































Multispecies Encounters

Surrendering the Self: The Posthuman 
World in Vandermeer’s Annihilation

Sam Allen

• •  • •

 In his novel Annihilation, 
author Jeff Vandermeer provides 

a science-fiction narrative on nature as 
an unstoppable and uncontrollable envi-
ronment where plants, animals, humans, 
and the land exist as a collective and 
connected entity of interactions. The 
novel utilizes Lovecraftian horror ele-
ments of an uncontrollable nature, hu-
man contamination, and an unknowable 
future controlled by nonhuman forces 
to portray both a multispecies environ-
ment and the posthuman future. Read 
through a multispecies lens and framed 
by Donna Haraway’s Staying with the 
Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulu-
cene, this essay is an analysis of how 
Annihilation’s setting—Area X—neces-
sitates the removal of human-centered 
processes and the human concept of 
individualism for favor of a flourishing 
multispecies environment. Its analysis 

exemplifies the genre of science fiction-
as a method to expand the boundaries 
of our perceived human-centered world. 
The narrative and rhetorical structures 
utilized by Vandermeer in his represen-
tation of real-world environments and 
natural processes as uncanny horrors and 
an off-center reality accurately represent 
the unknown future beyond the human 
species.

©2024  Allen. The Digital Literature Review, 11, 100-114. doi: 
10.33043/b8b79k4xz. Shared with CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 Liscense.



101

 In the science fiction and weird horror foundation built by American 
fiction writer H.P. Lovecraft, stories are characterized by cosmic, 

unseen, and unnameable horrors. His fictional Cthulhu mythos is a repre-
sentation of the world and the future beyond the human species, and por-
trays human-created laws and social orders as meaning little in the grand 
scope of an indifferent universe. Human characters often experience physi-
ological torment and contamination in response to interactions with an un-
explainable environment and complex creatures (Kneale). In Staying with 
the Trouble, multispecies scholar Donna Haraway names our current eco-
logical period the Chthulucene in opposition to the Anthropocene, and in 
reference to Lovecraft, emphasizing that the interactions, connections, and 
evolutions between living and nonliving beings extend beyond humans, 
and will continue after our extinction. Jeff Vandermeer calls to Lovecraf-
tian science-fiction elements of weird horror and psychological manipu-
lations in his novel Annihilation, but utilizes them to represent Haraway’s 
Chthulucene in his biologically uncanny setting in Area X. Vandermeer 
illustrates a setting where no one species is an individual, but instead an 
intermingling amalgamation of plants, animals, and other-worldly crea-
tures—in so doing, arguing for a multispecies perspective in studying liv-
ing and nonliving relationships and considering the posthuman Earth. The 
Lovecraftian horror and science fiction genre expectations of exploring 
the mysteries of the unknown allow Vandermeer to push the boundaries of 
natural realities like coastal environments, the human microbial system, 
death and decomposition, and the posthuman world to explore the natural 
world’s true power over humankind. Through Annihilation, Vandermeer 
offers up the science fiction genre as an adequate portrayal of multispecies 
theory, and specifically how the posthuman Earth requires the removal of 
human-centered belief systems and actions to preserve the natural environ-
ment and its processes. 
 H.P Lovecraft (1890-1937) was an American horror fiction writer 
who created a literary mythos that cemented cosmic horror as an avenue 
of storytelling far beyond his lifetime—the avenue now labeled Lovecraf-

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tian. In his fiction, the nonhuman creatures and spirits from the incompre-
hensible beyond were Lovecraft’s sources of horror and fear, belonging to 
“spheres of existence whereof we know nothing and wherein we have no 
part” (Lovecraft, “Supernatural Horror”) and initiating the most visceral 
feeling of fear that humans encounter: fear of the unknown. His descrip-
tions of the unknown tread the line between clarity and confusion, so his 
texts become “explorations of the limits of language and representation” 
(Kneale 110). An example being his description of the monster Cthulhu 
representing a “vaguely anthropoid outline” with an “octopus-like head” 
(148) and originating from some society “frightfully suggestive of old and 
unhallowed cycles of life in which our world and our conceptions have 
no part” (149). Lovecraftian horror became a genre where human actions 
are inconsequential in the grand scheme of the cosmos, represented by the 
inability of human society to understand its grandeur, and the metamor-
phosis of human social constructs (Lovecraft et al., “Letters” 8). Upon 
their awareness and interaction with cosmic beings, human characters ex-
perience physical and psychological transformations and hauntings. After 
researching the cult of Cthulhu, narrator Francie Thurston in Lovecraft’s 
“The Call of Cthulhu” says:

