On uncertain endings: The Southern Reach trilogy, by Jeff VanderMeer

 On endings.  Sometimes, a story ends conclusively with everything wrapped up in a neat, tidy bow.  Do you feel that way now?  If you think about the state of the country (or the world), probably not.  However you feel about Arnold Schwarzenegger, he had one of the most badass moments in his career recently.  He got his vaccination, and said... "come with me if you want to live."  So badass.

Yeah, a lot of people would like to come with you right now, Arnie.  Kind of waitin' on logistics, though.

Anyway, endings are often not so pat, and they often aren't endings at all.  Instead, they are often... "what now?"  Sometimes, authors try it.  Given the "what now?" state of the world, I'm feelin' a little resonance with having recently read Jeff VanderMeer's The Southern Reach trilogy.  Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance.  Good books.  Flawed, of course, but good books.  Normally when I write sci-fi commentary posts, I try not to be too spoiler-y, but since this one is all about endings, this one is going to be, by necessity, spoiler-filled.  Fair warning.

Anyway, here's the set-up.  As I understand it, there may be a movie out there related to this stuff.  I have no idea how much it deviates from source material, and I don't care, but I'm writing about the books.

The novels center on "Area X," which is the pointedly douchey name the government has given to a place in an unspecified region called "the forgotten coast," where a mysterious border has somehow appeared, blocking it off from access, and within which weird stuff happens.  Very Lost-like.  A government entity called "the Southern Reach" is in charge of managing it and sending in expeditions to study Area X.  There are... lots of expeditions, and most of them turn out badly, because Area X is a dangerous place.  What, precisely, is it and how did it appear?  It is strongly implied that alien technology created it, and that Area X isn't actually on Earth.  There is a single doorway into it, and when you go through that doorway into Area X, you're somewhere else entirely.  How did it appear?  Something about a lighthouse, and weirdness, and that part is more vague, but whatever.

Anyway, the series starts with an expedition from the point of view of "the biologist."  No names.  Her whole expedition dies, because that's usually what happens, but she survives because she's a self-sufficient badass, but in the process, she gets altered.  She heads off on her own to live on an... island... in Area X while resisting a full transformation into whatever beastie she becomes for as long as she can.

But...

One of the things that happens is that people do come back from these expeditions.  Just... not the original people.  Facsimiles, to varying degrees of accuracy.  Sometimes blank slates with very few memories.  For the biologist, though, what happens is that something with more memories comes through, who comes to be called, "Ghost Bird," based on an old nickname.  You meet her in the second book, which is told from the perspective of John Rodriguez, who shows up as interim director of the Southern Reach.  Rodriguez is... kind of a tool.  He's not the dumbest guy around, but he's basically nepotism in action.  He comes from a long line of spies who are smarter than he is, with his mother being top of the heap.  He... is not.  He's there as a pawn.  And he shows up, telling people to call him, "Control."  Which... gets him laughed at, because it is such a stupid cliche.  He's a tool.  He actually does have a brain in his head, but he's just not the absolute smartest, which is kind of a cool writing trick.  Usually, characters are either smaaaart, or just idiots.  You don't see characters like this a lot.  So, good on Jeff.  Anyway, he shows up, sees what a shitshow the Southern Reach is, meets Ghost Bird, and some other terrible people, and everything goes to hell when the border expands, which had been predicted by the previous director, who was actually part of the expedition in the first book.

Sorry, but I warned you I would spoil stuff.  Since I'm trying to explain the ending, I gotta.

This gets you to the third book.  Rodriguez, Ghost Bird, and the assistant director of the Southern Reach, Grace Stevenson, are running around inside the newly-expanded Area X trying to figure out what the hell to do.  Grace, OK, yeah, "Control" is a tool, but wow is she... never mind.  Anyway, they eventually decide that they need to go down into a big hole in the ground, which is in no way the "hatch" from Lost, and confront the monster, who is in no way Smokey/The Man In Black from Lost.  Grace and Ghost Bird have a moment with the monster (the "Crawler"), while Rodriguez goes down into "the light," which in no way resembles the light at the bottom of the pit at the end of Season 6 of Lost, and somehow, through unspecified means, Rodriguez doing so... like... changes something, and Grace and Ghost Bird can go back up top and try to leave.

