I den här uppsatsen undersöker jag hur platserna Kurouzu-cho från Junji Itos Uzumaki och Område X från Jeff VanderMeers Annihilation framställs ur ett ekokritiskt perspektiv. Detta genom att titta på växtligheten och naturfenomen, attityder kring platserna, hus och byggnader, samt hur platserna förhåller sig till begreppet agens. Bland annat används Timothy Mortons bok Ecology without Nature och Bruno Latours artikel Agency at the Time of the Anthropocene. Slutligen sammanfattas och diskuteras detta. Jag kommer fram till att platserna nästan fungerar som karaktärer.

Annihilation is the first novel in the trilogy named “The Southern Reach,” a ScienceFiction/Horror series of books written by Jeff VanderMeer. Annihilation focuses on a team of scientists on an expedition into an area where the very nature has been altered in mysterious ways. The scientists’ goal is to study this area to come to an understanding of what is happening, but like the eleven previous expeditions, they fail.   With the aid of narratology, I will argue that Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation is an unreliable narrative. To prove that, I will analyse and discuss specific passage’s unreliable narration used in the novel, as well as incorporating themes from the novel that directly correlate with the unreliability of the novel’s narrative.  Annihilation is filled with ambiguous language and events that are on almost every  level unexplainable using scientific methods. The way that the novel is written makes the narrator, the biologist, unreliable in her narration of the events that take place around her. She is tormented by both her past and by the beings that inhabit Area X, such as the Crawler. The results of this study exemplify the ambiguity of VanderMeer’s writing and how he uses this ambiguous language to further thrust the narrative into a void of chaotic unreliability. There is nothing in the novel that can be trusted as fact in the context of the world in which the characters inhabit, down to the characters own thoughts and memories. The presented themes of Annihilation are in direct correlation with the unreliability of the narrative and show how deep VanderMeer went into constructing the most unreliable narrative possible.

This paper examines the relationship between the sublime and the Anthropocene, the period in earth’s geological history characterized by human impact upon the planet. As the genre of Anthropocene fiction, or climate fiction, has emerged in recent years, difficulties in defining the new genre as well as identifying useful tropes and forms within cli-fi novels has given rise to several proposed methods of understanding the Anthropocene. This essay examines the problems posed within Anthropocene fiction as well as the history of the concept of the sublime before examining Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation to find evidence of the relevance of the sublime within the Anthropocene.

Jeff Vandermeer’s Southern Reach series has been a talking point for many ecocritical papers exploring themes of Anthropocene, uncanny, and hyperobjects. Despite the plethora of themes being investigated concerning climate change in Southern Reach, an important aspect, the climate change bureaucracy of the Southern Reach agency, is glossed over. This agency is responsible for containing Area X as well as understanding it. By primarily looking at Max Weber’s notions of bureaucracy and Jale Tosun’s and Michael Howelett’s discussion on public bureaucracy facing climate change, this thesis explores why the bureaucratic system of the Southern Reach fails to deal with climate change and, more importantly, claims that a rational bureaucratic administrative system is not equipped to deal with environmental changes of Area X because it defies the epistemological capacity of rational bureaucracy.