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Summary
Summary
A 2020 LOCUS AWARD FINALIST
Jeff VanderMeer's Dead Astronauts presents a City with no name of its own where, in the shadow of the all-powerful Company, lives human and otherwise converge in terrifying and miraculous ways. At stake: the fate of the future, the fate of Earth--all the Earths.
A messianic blue fox who slips through warrens of time and space on a mysterious mission. A homeless woman haunted by a demon who finds the key to all things in a strange journal. A giant leviathan of a fish, centuries old, who hides a secret, remembering a past that may not be its own. Three ragtag rebels waging an endless war for the fate of the world against an all-powerful corporation. A raving madman who wanders the desert lost in the past, haunted by his own creation: an invisible monster whose name he has forgotten and whose purpose remains hidden.
Author Notes
Jeffrey Scott VanderMeer was born in Bellefonte, Pennsylvania on July 7, 1968. He is an editor, writer, teacher, and publisher. He is the founding editor and publisher of the Ministry of Whimsy Press. He is the author of several books including City of Saints, Madmen, Finch, and The Southern Reach Trilogy. His novel Annihilation won the Nebula Award for Best Novel in 2014.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
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. (Dec.)
Booklist Review
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 into its multi-dimensional sequel.--Nell Keep Copyright 2019 Booklist
Guardian Review
Agenuinely innovative artwork requires time to fulfil its effect. Jeff VanderMeer's Dead Astronauts is one such work - bewildering, perplexing, original - and I would recommend that readers allow it the concentration it demands. The opening third poses as a quest narrative, a fantastical variant of the classic western: three battle-scarred gunslingers set out across an ecologically ravaged landscape in pursuit of an enemy. Our heroes are Grayson, a black woman and sole survivor of a disastrously failed mission to explore deep space; Chen, an indentured worker bound in perpetuity to an invasive corporation known only as the Company; and Moss, whose name was once Sarah, now a complex, composite organism who has been partially absorbed into the structure of the worlds they move through. The enemy they seek to defeat is the Company itself, and more specifically its agent, a deranged Dr Moreau-type biologist named Charlie X. The three are helped along their journey by Charlie's failed experiments: the blue fox, the duck with the broken wing, the leviathan called Botch, a hive-mind of salamanders. The astronauts project themselves through time, engaging the Company across multiple iterations in a repeating battle that most resembles a deadly game scenario. They hope eventually to stumble upon its origin story: the company before it became the Company, when it could still be destroyed. In some versions of reality there is nothing left but the Company, its grinding machinery still energised by poisoned rivers. In other realities, the Company has been destroyed and the City that serves it has been reduced to a ruin, polluted and rendered alien by vast, voiceless creatures from the quantum void. Especially treacherous are the versions of reality where life appears to be going on as normal: "Everything the Company did destroyed someone, killed someone, even if it helped someone else. The rest was subterfuge, and no suit to protect against it." The critique of corporate capitalism is clear to see, and this first act, strange and abstracted though it is, is not without precedent. Fans of weird literature are sure to find echoes of Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun, Zachary Jernigan's underappreciated Jeroun books, even Stephen King's Dark Tower series. It is not in VanderMeer's game plan, however, to let us get too cosy, and as the novel progresses it begins to shed its archetypes, fragmenting into a series of variously interconnected accounts from different narrators. We experience his world from the point of view of Botch, a gigantic mutated fish feeding off Charlie X's discarded experiments. We encounter Charlie himself, a boy then man abused by his monstrous father, driven finally to madness and - like Victor Frankenstein - beyond redemption: It wasn't Charlie X's fault, in a way, even though it was all his fault. Charlie X just thought in the old way. Plants couldn't feel pain, animals were objects to be manipulated as products or resources ¿ and it mattered little if the pure part of beauty was blood. It had become a death cult, under a veneer of what was inevitable and necessary, and anything else was illogical. When we finally meet Sarah we discover her homeless in a world that feels disturbingly familiar, much closer to our own time than to any far future. The Company exists but still in prototype, a fume-belching, coal-fired anachronism. Sarah believes she can see demons, and it comes as no surprise when she is visited by three astronauts from the future. The mysterious visitors are looking for Charlie X's journal, which Sarah has found beneath a bridge on a rubbish-strewn river bank. Then come diagrams of creatures that look like autopsies or recipes. Some almost whimsical. A plant that becomes a sea anemone that becomes a squid. Others like levels of hell. Bear-men and men like bears. Scenes of slaughter you pass quickly. More "instructions" in sentences and paragraphs in a language you don't understand. Spanish in high school and some knowledge of Russian, so you know other alphabets. But this matches nothing you've ever seen. Images and leitmotifs recur, a dizzying interplay of references - the burning shed, the tunnel, the bridge - that remain mysterious and yet act as an anchor, a cumulative weight of symbolism that gradually awakens the reader to a blasted form of thematic coherence. We are offered glimpses of scenes and characters familiar from VanderMeer's previous novel, Borne, to which Dead Astronauts is loosely linked. The typographical games that characterise these latter sections - paler and heavier typeface, isolated strips of text on an otherwise black page, figures in the margins reminiscent of biblical verse-numbering, only counting backwards - recall Mark Z Danielewski's 2000 metafictional horror novel House of Leaves or more recently Nicola Barker's 2017 dystopia H(a)ppy. How far readers will tolerate such self-conscious gamesmanship will come down to individual taste. For this reader at least, this kind of formal innovation is pure catnip, an indication that as a mode of literary expression the novel is still vigorous, still developing and still important. Far from being pointless or posturing, such devices serve as a reminder that the novel is not simply a narrative, it is also text, and that language can have an agenda apart from story. The effect of language as raw material exerts itself in ways that are not always easily explicable but - like poetry - reach beyond organised thought and into sensation. Dead Astronauts transmits its core concerns around environmental breakdown through the splintering of narrative into its component parts. The blue fox's story, which occupies much of the last quarter of the novel, includes many pages of text that consist of the same dozen words or phrases, repeated many times with only minor variations. There is a temptation to skip over such passages, yet in their obsessive reiterations they begin gradually to take on the quality of music, a whispered continuo that is both creepy and beguiling, conveying their message with a subtextual intensity that would be difficult to achieve through more conventional means. Climate fiction is an important strand in contemporary literature, so much so that in its repeating imagery, its insistent narrative of imminent catastrophe, it may begin to seem over-familiar and thus lose its urgency. As a writer of fantasy, VanderMeer has always eschewed the more derivative aspects of world-building, preferring instead to employ speculative conceits as a means of stretching the envelope of the possible. From his 2014 Southern Reach trilogy onwards, it has become clear there is no subject more important to him than the degrading and disastrous effect of human activity on fragile ecosystems. Employing stylistic and linguistic devices that reach beyond narrative, the author deliberately deconstructs the very concept of familiarity and forces us up against his subject matter in a way that demands we not only engage with it, but recognise its vast importance to our lives and futures.
Kirkus Review
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 Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
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.