Information without Meaning in Jeff VanderMeer's Trilogy of Area X

The essay discusses Jeff Vandermeer’s "Southern Reach Trilogy" (2014) as an exemplary case of speculative narration at the convergence of weird fiction and theory; it resonates with current neo-materialist theories that call into question humanist epistemological privileges and dissolve their central figure—the human subject of knowledge endowed by unique properties. However, by imagining slow death of the human world and the emergence of habitats completely opaque to human understanding and un-containable by human agencies, the trilogy also assumes and magnifies the discontinuity between biological, cognitive, and communication systems. By approaching the analysis of the Trilogy from a systems theoretical perspective, the essay demonstrates how the trilogy takes up the narrative challenge of establishing meaningful relations out of that state of blindness of its imaginary enivronment, and how it proceeds self-referentially, by generating transitional observers within its fictional space that bring forth descriptions and observations of the unknown. Finally the essay claims the heuristic value of a systems theoretical approach to address this work vis-a-vis dominant interpretations based in new materialist speculation.