Readers of VanderMeer’s previous work will not be shocked at this cast given that the novel is set in the familiar Borne universe (which already introduced us to a giant flying bear). Narrative omniscience is only partial, allowing readers (and the astronauts) moments of overlap between or glimpses from other realities. His new novel, Dead Astronauts, perhaps the most weird yet, is an exploration into the ways in which resistance to these forces (which are embodied in the novel as the nefarious “Company”) can and should persist even in the face of impending failure.ĭead Astronauts takes place across seven (or more) versions of reality inhabited by three (or more) dead astronauts, a wolf-sized blue fox, a leviathan that matures into a behemoth, and an evil duck with a broken wing. Offering only partial understanding and knowledge for readers, VanderMeer’s work engages in a form of critical negativity that perhaps reflects the increasing estrangement of humanity from the ability to comprehend and act (effectively, collectively) in response to the global devastation of colonialism, late capitalism, and the effects climate change. Rather than shy away from attempts to inhabit unknowable, often nonhuman narratives, VanderMeer’s fiction seems to acknowledge the limitations of the human while still committing to the imaginative work of exploring the impossible. His novels, as one might claim is true of the larger project of the contemporary Weird, collectively attempt a kind of un-knowing - an engagement with what cannot be represented, stories that cannot be told. IF IT’S DIFFICULT to describe Jeff VanderMeer’s work, maybe this is because the weirdness of his novels is less about the genre-bending that has come to characterize accounts of weird fiction, and more about the ways in which it seems to actively resist summary or synthesis.

Borne vandermeer review