Imagine, if you will, that one day our world began to be radically transformed by creatures with totally alien minds. Further, imagine that they could alter reality in ways we couldn’t explain or even fully understand, and could change the fabric of nature in ways that were ruinous to us. We couldn’t hope to understand their goals: they would exist inside a conception of reality vastly different from our own. All we could do is hunker down, and prepare to try and survive the destruction that would surely follow.

For all other animals on Earth, this scenario is playing out right now. Their realities frequently alter for reasons that are utterly outside their understanding of the world, because these reasons are ones you would need to be a human being to understand. For example, it’s hard to see how a great crested newt could ever know what Brexit is, even though it may have a great impact upon her: the concept rests on top of a mountain of other concepts that only humans have, and which an amphibian could never stand any chance of unravelling.

It’s worth thinking about what this implies. The human world is more alien to a newt than the alien worlds of fiction tend to be to us humans: this maybe has to be true, because the stories any creature creates can only contain concepts and ideas she is capable of conceiving of. But if that’s true, it suggests our experience of real alien minds might be incomprehensible to us, involving our world changing in ways which we simply wouldn’t have the capacity to understand. This is the sort of alien encounter that Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation is about.

The premise of Annihilation is more or less this: some time in the past, a great chunk of America started to change in indefinable ways. This area of land — now referred to as “Area X” — has been evacuated, and now appears to be at once reclaimed by nature and remade by alien artifice, with the natural world within its border being wrong in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. Periodically, an organisation called the Southern Reach sends expeditions of people into Area X to try and chronicle the world within its borders — but the survivors of these expeditions always come back changed, riddled with cancer and devoid of personality.

The experiences of the all-female expedition we follow in Annihilation are chronicled by a character referred to only as “the biologist”, who seemed to me a convincing depiction of someone with a passion for ecology. The biologist is intimately aware of the life cycles of plants and animals in their natural environments and how these are disrupted by human activity — and through her eyes, we see how these are disrupted in alien ways, too. The biologist’s knowledge makes it easier for us to make the connection between the changes we bring upon the world and the changes brought about by aliens — both are presented as profound and incomprehensible from the point of view of an undisturbed ecosystem.

Annihilation is the first book in a trilogy, and seems to have always been conceived of as such. This isn’t a case of a novel whose popularity caused an entire series to emerge: all three books of what’s called The Southern Reach Trilogy seem to have been written alongside each other and released relatively close together. This is quite strange to me, as I feel Annihilation is more powerful when read as a standalone work. It sets out its stall in such a clearly defined way — here is a landscape being altered in an incomprehensible way, here is why the nature of that incomprehensibility matters — that it felt to me that there wasn’t much else for the next two books in the series to do. It would undermine the themes of Annihilation more than a little if its sequels explained everything that happened in it, so this for the most part doesn’t happen — instead, for the most part they restate the inhuman nature of the events in the first book with different characters and in new narrative styles. They’re not badly written, but they are a bit inconsequential, and it’s weird to see them tagging along after a work of as much consequence as Annihilation. I guess you could argue that it’s appropriate that a story about incomprehensible things happening to reality itself exists in an incomprehensible form — but I’d be lying if I thought that this was intentional in any way.

However, I have come across works by other authors that expand on Annihilation’s themes. I read VanderMeer’s work at around the same time as I read another science fiction book about aliens who were truly alien — Adam Roberts’ The Thing Itself. Roberts — himself a fan of Annihilation — draws on Kant’s idea that space and time are constructs of the human mind to imagine an alien race who exists independently of both those concepts. It’s a fairly mind-blowing idea, but it occurred to me upon finishing the book that we might live among creatures as alien as this anyway — we just tend to refer to them as “animals”. Frans de Waal’s recent work Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? argues that animals may often display cognitive abilities that go unobserved by scientists simply because those abilities are too far beyond our reference frame for humans to meaningfully analyse. It’s not a massive leap from this view to one that argues that some animals may see the world in radically different ways to ourselves, perhaps to the extent that concepts as fundamental as space and time are not experienced in analogous ways. In other words, our experiences of the world may be a woefully tiny subset of all animal experiences of the world, and we may simply be unable to understand the extent of that incompleteness.

In its way, science fiction that invites this view is antipathetic to scientism, the view that science can ever provide a complete description of the universe that we live in. After all, no amount of experimentation could ever reveal a fact that was as far outside your own frame of reference as Brexit is to that of a great crested newt. In this sense it differs quite strikingly from a certain other strand of science fiction, where every person of every species encountered views the world in a way that seems suspiciously similar to the way the author does. In a completely unfair way, I think it’s possible to see science fiction that looks to illustrate a perfect society or describe what an “advanced” alien species would look like as hewing to the spirit of the physical sciences as popularly understood rather than the ecological ones. By this I mean that theoretical physics is often characterised as a quest to unravel the fundamental forces that underpin everything, with the knowledge of which often held in almost religious reverence. In a similar light, some science fiction can be read as looking for a single and final answer to questions that probably don’t really have them: this society is structured in the one True and Correct way, this alien race is more advanced than us because they are further down the sole possible path of Inevitable Technological Progress. As Annihilation shows us, science fiction reflective of the science of ecology might take a rather different view. If physics could be defined as a quest to find fundamental truths that underlie everything, ecology could be contrasted as a discipline where it’s rapidly apparent how little we actually know. It’s about the limits not just of our minds, but of the fiction we create with those minds, and serves as a reminder of how much larger the universe could be than our own imaginations. I’m fond of the GK Chesterton quote that goes:

A turkey is more occult and awful than all the angels and archangels. Insofar as God has partly revealed to us an angelic world, he has partly told us what an angel means. But God has never told us what a turkey means. And if you go and stare at a live turkey for an hour or two, you will find by the end of it that the enigma has rather increased than diminished.

Stephen Hawking once said that the ultimate triumph of human reason would be to know the mind of God. I would side with VanderMeer that reason’s greater triumph is to know we will never understand the mind of a turkey — and to know, as far as is possible, what that says about the universe where we both live.