The f uture i s w eird : Jeff Vandermeer, s cience, r itual, a nd t he s trangeness o f c limate c risis Change is scary. As we push ourselves past climate tipping points and end what once seemed like immutable normalities, weird fiction has made a notable comeback. Through the frightening weird ecologies of Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach series (the source material for the film Annihilation, dir. Alex Garland), this talk argues that leaning into both the horror and excitement of strangeness is key to addressing crises. Guiding you through the strange roots of the weird literary tradition and drawing on Lacanian psychoanalysis, I argue that we can look to VanderMeer’s Area-X as a necessary confrontation with the limits of our reality.