Saturday, January 18, 2025

Jeff VanderMeer wrote a Predator novel called "Predator: South China Sea" and it contains a tiny glimpse of what would become "Annihilation"


(Not available at Amazon at all when I checked after seeing that tweet, and the few physical copies at ebay are prohibitively expensive.)

It's mostly a lackluster page-turner about far, far too many characters finding themselves hunted while visiting a resort island. But it was published in 2008, and features a tiny subplot that was eventually imported into "Annihilation." Spoiler if you plan on reading "Predator: South China Sea": 


One of the characters gets scratched by the Predator, the cut gets infected, and the man finds both his body and grip on reality slip away. Here's what his romantic partner sees when she looks at him at the end of the book:

[T]he closer she got the more she realized he had become other.

His skin was constantly shifting as if each individual cells were in continuous motion across his body.

...

Should she burn him, give him a final peace he seemed not to need?

Should she join him? She couldn't pretend to understand the process of the thing that had colonized him, but surely if she went to him now, took him in her arms . . . she too would experience the same state of oblivion and bliss?

But, she found, she could do neither thing--neither kill him nor annihilate herself.