Dead Astronauts

October 28, 2019
VanderMeer returns to the hallucinatory world of Borne, where an all-powerful company has ravaged a metropolis known only as the City, in this lackluster novel. Into this unpredictable landscape come three astronauts, Chen, Moss, and Grayson, determined to explore their otherworldly environment, which is watched over by a mysterious blue fox that seems capable of transcending time and space. After the first few chapters, fragmentary subplots bubble up: there is Charlie X, a rogue astronaut from the expedition fighting to hold on to his memories amid a creeping amnesia; a massive sea monster awaits its death; a mysterious journal containing knowledge of demons that foretells the coming of the monster Behemoth is passed between survivors; a total darkness called Nocturnalia threatens to engulf the dead city; and a shapeshifter confronts a cosmic duck over ownership of the journal. If this sounds overstuffed, it’s because it is. It’s certainly among VanderMeer’s most experimental work, but the novel never coalesces; the characters and concepts are too loosely sketched and the prose is both grandiose and oddly humorless, punctuated by lines such as “A fox is a question that must be answered” and “The duck represented a paradox.” This diffuse novel reads like unused notes from Borne and feels incomplete.

Starred review from November 1, 2019
Vandermeer's follow-up to Borne (2017) explores the multiple pasts and futures of the City and the sinister Company that twists and destroys countless living things. The fragmented narrative centers primarily on the dead astronauts at the crossroads from Borne, revealed to be three revolutionaries consisting of former Company workers/experiments Chen and Moss and the formerly lost-in-space Grayson. As these three lovers and companions come to the latest version of the City and the sinister Company, the established patterns of their war across realities begin to shift, with factors such as the demented and tortured Charlie X, a mysterious blue fox, a vast leviathan, and the dark bird known as "the duck with a broken wing" all come into play. The varied points of view and stylistic shifts of the narrative allow the reader to experience reality through the eyes of different characters, human and otherwise, and the struggle of different forms of life trying to survive unites the vignettes that form the bulk of the novel. Highly recommended for those interested in sf invested in ecological concerns and speculative fiction that plays with narrative form. New readers will want to read Borne before diving in to its multi-dimensional sequel.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)

July 1, 2019

In a City with no name, ruled by a dangerously dominant Company, the fate of Earth--and other Earths--is at stake as rebels battle the reigning powers, a madman looks for an invisible monster he created for unknown purposes, a homeless woman finds the key to all things, and a blue fox heads out on a mission through various realms of time and space. This is billed as literary fiction, which fits VanderMeer's exceptional language, but of course the fantastical story is no surprise coming from the author of the New York Times best-selling "Southern Reach" trilogy and the Nebula and Shirley Jackson Award-winning Annihilation. All types of readers for this one.

Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from October 1, 2019
VanderMeer (The Strange Bird, 2018, etc.) continues his saga of biotech gone awry and the fearsome world that ensues. David Bowie had just one dead astronaut, poor Maj. Tom, in his quiver. VanderMeer puts three in the middle of a strange city somewhere on what appears to be a future Earth, a place where foxes read minds and ducks threaten their interlocutors: "I'll kill you and feast on your entrails," one duck says, and, on being challenged about his lab-engendered ducky identity, spits back, "You are not a whatever you are." All very true. In the ruin of the world that the nefarious Company has left behind after its biotech experiments went south, such things are commonplace, and nothing is quite as it seems, although everything dies. Sometimes, indeed, everything dies even as it lives, which explains why those three astronauts, a nicely balanced blend of ethnicities and genders, are able to walk and talk even as their less fortunate iterations lie inert. Says one, Chen, of his semblable, "Keep him alive. He might have value," an easy task given that one version of Chen has been blown "into salamanders," as our duck can attest. Other creatures that flow out of the Company's still-clanking biotech factory have similar fates: They are fodder for the leviathan that awaits in the holding pond outside, for the behemoth that stalks the land. "Bewildered by their own killing," muses Grayson, one of the three. "Bewildered by so many things. To be dead without ever having lived." Much of the action in VanderMeer's story is circumstantial, but it provides useful backstory to his previous books Borne and The Strange Bird, delivering, for example, the origin story of the blue fox and emphasizing the madness of a humankind that destroys the natural world only to replace it with things very like what has been destroyed. Or at least that's their intention, creating instead a hell paved with the results of mad, bad science. VanderMeer is a master of literary science fiction, and this may be his best book yet.

COPYRIGHT(2019) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.