With it shall go this record of mine—this test of my own sanity, 
wherein is pieced together that which I hope may never be pieced 
together again. I have looked upon all the universe has to hold of hor-
ror, and even the skies of spring and the flowers of summer must ever 
afterward be poison to me. But I do not think my life will be long. 
As my uncle went, as poor Johansen went, so I shall go. I know too 
much, and the cult still lives. (Lovecraft, The Call 169)

In his tales, Lovecraft willfully leaves out placid resolutions where hu-
mans are better off than they began and instead leaves them to accept the 
nature of their devolving condition. This decision emphasizes two key 
elements of Lovecraftian horror that persist in Vandermeer’s novel Annihi-
lation: human ideas, investigation, and anatomical or physiological abil-
ities are no match for whatever exists ‘beyond’ their society; and cosmic 

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environments and beings will continue to exist beyond humanity’s societal 
lifespan. 
 Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer is a novel that utilizes Lovecraftian 
horror elements to describe a world indifferent to human processes, but 
differs from Lovecraft in its multispecies application. Where Lovecraft’s 
characters unwillingly forgo their autonomy to be plagued with torture by 
cosmic horrors, Vandermeer’s narrator forgoes her autonomy willingly to 
be intertwined in an environment where an ever-evolving nature wins out, 
and humans are clearly represented as one evolutionary step into a post-
human world. The novel follows a group of four women: a biologist, a 
psychologist, a surveyor, and an anthropologist as they explore Area X on 
the twelfth expedition put on by an obscure governmental agency referred 
to as The Southern Reach. Surrounded by a slowly growing and indestruc-
tible border, Area X is an environment reclaimed by nature and that is 
evolving into a diverse and biologically abnormal ecosystem. Upon arriv-
al, the team finds an opening in the ground with descending stone stairs, 
and along the wall are cursive words with the make-up of, according to 
the biologist, “rich green fernlike moss…a type of fungi or other eukary-
otic organism” (Vandermeer 24). The vines are composed of an ecosystem 
of filaments and golden nodules, including one that sprays the biologist 
with gold spores and initiates her contamination (25). This contamina-
tion is dubbed a “brightness” (83) and produces psychological and phys-
ical changes within the biologist, transitioning her from an observer and 
mapper of Area X into an active component of it. The novel ends with the 
biologist venturing out into the sea of Area X rather than traveling back 
home through the border in search of her husband, who was on the previ-
ous expedition. 
 Reviewer Sam Gormley names Jeff Vandermeer’s writing as “ brim-
ming with eerily intelligent life forms overspilling the boundaries between 
natural and unnatural, organic and artificial, human and nonhuman” (111) 
and his Southern Reach Trilogy as “showing up the limitations of human 
intelligence” (114). This essay builds upon previous scholarship on Anni-

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hilation’s place in multispecies theory and ethics, such as Lisa Dowdall’s 
chapter “Figures” and its description of Annihilation as reimagining inter-
actions between plants and humans by exposing what lies beneath nature 
(151-152), as well as Finola Prendergast’s “Revisiting Nonhuman Ethics 
in Jeff Vandermeer’s Annihilation” and its explanation of how science 
fiction represents reality slantwise in order to express an ethical way of 
managing interactions between nonhumans and humans (344). This essay 
explores three elements of Annihilation: the ongoing and indescribable 
ecosystem Area X, the biologist and other human characters, and the inter-
connectedness and transformation of humans into the environment. Each 
element serves as an example of the utilization of Lovecraftian horror 
genre expectations to describe how living in a multispecies world—as de-
fined by Donna Haraway in Staying with the Trouble as the Chthulucene—
requires an acknowledgement of that which is unknown and an absolving 
of human constructions and identities as absolute. 
 Multispecies theory and studies involve an inclusive look at the 
world, one that acknowledges all of its interactions and entanglements be-
tween living and nonliving beings. Multispecies scholar Donna Haraway 
defines the world in When Species Meet as a “knot of species coshaping 
one another in layers of reciprocating complexity all the way down” (42) 
from before, during, and beyond their existence. Analyzing Annihilation 
as a science-fiction avenue of multispecies scholarship opens up its value 
beyond casual readership into a guidebook for how to acknowledge the 
web of interspecies interaction in the present day, but more specifically the 
posthuman world. Haraway defines the Chthulucene as the trash-collector 
of the Anthropocene, and a name for “an elsewhere and elsewhen that was, 
still is, and might yet be” (Staying with, 31). The setting Area X in Anni-
hilation represents a potential Chthulucene, and thus a potential posthu-
man world. Although Vandermeer calls to Lovecraftian horror themes of 
inconsequential humans and contamination, he differentiates himself from 
the genre’s negative aspects and transforms those themes into ones that 
describe Haraway’s Chthulucene. Vandermeer uses science-fiction tropes 

