The more-than-human in Jeff Vandermeer's Annihilation

By Isobel Woodiwiss

As the newest member of the Milkweed Co-Lab, I’ve been brushing up on some key concepts through a combination of books, articles, and science fiction. The term more-than-human is critical to the lab’s approach to research and research creation, and – as I’ve recently discovered – a very interesting topic to dive into.

According to Puig de la Bellacasa (2017), more-than-human acknowledges “nonhumans and other than humans such as things, objects, other animals, living beings, organisms, physical forces, spiritual entities, and humans” (p.1) in one fell swoop. 

I was reading articles about more-than-human perspectives, I was also reading Annihilation, by Jeff Vandermeer. In Annihilation, an unnamed protagonist referred to as ‘the biologist’ explores the unusual, alien phenomenon that is Area X with a team of various experts she doesn’t quite trust. As the biologist explores Area X, we the audience explore the biologist; her unsteady relationship with her husband, her desire for solitude, and her love of transitional ecosystems. I also watched the movie, directed by Alex Garland. While it focuses much more on the people in the story and their inner emotional turmoil, I found both present challenges to the characters that are rooted in more-than-human concepts.

Early on in the book, we learn the biologist is heavily influenced by any environment or experience she finds herself in, from tide pools on a remote island to a bar with her husband’s friends. in reflection, she states, “places could impress upon me, and I could become a part of them with ease.” The movie puts a similar theme on all its characters, however within the context of emotional pain. One character describes losing her daughter to leukemia: “in a way it’s two bereavements. My beautiful girl… and the person I once was.”

Zaga et al. (2026) describes more-than-human perspectives as “positioning humanity as an embedded, reflexive, and situated actor within the intricate and dynamic web of life” (p. 3). While very different on the surface, both versions of Annihilation indicate the characters are fundamentally changed by their surroundings and the events of their life. These are things they do not choose – their experiences are matters of coincidence, tragedy, and circumstance – but the ways they change are permanent and irreversible.

They are, in essence, more-than-human, as the nonhumans (events, environments, things) become factors in who they are both externally and internally.

With this theme that we are fundamentally changed by our experiences and surroundings comes the sense that ideas of self – both as a physically distinct thing and as a thing with agency, choices, a personality – is in fact deeply fragile and out of our control. This is where Annihilation starts to feel like a horror novel. In Area X, the biologist comes across “a few peculiar eruptions of moss or lichen… misshapen, the vegetative matter forming an approximation of limes and heads and torsos.” She takes a sample of the vegetation to examine under a microscope and discovers they are comprised of modified human cells. This is deeply troubling for the character – are these plants that have developed human traits, or humans that have transformed into plants? What does that mean for the biologist’s future?

Characters in the movie are even more disturbed by the ways they see themselves changing, having seen footage of a man on a previous Area X expedition whose intestines have become snakelike, writhing in his exposed gut. But they ways they feel their minds are changing are equally, if not more disturbing. One character presses on with the mission despite the risks because of this sense of change, stating that the needs to be “the one that ends” her journey, implying further change would make her something other than herself, that her present being is the only self she can be.

But both texts challenge the need to be disturbed by these changes. Change, in fact, is that brings the biologist closer to her husband, even though they rarely interact directly in both narratives. In the book, the biologist discovers her husband’s field journal and feels connected to him not only for their shared experiences and the ways they’ve both changed, but for the ways she sees herself in his writing. The biologist states, “it bound him to me in a more intimate way than we had ever seemed to have while together.”

A character in the movie, Jose, willingly succumbs to Area X. As another teammate was killed by a never-before-seen animal, she observes the animal develop the ability to mimic the teammate’s screams. She says, “part of her mind became part of the creature that was killing her… I wouldn’t like that at all,” and rejects the idea that she must press on, resist the changes she faces, and seek answers. Instead, she walks into the trees and disappears among the humanoid plant structures. The audience is left to wonder: did Jose lose herself the same way her other fallen teammates have, or did giving in to Area X save her from the pain of resisting?

Asenbaum (2026) argues in favour of “understanding humans as hybrid human-nonhuman assemblages” because it “opens up space for the realization of our more-than-human transformations” (p. 2), which maps beautifully onto Annihilation. The characters are influenced by the landscape and one another in a way that, while supernatural, acknowledges that we as humans are not lone actors on earth. It even goes further to argue that accepting these influences are not only necessary for survival, but beneficial, regardless of how uncomfortable transformation may be.

Given that we are transformed by and intertwined with nonhumans, those nonhumans inherently have agency. 

Just like Area X is not a stable object for the biologist to objectively observe, nonhumans are not resources to be harvested and manipulated at our whims. Johnson and Goldstein (2015), in fact, argue that they are “the bearers of creative wealth” (p. 391), untapped resources with ways of living, moving, and transforming that we can learn from.

This perspective challenges our perceived hierarchy of beings that places humans at the top of the pyramid and all other far below. In our culture, humans are placed above the rest of the species on earth for a myriad of reasons: first, because we have a desire to protect our own over others, and second, because we perceive intelligence and power as a distinctly human trait which indicates importance and worthiness of life.

Annihilation invites us to ask ourselves if we would even recognize intelligence and power beyond our own. 

None of the characters can truly comprehend what is happening in Area X. The entire ecosystem – from the insects to the animals – function in ways even the biologist can’t fully understand. Not only that, but all of the characters within Area X are helpless against its inner workings, making it by far the most influential feature of the narrative.

The movie Annihilation begins with the biologist teaching university students a lesson on cancer cells. She states that all beings, including humans, are made of cells, and all cells have evolved from the same original cell. In essence, we begin Annihilation with a reminder that we are not so far away from all the other things on earth, as we all come from the same ancient cell.

So, what do we do with this idea that both we and the rest of the world are more-than-human? In one specific use-case, Johnson and Goldstein (2015) argues that we should look to the rest of the world for our science, technology, and medicine.

Johnson and Goldstein (2015) look to biomimetics, in which nature is “a participator ‘mentor’ of engineering, and inventive companion capable of generating solutions more sophisticated than our clunky, industrial society can imagine” (p. 388). They suggest, essentially, that the solutions to a great number of our problems already exist in nature, needing only to be synthesized by engineers and scientists rather than invented from a blank page.

Asembaum (2026) suggests an onto-epistemological approach called being with, which, rather than simply researching a subject, focuses on how a subject affects, transforms, or changes the researcher. Doing so acknowledges both the agency of nonhumans and our more-than-human nature. It also requires a more-than-human perspective on the subject, as this approach inherently requires “admitting a lack of knowledge, even attempting now to know, since the certainty of knowledge may foreclose affective perceptibility” (p. 3). This challenges the idea that the human researcher is the lone actor in research, instead suggesting that, simultaneously, the researcher is “being acted upon by nonhuman others” in an “equalizing moment of companionship” (p. 3).

In a broader sense, more-than-human perspectives ask us to consider our role on Earth as members of complex ecosystems, in which our actions and the actions of nonhumans have profound ripple effects. 

It presents us with questions regarding how we are going to build our futures. What do we owe each other given our more-than-human commonality? How can we consider the nonhuman lives around us as we move into the future? How can we embrace our own more-than-human qualities? What can we learn from a more-than-human world? 

Annihilation fleshes out these questions by offering us a surreal reminder that not only are we more-than-humans, but so is the rest of the world – all evolved from the same cell, all in constant flux, all affected by one another. The answers to these questions are far, far from simple, but that only makes the more worthy of consideration. The more-than-human perspective is not a set of rules to follow for research or life. Rather, it asks for open-ended thought about our place in the world, given this idea that we are not nearly as far above it than we may like to think.