A Review of Jeff VanderMeer’s “Dead Astronauts”
Prose as Music, but What Does It Mean?
Science fiction author Jeff VanderMeer is gifted and talented, no doubt about that. He can make you see things that are otherwise unseeable, and inventive enough to bring forth lifeforms that haven’t been created yet. His latest novel, Dead Astronauts, is set in the same universe as his previous novel, Borne. However, to call Dead Astronauts a novel might be a bit of a stretch. It really feels more like a collection of short stories (maybe even poems) that are unified by their setting in the Borne universe. It is a disjointed collection, and terribly unnerving, but you might read it mostly in one sitting (as I did) letting the sheer lyricism of these pieces wash over you.
For those unfamiliar with Borne, a bit of a recap. Set in a nameless alternate universe, contained within a nameless City, lies a building known as only the Company. Deep within the Company, biological research is conducted on animals to make them into different things: other organisms entirely, or some combination of technology and biology. When these organisms “fail,” they are either killed, sent to exile in tidal pools outside of the building, eaten, or pulled apart and put together again. However, the Company — by the time that VanderMeer gets to it — is in ruins and so is the City, which is populated with strange organisms and human scavengers. That’s about the crux of it.
I’d like to be able to tell you what Dead Astronauts is about. However, I’m completely clueless and baffled by it as much as I was enchanted by it. I think it’s a sort of prequel to Borne, but while Borne had a more standard narrative, Dead Astronauts is completely abstract and experimental. The bulk of it is about three half-human astronauts on a mission seemingly to destroy the City and its alternate reality. But it’s also the narrative of a blue fox and an oversized salamander-like creature. It’s a strange work, and whether it’s your cup of tea really depends on how strange and fantastic you want your strange and fantastic to be.
Overall, Dead Astronauts is a book about how humans in the here and now are messing with biology, whether it’s by hunting animals to the point of extinction or by climate change (and, of course, experimenting with lifeforms we really don’t have a right to experiment with). It is a book concerned with environmentalism, but — to make its points — goes right out on a limb to be as playful with words as possible. In a sense, Dead Astronauts reads like a fever dream, a stream of consciousness about gobbledegook that tries to make the reader understand it by emphasizing that there’s nothing to be understood about it, other than by pointing out the utter shit that human beings are doing to the environment.
In fact, I would go so far to say that this “novel” isn’t really prose at all — nor is it poetry. It’s music. Jeff VanderMeer does to the blank page of writing a novel what Ornette Coleman did with his work Free Jazz: create something new and startling and never before seen or heard. Dead Astronauts, then, is a marvel. It is completely unique and original, and even pushes the boundaries of fiction beyond what Borne tried to do. However, that is not to say that this work is perfect: there is a ton of repetition in the text, as if VanderMeer wanted to take a mallet to the reader’s head to make sure that whatever point he was trying to make gets through. This is a failing: sometimes the author is too in love with his words to realize that some of what he’s doing doesn’t make a lot of sense. In fact, Dead Astronauts could have used some judicious editing.
Still, for a novel that is essentially unreadable, it is essentially readable at the same time. I was amazed with this work, even in the moments that I clearly didn’t understand all of it. This is the kind of book that people are going to need to write Ph.D. dissertations on just for the average reader to come to make sense of VanderMeer’s prose. (Aside from the fact that what I think this novel is saying is that any kind of manipulating of the Earth, especially for profit, is a bad, bad, very bad thing.) It is that obtuse and myopic. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but I really found the ideas embedded within this text particularly hard to understand. Maybe I need to swear off reviewing science fiction, because this is a common complaint I have with so-called trailblazers.
Should you read Dead Astronauts? I can’t say, other than to advise that you read Borne first to get an understanding of the world it is set in because, otherwise, you might be particularly lost as certain characters first get mentioned in Borne with more clarity, even if Dead Astronauts is more of a prequel. It also really depends on how much you might stomach the willfully experimental — as noted, this book really isn’t a novel at all, or prose, or anything resembling what you might consider being a narrative unless you’ve had a steady diet of post-modern texts. At the same time, there are aspects of Dead Astronauts that feel wholly accessible. Even if you’re not quite clear at what’s going on, this book is subtly hypnotic and its use of language will keep you turning the pages, either in bafflement or wonder. While I had wished for more of a straight-up sequel to Borne, which was a nearly excellent book (despite the in-fighting between main characters), this is a book about relationships, family and the eco-system it inhabits. I’ll bet that you might read this “novel” and get something entirely different out of it than I did. Otherwise, if you like being amazed while scratching your head, Dead Astronauts might be the X that marks the spot for you.
Jeff VanderMeer’s Dead Astronauts was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on December 3, 2019.
Of course, if you like what you see, please recommend this piece (click on the clapping hands’ icon below) and share it with your followers.
Get in touch: zacharyhoule@rogers.com
