Francesca Forrest’s Reviews > Annihilation > Status Update

<spoiler>It creates out of our ecosystem a new world, whose processes and aims are utterly alien--one that works through supreme acts of mirroring, and by remaining hidden in so many other ways...Imagine these expeditions, and then recognized that they all still exist in Area X in some form, even the ones that came back ... layered over one another, communicating in whatever way is left to them.</spoiler>

"There were thousands of 'dead' spaces like the lot I had observed, thousands of transitional environments that no one saw... Anything could inhabit them fora time without anyone noticing. We had come to think of the border as this monolithic invisible wall, but if members of the eleventh expedition had been able to return without our noticing, couldn't other things have already gotten through?"

"In that moat vast sea creatures swam, oblivious to me watching them; I could fee the absence of their regard like a kind of terrible bereavement."

The husband's dreams:
"Some nights he swam through the marsh canals. Others, he became a tree or a drop of water. Everything he experienced refreshed him.Everything he experienced made him want to go to Area X."

Her, musing on this memory "I still blamed him fiercely for his decision...and yet even so, somewhere in the heart of me I had begun to believe there was no place I would rather be than Area X"

"You were a flame," she said, and I had a brief vision of my brightness, made manifest. "You were a flame, scorching my gaze. A flame drifting across the salt flats, though the ruined village. A slow-burning flame, a will-o'-the-wisp." --the psychologist to the biologist-narrator. She then proceeds to call the narrator "Little Flame." Narrator's husband called her "Ghost Bird." Interesting.

"That's how the madness of the world tries to colonize you: from the outside in, forcing you to live in its reality."

--That's the second time she's thought in terms of being colonized.

"Words had been written on these walls, but nothing like the words in the Tower ... Confessions, too, which I won't document here but that had the sincerity and weight of having been written immediately before, or during, moments when the individuals must have thought death was upon them. So many needing so much to communicate what amounted to so little."

--I'm sensing a communication theme, for sure.

Musing on the narrator's fascination with the words in the tower "An ... organism ... was writing living words along the interior walls of the tower ... What was the purpose of the physical 'recitation' of the words? Did the actual words mater, or would any words do?"

--She doesn't think at all the formation of the words (at least as she perceives them), in English, in the Roman alphabet. To me that would be key...