Annihilation

Great book. I enjoyed the flawed narrator perspective, and the fact that no names are used for any of the characters in the book, save for the names the human characters give other entities.

I encourage you to read the introduction to set the stage for themes and ideas you can chew on as you read the book: ideas like human primacy being arrogance, and the fact that collectively when we encounter the unknown we often find ourselves resorting to quick heuristics and violence rather than embracing the complexity. The book captures a certain sense of awe I’ve felt in my own research and life for complex systems like life, consciousness and intelligence. We know so much about how things work, but as that frontier of knowledge grows, the surface area for what we don’t know does as well – sometimes you just have to gawk and laugh at the messy beautiful nature of it all.