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to extend beyond the portrayal of humans as a part in a web of living and 
nonliving beings in the present, instead hypothesizing about “the pattern-
ing of possible worlds and possible times, material semiotic worlds, gone, 
here, and yet to come” (Haraway 31). The Chthulucene is one that we, the 
collective Homo sapiens, will not see, and thus cannot study, understand, 
and most horrifyingly, control. In narrating through the biologist who 
understands the limits of human capabilities, and thus becomes one with 
the natural environment through what van Dooren defines as “passion-
ate immersion” (6), Vandermeer explores one possibility of the inevitable 
evolution of the natural world past our current geological age, and past the 
human species. 
 Readers of Annihilation traverse Area X alongside the biologist 
narrator as she attempts to make sense and meaning out of an ecological-
ly diverse, extensive, and at times unexplainable environment. Area X 
is located in a coastal, or transitional environment—a zone where ocean 
water meets the land, characterized by sand, mud, marsh, and swamp ter-
rains. Upon arrival, the biologist describes Area X as having a dense pine 
forest eventually giving way to a swamp with swaying reeds and “wind-
gnarled trees” (3), and before the coast and the ocean run rivers of natural 
freshwater canals. The purpose of representing Area X as a coastal envi-
ronment lies in the real-life qualities of coastal flora and fauna—namely 
their natural biodiversity and ability to adapt in an environment in constant 
motion. Vandermeer utilizes the differences in terrain to introduce com-
plex interactions between atypical organisms, such as marine animals that 
adapt to freshwater and coexist in environments with otter and deer (12), 
and the underground tower with flesh-like walls that live and breathe, its 
depths “revealing themselves in a kind of ongoing horror show of such 
beauty and biodiversity” (43). Area X pushes the limits of a real-life coast-
al environment by representing its ecology slightly off-kilter, its wildlife, 
structures, and creatures increasingly perplexing and scientifically uncan-
ny to the biologist. For example, she encounters a pair of otters that stare 
at her for over a minute, producing “a strange sensation that they could see 

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[her] watching them…that things were not quite what they seemed” (30). 
In his descriptions of Area X, Vandermeer connects to the central source of 
Lovecraftian horror by shining a light on an unknown realm, making the 
literary “endeavor to visualize and verbalize the unseen and unsayable” 
(Jackson 23). Vandermeer is setting the scene of the posthuman world as 
one humans would undoubtedly recognize by featuring similar ecological 
components, but is insinuating that this environment has changed certain 
processes through evolution. 
 In the biologist’s endless curiosity, rhetorical questioning, and ac-
knowledgement of her inability to describe Area X and its ecological 
processes, Vandermeer is emphasizing the power of what we do not ful-
ly understand, and thus cannot fully control. In the underground tower, a 
being the biologist names the Crawler appears to be writing organic and 
plant-like words on the wall, themselves a perplexing amalgamation of 
indecipherable phrases. The biologist acknowledges her own inability to 
conceptualize the tower, claiming:

I felt that I had abdicated my responsibility to that point, which was 
to consider those elements found inside of the tower as part of a vast 
biological entity that might or might not be terrestrial. But contem-
plating the sheer enormity of that idea on a macro level would have 
broken my mood like an avalanche crashing into my body. So…what 
did I know? (93)

The words on the wall themselves represent both the inability to adequate-
ly represent the posthuman ‘“beyond” in words and how Area X evolved 
to include human words and languages, but leaves them vague and in-
comprehensible. Vandermeer is arguing that the posthuman world will 
inevitably hold remnants of the human species as we currently understand 
it, but those remnants will not be focused on the benefit of human society 
or its once-powerful species, hence why neither the biologist nor explor-
er’s from past expeditions made any progress on the words’ meaning or 
purpose. When the biologist finally reaches the Crawler near the bottom 
of the tower, she is perplexed by the appearance, or non-appearance, of 

