Jeff Vandermeer's Annihilation Response

I really enjoyed, Annihilation, because it was something so different and something that I have never read before. When entering Area X with the four women, you as the reader are looking for any uncanny thing or spot like the lighthouse, the reed beds or the tower. However, the uncanny doesn’t live in these spots but rather lives in the character’s development and observations. The uncanny is hardly a thing in Annihilation and rather the actual state of the world. In Area X, familiarity is fiction, looking at the biologist, she keeps falling back on scientific explanation and not asking the world questions or even questioning her transmogrifying self. The biologist is confronted by a question, is she more X than human? And, instead of trying to fix this issue, she decides that kind of questioning is meaningless, "A religious or superstitious person, someone who believed in angels or in demons, might see it differently. Almost anyone else might see it differently. But I am not those people, I am just the biologist; I don't require any of this to have a deeper meaning" (192). In Annihilation, science is present to handle what is considered the uncanny and the biologists doubt at the end of the book shows human frailty and ambition.

            I was very intrigued when reading the end of this story and to see that there wasn’t really an ending at all, considering this is a trilogy and that ending won’t come until two books later. Finishing this story, I am left with so many questions such as, will they ever be able to go home or is X now home?