Acceptance

It's taken me a few years to get around to this one. Annihlation was, start to finish, an excellent and engaging book but Authority was a different beast altogether. Set outside of Area X entirely, it was more of a straightforward psychological thriller about bizarre events featuring some very odd characters. Acceptance successfully marries the two, weaving four POV characters into three temporally distinct narratives in order to (I think) answer the lingering questions from the first two books.

In the earliest we get to meet the lighthouse keeper and relive events in the days leading up to the formation of Area X. In the next, we find out about the Psychologist from the first book, her connection to the lighthouse keeper, how she maneuvered herself and was in turn maneuvered into her post as Director of the Southern Reach, and finally how and why she authorised, prepared and joined the 12th Expedition. And in the latest narrative branch, we follow Control and Ghost Bird as they return to Area X, discover more of the truth behind it, reunite with the original Biologist, and get a glimpse into the future of our world (or is it our world at all?)

Vandermeer succeeds in bringing all these threads together, while stopping just short of giving conclusive answers about...well, anything. My only wrinkle with the series as a whole is that there seemed to be a couple of big ideas that he dropped between books and they weren't explained away to my satisfaction. In Annihlation, a big part of what made Area X so scary was the way that it was expanding, inexorably, a little bit with each passing year. Authority retconned that by instead establishing that Area X wasn't expanding like that at all, instead periodically expanding in bursts depending on some sort of cosmic event. Then Authority ends with the replica Psychologist leading an expanding frontier of Area X toward the Southern Reach. Based on what we know from Acceptance, it would make sense that this is Area X reaching out to 'get' Lowry but if that actually happens we don't see it, leaving the replica Psychologist feeling like a loose end. Or maybe all these things were actually tied up and I just didn't follow what was happening well enough to see it? It's that kind of book.