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the being: “the Crawler kept changing at a lightning pace, as if to mock 
my ability to comprehend it” (176). Vandermeer recognizes what scholar 
James Kneale calls “the problem of witnessing” in Lovecraftian horror, 
where the writer must include enough hints about a being’s complexity to 
make it horrific without explaining the fear away (112). Where Lovecraft’s 
characters experience negative physical and psychological repercussions 
of coming too close to the unknown, or the cosmic, Vandermeer’s biol-
ogist is overtaken with an appreciation for Area X’s complexity and an 
acceptance that she may never understand it. Her experience engaging 
with the environment is enough, as she claims “[o]bserving all of this has 
quelled the last ashes of the burning compulsion I had to know everything” 
(195). Through Vandermeer’s description of Area X as an uncanny ver-
sion of a coastal environment and creating a narrator who appreciates its 
complex beauty, readers’ interpretation of an ecosystem is reframed into a 
multispecies perspective for the purpose of appreciating a world one might 
not fully understand, and might not be the central figure of. 
 Like Lovecraft’s humans, Vandermeer’s human characters traverse 
through an unknown environment and are made aware of their insignif-
icance in relation to it—the contrast being Lovecraft’s sole ending for 
humans to be in death or endless torment, where Vandermeer only results 
to torment if the characters refuse to adapt to nature’s will. Vandermeer’s 
depiction of humans in Annihilation serves his purpose of both acknowl-
edging Lovecraftian genre expectations of their insignificance, but also 
arguing that humans are tangled in Chthulucene’s web of beings and must 
adapt to an uncontrollable nature. The biologist becomes the perfect model 
for this adaptation by nature of her general distaste for human connection 
in favor of nature and of her acceptance into it via Area X. At her core, 
the biologist craves solitude and assimilation with the nature she studies, 
often expressing this nature in opposition with her confident and outgoing 
husband. “Observation always meant more to me than interaction,” she 
claims, even comparing an orgasm to the “sudden realization of the inter-
connectivity of living things” (Vandermeer 110). In the biologist, Vander-

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meer exalts a worldview that understands humans’ incapabilities while not 
leaning entirely anti-human in his narrative. The biologist criticizes her 
husband’s outgoing nature directly, claiming he “wanted to stand out…
he had been wrong for the eleventh expedition because of this quality” 
(110), but Vandermeer also uses subtler ways to critique exclusively hu-
man-to-human interaction by removing any personal names and instead 
referring to the human characters by their job titles (psychologist, biol-
ogist, surveyor, anthropologist), and bringing harm to those in the novel 
that solely adhere to human methods of communication, technology, or 
both. The anthropologist is killed by the Crawler in the tower, the psy-
chologist jumps from the lighthouse platform for fear of the biologist and 
her physical transformation resulting from her immersion into Area X, 
and the surveyor is shot by the biologist in self-defense. Their deaths are 
results of not just their human-centered professions, but also their inabil-
ity to passively coexist with Area X. Their end goals for the expedition 
are ultimately self-interest or at least an increase in their knowledge of 
the environment for the benefit of a governmental agency—contrasting 
to the biologist’s belief: “[y]ou had to fade into the landscape…you had 
to pretend it wasn’t there for a long as possible. To acknowledge it, to try 
to name it, might be a way of letting it in” (116). The nature of Area X 
as the Chthulucene requires a sort of giving up on the self, a shedding of 
human-centered belief systems and ways of studying or understanding the 
world for the purpose of nature’s self and system of being. Area X makes 
this system inherent, so no human can control or access its patterns except 
for the biologist, who experiences a transformation physically and psy-
chologically that separates her from her human self. This separation from 
the self is not a complete separation from the human as a being, because 
humans do play an important role in multispecies interaction and study. 
Haraway herself discredits the belief of Homo sapiens as entirely purpose-
less in the Chthulucene, as “[d]iverse humans are necessary in every fiber 
of the tissues of the urgently needed Chthulucene story. The chief actors 
are not restricted to the too-big players in the too-big stories of Capitalism 

