If you loved Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy as much as I did, here’s some similar-in-spirit media that I’ve come across over the last few years. This rec list includes novels, short stories, nonfiction books and articles, a few films, and multimedia projects, with heavy emphasis on dark ecology, novel ecosystems, and New Weird literature. I’ve included PDFs where I’ve been able to find them online and indicated them with an asterisk below.
Roadside Picnic*, by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. A classic of Soviet science fiction, eerily prescient pre-Chernobyl, and a direct inspiration for Area X.
Borne, by Jeff VanderMeer. Set in a different world than the Southern Reach trilogy, this book nonetheless contains shapeshifters, bizarre biotech, and landscapes that aren’t at all what they seem. (Dark Tower fans will get a kick out of this one.)
Radiance, by Catherynne M. Valente. An alternate universe where Old Hollywood colonizes the solar system, wherein a young filmmaker sets out to determine what caused reality to go terribly wrong on Venus and goes missing herself.
Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong*, from Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried. A war story about how to tell a war story and a nice midwestern girl turning into something else entirely in Vietnam.
The Long Rain*, by Ray Bradbury. Another short story about a group of people stranded in an alien jungle, this time on another world.
The New Weird, an anthology edited by Jeff and Ann VanderMeer.
The World Without Us, by Alan Weisman. If all of humanity disappeared overnight, how would the rest of the planet respond, recover, or be permanently marked?
Ecology Without Nature, by Timothy Morton. Heavy-duty ecological philosophy on how and why there’s no such thing as a “pristine wilderness” and how we can rethink our relationships with what’s left of the natural world in the Anthropocene – whatever that means.
The Mushroom at the End of the World, by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing. An exploration of the ecological and human networks bound by the matsutake mushroom across continents and in the face of ecological destruction.
Weird Ecology: On The Southern Reach Trilogy, by David Tompkins. The article that first introduced me to Timothy Morton’s writing on hyperobjects and dark ecology, connecting it to The Southern Reach Trilogy, Lovecraft, and other New Weird themes.
Dark Ecology, by Paul Kingsnorth. An essay questioning what even counts as “nature” in the Anthropocene, how it is valued, and how to begin to get our heads around it in the first place.
The Babushkas of Chernobyl (2015). A documentary about the community of elderly women who continue to live within the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, focusing on the connections between landscapes, hazards, and where people call home.
Stalker (1979), a film by Andrei Tarkovsky. Based on Roadside Picnic – beautiful and very atmospheric.
Mushishi. A manga and anime series about a sort of supernatural-naturalist named Ginko who travels the Japanese countryside to study mushi, primitive magical lifeforms that often cause problems when they interact with human communities.
Princess Mononoke (1999). A classic Miyazaki film about human-environmental conflict and ecological devastation brought on by industrial progress.
The Dark Ecology Project. A multi-year experimental art and writing project that brings researchers and artists to the edge of the Arctic Circle to study a zone along the Russian-Finnish border split between heavy industry and pristine wilderness. Very much worth checking out the creative works that have been produced through these trips.
14 Heart-Pounding Books Like Jeff VanderMeer’s “Annihilation”
A dark ecology literature primer from tumblr user @fatehbaz
A crowdsourced rec list for other media reminiscent of The Southern Reach Trilogy (contains many other books I haven’t read yet!)
Enjoy, and try not to breathe in any glowing spores in the meantime.
amandla
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blakekathryn
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