====== Authority ======

===== Notes =====

===== Thoughts =====
I went into this book with an even mixture of anticipation and hesitation. //Annihilation// was intensely personal and deeply abstract. How do you follow that up? 

I think VanderMeer rose to that challenge. The story jumps into the aftermath of the first book, this time following the perspective of the Southern Reach's new acting director. Jack "Control" Rodriguez is a pedigreed (but disgraced) spy who arrives to find the agency crumbling. Over the past thirty years, it has consumed untold resources and staff with next to nothing to show for it. Control's efforts to assume his role in the Southern Reach are repeatedly hampered by the assistant director, Grace, who insists that the former director (the psychologist from //Annihilation//) will one day return from Area X alive and intact. It's unlikely, but not as unlikely as one might expect.

The former director may have died in the expedition, but so did the anthropologist and the surveyor --- and those two have since reappeared outside of Area X, as has the biologist. All three are in Southern Reach custody for "debriefing", and none has been able to provide satisfactory answers about Area X or their escape. Control is immediately drawn to the biologist, whom he suspects remembers more than she lets on. 

Over the course of the book, we gain more details about previous expeditions and the bureaucracy behind it all. Control reports daily to a faceless figure known only as "the Voice" from within the opaque Central agency. He begins to suspect that the Voice represents not Central itself, but rather a faction within it. 

===== Related reading =====
  * [[.:Annihilation]], the first book in the series
  * [[.:Acceptance]], the third and final book in the series

{{tag>fiction}}