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and the Anthropos” (Staying with, 55). Interpreting the title of Annihilation 
as explaining the novel’s depiction of destroying humans is inaccurate, it 
instead is explaining the destruction of human-centered communication, 
interaction, and the belief of humans as above all others, or at least above 
nature. The biologist retains her natural passion, her body, her conscious-
ness, but forgoes an element of her human autonomy and social orders in 
favor of Area X. Her contamination and subsequent transformation repre-
sent a disconnect from an Anthropocentric worldview in favor of a multi-
species one. 
 The final argument for Vandermeer’s Chthulucene and its founda-
tion on and positive extension beyond Lovecraft is the depiction of human 
characters’ integration into Area X. As the biologist is transformed psycho-
logically and physically, and human characters are enfolded in the natu-
ral environment during and after their deaths, Vandermeer is representing 
the complexity of the human self and its validity in the scope of Area X’s 
Chthulucene, connecting to scholarship regarding the microbiome and 
its power over human behavior. As it relates to a posthuman world, Van-
dermeer is also depicting the reality of humans as one evolutionary step 
between our current geologic age and whichever one might come after. In 
Lovecraft’s horror, human contamination often transfigures into a haunt-
ing and represents his support of eugenics. In “Arthur Jermyn” and “The 
Shadow over Innsmouth”, scholar Mitch Frye claims that Lovecraft’s 
miscegenation and the comingling of humans and monsters in his fiction 
often results in social denigration, suicide, and torment (248). While Van-
dermeer depicts the genre expectation of contamination and transforming 
human characters as a result of interaction with unknown elements of na-
ture and the cosmic beyond, his analogy is concerned with the assimilation 
of the human species in the webs of the Chthulucene, or humans playing 
neutral in interactions with plants and animals, or more specifically the hu-
man microbiome. After her infection from the tower’s spores, the biologist 
begins perceiving elements of Area X and her own self differently, rep-
resenting the ineffective human in relation to a nature that holds control. 

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First, the psychologist’s hypnosis strategies fail to work on her, and she 
begins to see the tower as pulsating, living and breathing flesh, insinuating 
her transition from a human on a government-funded expedition to a part, 
a being, of Area X. She describes the general environment differently as 
well, claiming “[t]he wind was like something alive; it entered every pore 
of me…[e]ven the darkness seemed more alive to me, surrounding me like 
something physical” (Vandermeer 74-75), but never in her descriptions 
does she expound self-doubt or fear, instead her transition is neutral. In 
the first sentence of the chapter “Integration”, Vandermeer writes, “In the 
morning, I woke with my senses heightened, so that even the rough brown 
bark of the pines or the ordinary lunding swoop of a woodpecker came to 
me as a kind of minor revelation” (37). The biologist’s brightness, as she 
dubs it, gives her a certain power in Area X, specifically over the psy-
chologist’s actions and the Crawler—which is itself a former human fully 
absolved of all autonomy in writing the words on the wall. The psycholo-
gist describes her as “‘a flame…floating and floating, like nothing human 
but something free and floating’” (125), and claims her arm did not allow 
her to pull the trigger and attempt to shoot her. Here, Vandermeer is detail-
ing the change that occurs when we examine ourselves as just one piece in 
Haraway’s “muddle” of multispecies interaction (Staying with, 56). One 
‘real-life’ example lies in the human microbiome, how by acknowledg-
ing the livelihood of the trillions of bacteria within the human body and 
how their purpose and activity exists on a separate plane than the body 
they occupy expands the collective understanding of consciousness and 
self-control. Bacterial infections like syphilis and Lyme disease cause sen-
sory, psychiatric, and cognitive issues, sometimes continuing after exten-
sive antibacterial treatment, so the true make-up of the human self comes 
into question when bacteria in the human body impacts consciousness and 
self-making (Schuller). In giving up her human self, she becomes a gear in 
Area X that works to progress its processes, a reflection of reordering hu-
mans in the Chthulucene. As Haraway says, “human beings are with and 
of the earth, and the biotic and abiotic powers of this earth are the main 

