’[A] Halting Kind of Hope’: Multispecies Grief as Wild Possibility in Jeff VanderMeer’s <i>Southern Reach Trilogy</i>

This essay analyzes two central characters in Jeff VanderMeer’s <i>Southern Reach Trilogy</i> (2014) who attempt to change, slow or stop a planetary terraforming agent known as Area X. Proven able to radically transform the structures of life over the last few decades, Area X poses a threat to humanity as it rapidly expands across Florida’s Forgotten Coast, promising to eventually encompass the whole planet. Area X’s ability to both expand and change offers a speculative fiction of the present – that is, an analogy for the rapid and imminent transformation our own planet is currently undertaking in response to the ecological devastation of anthropogenic processes. While many humans have set out to stop the expansion of Area X in the trilogy, only one character, John Rodriguez, is able to change how Area X’s terraforming works, making it potentially survivable for humans. Rodriguez actively practices a hopefulness toward ecological disturbance that many other characters do not, reflecting the power of hope as an affective tool for ecological change. By presenting possible change to Area X, the <i>Southern Reach Trilogy</i> proposes an ecology of wild possibility through which interspecies grief and a cautious hopefulness can help humans work toward survival and reemergence in places dramatically reformed by the nonhuman – places not too different from ecological disaster areas on our own planet in the Anthropocene.