Your Local Book Club

Wondering how it took so long to read them, I find so much scific crushingly boring like I am reading the script for a movie that must be literally filmed and thus has all of the stage directions laid out along with a dissecting all knowing narrator that just directly hands me the described emotional intentions and desires of characters as if human beings were conscious of that kind of thing most of the time... ugh....

Annihilation avoids this pitfall beautifully but I think I never checked it out because people focused on the environmental aspects of it, which are incredible, but far more important is the way in which Annihilation demolishes 99% of scifi as childishly amateur men sitting in comfy rooms thinking about war in space trying to futiley deny the future from growing organically out from under them.

I like Thomas Pynchon, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Thomas Mann, Italo Calvino... weird shit that pushes the boundaries of what a novel can do... what words can do. I despise authors that think they know what their characters were truly thinking when they did something and will assert it directly in the text and even as Annihilation narrates the internal thoughts of characters it still somehow respects that magic space between us and what we are observing, and thus the novels have a very intense peculiar life to them.

The Annihilation series more than any other fiction I have discovered in years actually feels relevant and forward looking to the process of annihilation, extinction and radical letting go of our past selves that the catastrophic acceleration of climate change has locked us into.

It feels like a necessary compliment to Braiding Sweetgrass in describing the sickness of this time.

The map had been the first form of misdirection, for what is a map but a way of emphasizing some things and making other things invisible?