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story” (Staying with, 55). The Crawler is eventually confirmed as the end 
result of a full-human-to-Area-X-cog transformation in the third novel of 
Vandermeer’s Southern Reach series, Acceptance, and his original form is 
hinted at when the biologist finds him at the end of the tunnel in Annihila-
tion. She describes his face as featuring “the endurance of unending pain 
and sorrow, yes, but shining through as well a kind of grim satisfaction 
and ecstasy” (186), ultimately claiming that he “existed in a place none of 
us could comprehend” (187). It is undeniable that the Crawler is no longer 
human nor participates in human biological processes, but in Area X, he 
still holds elements of his human life physically and physiologically by 
retaining human expression and writing words in English. Neither the bi-
ologist nor the reader sees what the Crawler’s purpose for Area X is, so the 
resolution is that it (or he) is ultimately incomprehensible until the human 
self is surrendered. Beyond the biologist, Vandermeer portrays Area X’s 
reordering process in the deaths of other human characters. 
 Not all human characters in Annihilation become contaminated, and 
a stark difference appears between the fate of the anthropologist, psychol-
ogist, surveyor, and the biologist because of the formers’ refusal to adapt 
to the environment. As an analogy for the human species as a singular 
and finite evolutionary step, Vandermeer represents their death as a sort of 
transformation, leaving hints of human elements in nature itself. The or-
ganic words on the tower wall speak truth to this analogy, appearing above 
the anthropologist’s body to say “...the shadows of the abyss are like petals 
of a monstrous flower that shall blossom within the skull and expand the 
mind beyond what any man can bear” (61). The shadows being the virtual-
ly unknown Chthulucene, the unknown future evolution of Homo sapiens, 
and the blossoming and expanding of the mind reflect either the biologists 
surrendering her human self for Area X, or the others dying and becoming 
Area X. Upon their deaths, their bodies become inhuman and pass quickly 
into the landscape and are assumed to become a living creature or plant. 
The biologist sees the completion of human transformation before see-
ing the process, describing a dolphin’s eyes as “painfully human, almost 

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familiar” (Vandermeer 97), finding human-shaped “eruptions of moss or 
lichen” (96) in an abandoned village—both things causing a “feeling of 
something left unresolved or still in progress” (97). Wounded and dead 
bodies grow vaguely organic and supernatural qualities, the anthropologist 
having “something green spilling out from her mouth” (60) and “a torrent 
of green ash that sat on her chest in a mound” (61), and the psychologist’s 
arm “colonized by a fibrous green-gold fuzziness” (133). The biologist 
does not witness any transformation of the surveyor, but has now recog-
nized the pattern of human integration into Area X and hesitates to bury 
her in case it may block her from achieving her purpose to become a part 
of a multispecies and posthuman world. This process is not overlooked by 
Haraway, in fact, the act of living and dying is crucial in creating the mul-
tispecies web, imagining and appreciating the tangling of living and non-
living beings in our world and beyond. Haraway writes that “There is only 
the relentlessly contingent SF worlding of living and dying,” “of becom-
ing-with and unbecoming-with, of sympoiesis, and so, just possibly, of 
multispecies flourishing on earth” Vandermeer represents both the reality 
of human deterioration and decomposition after death and the part humans 
play in the flourishing of a multispecies world even if their consciousness 
dissipates. It reflects the truth of the Chthulucene, where whether humans 
are conscious of it or not, we must accept the truth of the passing of the 
human species, and thus surrender human needs and necessities, for the 
favor of an ever-changing ecosystem. 
 In Area X as the Chthulucene, humans are one piece in a range of 
uncanny multispecies interactions, but also themselves an amalgamation 
of natural elements that when initiated—in the biologist’s infection—are 
integrated into an environment where nature has full control. This essay 
explored how Area X is a representation of a complex transitional environ-
ment after our current ecological age, and how Vandermeer purposefully 
acknowledges his characters’ inability to describe Area X to emphasize the 
unknown future of the posthuman world. Like Lovecraft’s, Vandermeer’s 
human characters and their constructed systems and thought processes 

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are rendered inconsequential against Area X. By relinquishing her self, 
the biologist is transformed by and integrated with Area X, resulting in 
physical and sensory changes—and the other human characters physical-
ly become part of the ecosystem through animals and plants. This trans-
figuration of human characters represents the truth that Donna Haraway 
defines in When Species Meet and Staying with the Trouble: that humans 
are one piece in the web of human and nonhuman interaction, and to fully 
understand the extent of a non-human-centered world, there must be some 
sort of reframing the human as a natural element of an ecosystem. Van-
dermeer’s Annihilation argues for science fiction as an adequate method 
to represent this reframing, its writing portraying the posthuman world as 
one that requires humans to absolve their sense of self and acknowledge 
the power of an ecosystem that runs on the collective web of interlocking 
and interacting living and non-living beings. 

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