Annihilation

Annihilation is a 2014 novel by Jeff VanderMeer and the first book of the Southern Reach series. It follows a team of four women sent into a government-managed, uninhabited region called Area X to survey the land and its ecosystem. They are the twelfth expedition, and the previous ones ended in disappearances, suicides, aggressive cancers and mental trauma.

The novel won the 2014 Nebula Award for Best Novel and the 2014 Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novel, and a film loosely based on it was released by Paramount Pictures in 2018. A significant part of the book's method is that the four specialists do not know each other's names, having been given only their professional roles, and the secrets they keep from one another become as important as what they find.

VanderMeer's inspiration came from a fourteen-mile hike through the St. Marks National Wildlife Refuge in Florida, and the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster was also a source, which explains the book's use of a landscape that has been altered rather than simply ruined. It is usually classified as weird fiction rather than conventional science fiction.