The book ends with Grace and Ghost Bird heading towards where the exit used to be.  (Rodriguez, it is strongly implied, has been transformed into a marmot, whom they meet along the way, which is less silly than it sounds.  Really.)  But since the border expanded, that's not where the exit is anymore.  They keep on walkin' towards the Southern Reach building, where we saw Area X expand to encompass at the end of Book 2, and... they keep on walkin'.  What did Rodriguez do, precisely?  Do Ghost Bird and Grace get out?  Is there anything left out there, or did Area X expand to cover everything?  And kill everyone on Earth in the process?

What kind of ending is this?

It's not an ending.  It is where VanderMeer stopped writing.

The ending is the cold death of the universe.  Or at least, the extinction of humanity, if we are writing about humans.  (And technically, the only "human" we know to be left at the end of the trilogy is Grace, since Ghost Bird is some sort of we-don't-know-what.)  Or fine, the deaths of all of your characters, presuming you don't care about descendants and the consequences of the characters' actions for the future.

Even the Russian authors stopped writing at some point, and those dudes were more long-winded than I am.

"And they all lived happily ever after."  Bullshit.  "And the Earth died screaming."  You want a real ending?  There you go.  Everything else is just where the author stopped writing.

Storytelling conventions are based on consumer demand for a satisfying ending.  Satisfying to whom?  That'd be you.  The audience.  Audiences don't tend to like an ending with no sense of resolution.  Note my wording.  Actual resolution?  You've got your fairy tale ending, and you've got Tom Waits.  Everything else is a sense of resolution, within a narrative.  For any other narrative, the question is, what comes next?  The end may hint at what comes next, and you can fill in the rest as you choose.  But the question will be, what comes next?  The ambiguous endings are the ones that don't give you much of a hint.

The ending of The Southern Reach trilogy is one of those endings that doesn't give you much of a hint regarding what comes next.  Somethin' happened, and then Ghost Bird and Grace Stevenson wander off looking for an exit from Area X, not knowing either if there is an exit, or what may be left on the other side if there is.  All they know is that they have, in some sense, escaped the worst.

OK, maybe I'm getting a bit of resonance from that right now, but that's kind of the point, isn't it?

The way that you infer what comes next at the end of a story is from a combination of the author's written ending and narrative convention, along with the weight of everything else you have read.  That doesn't work in this place called "reality."  What's next?  You get through some shit.  Maybe.  What's left?  What's on the other side?  You're not even really through it.

Ending?  What ending?  The ending in "they all lived happily ever after" implies immortality by the wording.  You can pick it apart and suppose that they lived happily until they died, but then the ending is still death.  Different from the Tom Waits ending, but you're still inferring the ending from the way the author wrote it.

Yeah, morbid, but would you prefer that I discuss the other inevitability?  Taxes?  April 15, baby!

Certainty, or the semblance of certainty, would require an author.  Throughout the course of the Trump era, I have often said that it felt like badly written narrative.  And it did.  Of course, part of badly written narrative is that you cannot trust a logical deduction to make a prediction because the author may just be an idiot.  You know that tale told by an idiot thing?  Yeah, that's reality for you.  The difference between a tale told by an idiot and having no author at all is a difference without a distinction.

January 24, 2021.  We have reached an ending, of sorts.  But an ending is not really an ending.  Tomorrow is January 25, and so many of the problems that existed on January 19 will still be there.  Yeah, we'd like to go with Arnie, but can you?  And that's just one of the problems.

In a way, this is why people like works of fiction that provide "satisfying" endings.  They are escapist.  They provide that which reality does not.  VanderMeer provided something a little more like life.  You get through some shit, but you still have no clear sense of where you are.  Calling The Southern Reach trilogy anything like life sounds weird, since "weird" is basically the primary descriptor of anything written by Jeff VanderMeer, but there it is.

Good books.  I could pick 'em apart, like inconsistencies in the characterization of the psychologist/director, some... let's say "creative license" with what hypnosis can do, and other such critiques, but whatever.  I'll still give these books a strong recommendation.  They do not spoon-feed anything to you, but they are worthy of thought and analysis.