#annhilation

This isn’t going to be a comprehensive post, but I’m re-listening to Authority while reading Absolution, and I’m slowly picking up on things that form a timeline. I haven’t yet finished the Lowry section—three pages in and I’m already losing my mind. Lay off the drugs, Lowry.

Anyway, from what I can tell, Annihilation seems to take place in the 2010s, though in an alternate reality where factions and organizations like Central or the Séance & Science Brigade exist, and where Florida is known as the “Forgotten Coast.”

Grace mentions that strange phenomena have been occurring on the coast for a century, which—if taken literally—would date back to around the 1910s. The director’s notes state that the S&SB have been operating on the coast since the 1950s. If the Dead Town expedition took place 20 years before the Border came down, that would place it in the 1960s, while the Border fell in the 1980s (also around the time the Southern Reach was formed). The white-rabbit experiment occurred in the 1990s, although the time-warping effects sent them back to the 1960s.

The present-day story likely takes place in the 2010s, which would put most of the characters—Cynthia/Gloria, Grace, Lowry, Whitby, and Jackie—in their 40s to 60s. Control says his grandfather Jack is retired, which would make him quite old if he and Old Jim were “buddies back in the day.” Jim, probably in his late middle age during the 1980s, could have passed as a man in his 60s or 70s. So if Jack is still alive, he must be very old.