Authority

Thirty-eight-year-old agent John Rodriguez, better known as “Control,” on a downward slide in his career, has been sent into the thirty-year-old Southern Reach facility as the new director and a “fixer” to try and get answers to Area X. Three of the women from the 12th expedition into Area X have suddenly appeared in various locations; the biologist, the anthropologist and the surveyor. The reader knows that from the original book the psychologist, the anthropologist and the surveyor were all killed in Area X and the biologist, who was going through transformation, decided to stay in Area X and travel further into its interior.

The Southern Reach has become a backwater secret facility, since in its thirty years of sending teams into Area X (many more than 12) nothing tangible has ever been learned. The staff has been reduced and the equipment in the creepy facility is aging or abandoned. The frustration, fear and losses of thirty years of fruitless efforts to understand Area X have taken their toll on the remaining staff. We learn that the missing psychologist from the last 12th expedition was the prior director of Southern Reach and, for unknown personal reasons, decided to join the 12th expedition into Area X.

As Control tries to get a better understanding of Southern Reach, the staff and Area X he always appears psychologically outmatched and stymied by the females that surround him, whether it be the uncooperative facility's assistant director; his main interest for information about Area X, the uncooperative biologist; or his domineering, but almost never present, secretive, high-ranking agent mother. And, he has to constantly check in with, and be harangued by, an enigmatic phone contact at Central (the CIA?) only known as the “Voice.”

The reader witnesses the events that take place at Southern Reach through the eyes, experiences and thoughts of Control as he attempts to figure out just what happened and is happening at the Southern Reach facility and begins to wonder if he, like the members of Area X expeditions, is just another pawn for Central in something larger.