Authority

Area X over the horizon bounded guarded The Southern Reach is the institution given the task of investigating which it has done by probing with little to show. We see the operation of Southern Reach from its newly appointed director. His task to work out what is happening given the mystery surrounding its last director. The reader this time is able or rather the author has the luxury of enabling the reader to relate to the director initially nameless but for his role ... Control.
Are there answers or more understanding amidst the few strange facts. Yes but well no maybe by the end have a better understanding of where we are in relation to Area X and its still bleak.

Third volume on my shopping list, I want answers.

This book is an odd duck–on the one hand it's about world-changing events, but on the other hand it has nice little moments where the protagonist goes for a jog. I like the mixing of scope. Not only does it make the protagonist more interesting, it centers the horror/weirdness in a personal way. A page turner where, frankly, not a whole lot happens until the end–and yet still a page-turner.

My only complaint is that, while the first book was clearly a set up for a trilogy, it at least had a solid ending. This one has a very Empire Strikes Back ending, which isn't a bad thing in itself, but I love it more when authors can give us a contained story and still make us want to read “the next one”.

When I finished [b:Annihilation 17934530 Annihilation (Southern Reach, #1) Jeff VanderMeer https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1403941587s/17934530.jpg 24946895], I noted that I'd like more information on the shadowy government agency running the expedition. And that's exactly what we get here - in a fun, satisfying way. It gives a lot of insight into the Southern Reach and Central, and just how much they're *#&@ing with people's minds and lives.Amusingly, this also has a lot of keen depiction of standard workplace dramas, which was fun for me as a corporate drone.Once again, we have a story about a creepy mystery and a clandestine government agency, told through the very personal, introspective story of the main character. I actually didn't like Control all that much, but I could sympathize with his situation. The creep factor accelerates as you progress, and there came times where I wasn't sure if Control was just hallucinating or things were really happening. But I mean that in a good way!This did answer questions and have some juicy revelations, and of course built up even more questions, which are poised to be answered (I hope) in the final volume, [b:Acceptance 18077752 Acceptance (Southern Reach, #3) Jeff VanderMeer https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1403941598s/18077752.jpg 25384096].

I just want to be clear right off the bat - this book is very boring.When I came into this book I was anticipating something as complex and challenging as [b:Annihilation 17934530 Annihilation Jeff VanderMeer https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1403941587l/17934530.SX50.jpg 24946895] was. What I did not expect was something so deeply committed to the concept of “Kafka-esque” that there would be very little that happened outside of the bickering of colleagues floating along in a crumbling institution. There is little in the way of thrills or horror, zero interesting characters, and nothing seems to really be going anywhere.I'm giving this two stars because it took be a good damn while to notice that nothing was happening and nothing really was going to happen, and that's a feat in itself. Jeff VanderMeer is very clever and actually a very funny writer, and for a while you're riding the tongue-in-cheek quality that the writing has. When you slow down and really read it - which is what I had to force myself to do in order to not chuck the book out a window - the writing is genuinely beautiful and smart. It felt largely for naught though. If you have the patience for it, then its possible to enjoy this book if you look at it line by line. As a whole though, for me, it felt like a whole lot of nothing.

Though I quite enjoyed the first book in the Southern Reach trilogy, this second one took the plot in a much different direction, choosing to focus on the office politics of the staff of the Southern Reach, instead of examining Area-X itself. The language was still dreamy and ethereal, but I wasn't nearly as engaged as I was in the first book. I'll need to drag myself into the third and final novel, hoping it makes this previous one pay off.

I'm generally not a fan of sequels. In fact, I tend to avoid any books that pare part of a series. But this is a sequel done right. It seems that VanderMeer planned this story as a trilogy. This book builds upon the world that “Annihilation” created without repeating any plot points. Whereas “Annihilation” was an expedition into the unknown Area X, “Authority” is the story of those on the outside, the scientists and bureaucrats trying to solve the mystery from their perspective. While not as creepy as “Annihilation” (though the creepiness gets ratcheted up toward the end), this is an engaging story that tackles the same themes from a completely different perspective. Definitely worth a read if you liked “Annihilation.”

I'm enjoying this series so much. Vandermeer does a neat trick of implanting the suspicion that the books' reality might have been compromised, in one of several ways, from a very early stage in the story. Here he takes this a bit further still. Everything is unsettling. Yet the compounding of mysteries never feels like too much (think late seasons of Lost).

