Authority: A Novel

2.5 stars..... The follow-up to Annihilation picks up with the mysterious agency, the Southern Reach, working to piece together the events of the latest expedition into the Area X. "Authority" almost entirely focuses on introducing readers to new characters, all employees of the Southern Reach: the new director, known by the moniker "Control", whose tasked with leading the investigation. He has to struggle with an uncooperative assistant director, Grace, who feels slighted that she wasn't named director, and takes it out on Control at every possible opportunity. There's a lesser cast of quirky characters known as the Science and Seance brigade that come into play. Very little of interest actually "happens" in Authority. It's almost entirely character driven but it's not really very engaging. The opening chapters provide some intrigue (can't say much more than that), but it isn't built upon. The final chapter provides the only real excitement and suspense and answers some questions ra

I was extremely excited to continue the story from Annihilation but was blind sided by the change of pace of Authority. There were nuggets of the original flavor I was looking for sprinkled through out the novel but not until the last 30-40 pages did anything near as exciting as the first book take place. The author lingers on the main character's slightly boring history and we instead get dull character development that dead ends. I hope Acceptance redeems this series that had such a strong start.

Authority falls flat on its face compared to Annihilation. This second book has little to no plot, and felt like an endless parade of repetitive searching and dragging, combative dialogue. We're given a new main character and told to care about him and feel for his tragic past with no incentive. I literally only trudged through this book to get to the third one. Until the very end, there was hardly any sense of the wonder and exploration of science fiction beyond repeating details we already knew. An incredible waste of my time.