Thirty years ago, a mysterious border appeared, cutting off an isolated area of coast and swampland which has come to be known as Area X. Area X appears normal from the outside, but it’s not. Expeditions are sent in regularly to gather samples and to try and understand the changes taking place in this landscape. Sometimes they return, sometimes they don’t. Those who return are changed. Annihilation is the first book of the Southern Reach trilogy. It focuses on the 12th expedition, made up of […]
A sci-fi adventure on the evils of imperialism
After reading and loving the Silo trilogy by Howey, I went back to look for others of his works, and found Half-Way Home to be a fascinating and well-done novel in its own right. It is the story of a group of 15-year-olds who had been raised in artificial wombs aboard a spaceship, one of hundreds of such missions sent out from a future Earth to find and colonize viable planets. Missions landing on nonviable planets were abruptly aborted by the artificial intelligence (AI) controlling […]