Hmmm... Hmm... Book two in this series is definitely a bridging book. I didn't enjoy it quite as much as Annihilation possibly because the narrator wasn't as interesting to me and the action was a lot slower paced, but I still enjoyed it. This book explores Southern Reach as it relates to Area X as well as the cast of mentally unstable people who work there. Hypnosis, misinformation, and cryptic artwork once again combine to create an unreliable narrator (and narrative) and a conspiracy that swirls deeper with every chapter. The ending is once again ambiguous, and means I really have to read the third book before I can properly sort my feelings on the series.

Still recommended for fans of Haruki Murakami, Joe Hill, Mark Danielewski, and the “New Weird” in general.

Jeff Vandermeer does it again in “Authority”, by showing us all a new perspective about the Area X and what it means, this time from the outside, Southern Reach side. The story was very nice again, just a little more sluggish than I would have expected. But it ended up in a nice cliffhanger, enough to make me want to read the next book, as to see where the mystery is going to take me.

Introspectivo. Íntimo. Interior.

Me parece una gran continuación que muestra el otro lado. Seguimos intuyendo y persiguiendo sombras. Seguimos desentrañando el misterio.

Me ha encantado el enfoque, este nuevo punto de vista.

Buen protagonista, bien trabajado.

Léelo si te gusta que no te lleven de la mano y te lo den todo mascado.

I found this book much harder to follow than the first one. It could be because I half watched the movie before I read the first book. In this one, we get a character study of Control as he starts his job as Acting-Director of Southern Reach. The writing style is full of unintelligible half questions, and dramatic poetic short paragraphs. When I managed to follow along it was an enjoyable concise storytelling method but most of the time I would drift in and out of the narrative.

Pros: interesting characters, interesting mystery

Cons: drawn out, boring at times

John Rodriguez, or Control, as he prefers to be called, is assigned as the new director of the Southern Reach project, the organization that oversees Area X. His assistant director, Grace, is openly hostile, while the remains of the science team are a helpful, if slightly unhinged bunch. Even his handler, the mysterious Voice, whom he phones reports in to daily, becomes antagonistic towards him as the days pass. Control isn't sure how he's supposed to bring the agency under control considering the opposition, especially when it becomes clear that secrets have been kept from him.

While it's not essential to read book one in order to understand the majority of this book, the biologist does play a role and some information from Area X makes more sense if you have read that book.

I have mixed feelings about this book. I enjoyed getting to know Control and seeing the inner workings of the Southern Reach. While I understood some of Grace's resistence to his being there, her continued undermining of his job started to grate on my nerves. Indeed, about 200 pages into the book I began to realize that I didn't like any of the characters and no longer cared if Control succeeded in his mission.

I really wanted to learn more about the organization and Area X, but the book's more interested in the inner working of Control and how the various revelations affect his mental state. While the mystery was interesting, so little was uncovered by the 3/4 mark and in such roundabout ways (scenes intercut with other scenes, making it hard at time to piece together what was present and what was past) that I found myself getting bored and no longer caring what was going on. Things picked up in the last third of the book, getting first fascinating, and then kind of boring again.

The book brings up a lot of new questions but doesn't answer many. I'm wary of reading the third book for fear that no answers are coming.

I imagine literature teachers would love this book. And as a former lit kid, I loved it too. I can picture me and my old classmates (a class of only 5 kids) picking this apart and having so much fun with it.

As Luen said, there's not a single wasted word in the novel. The selection of each word, the construction of the passages is absolutely brilliant. There are layers to this writing, it lends itself to interpretation and doesn't treat it's readers like idiots.

Within just a few sentences you know exactly what kind of character Control is. As the story progresses you get to feel what he's feeling. When he's losing grip the sentences start to fall apart. When he's confused the paragraphs can feel jumbled. When he's comfortable at home with his cat he wisecracks more often. It's masterful writing.

The story itself is atmospheric and interesting HOWEVER the abrupt ending threw me off. The last bit of the book was noticeably less gripping than the rest of it. I was forewarned that this book and the third should be treated as two parts of the same story so I'm looking forward to that.

Regardless, Jeff VanderMeer is very talented.

This has a ton of fantastic moments (Control yelling at the Voice on the phone!), but overall is dragged down by a flop and annoying protagonist, and a lot of time wasted rehashing things from the first book. Once it gets going, it REALLY gets going, but it's frustrating to spend so much time waiting for Control to catch up to everything we knew on page 1.