiving hypnotic suggestion and quite another to experience it as an observer. Science is there to handle the uncanny, and the biologist's declaration near the end of the book – "Our instruments are useless, our methodology broken, our motivations selfish" – is anything but an expression of doubt. In Annihilation, the first volume of Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy, we join the twelfth expedition.I saw that the letters, connected by their cursive script, were made from what would have looked to the layperson like rich green fernlike moss but in fact was probably a type of fungi or other eukaryotic organism. It was only later that I realized the psychologist had tried to bind me with a hypnotic suggestion meant for me and me alone. As a group, we felt almost giddy, I think, to be free after so many confining months of training and preparation.