VanderMeer Radically Expands His Form with “Dead Astronauts”
Best known for his Southern Reach Trilogy, Jeff VanderMeer returns with another haunting novel that seems to beg more questions than it answers with Dead Astronauts, available December 3rd of this year. Returning to the City last seen in Borne, Dead Astronauts broadens its focus to include a variety of species, perspectives, and timelines. Slinking across the multiverse, a blue fox observes with an inscrutable sagacity, influencing the characters that cross this desolate landscape. Three of those characters are the dead astronauts last seen in Borne, here dedicated to an unending campaign against the nefarious Company, whose unethical biomedical experiments left the City in pieces. Their journey brings them in contact with a giant leviathan that carries a secret and the pain that accompanies decades of witnessing and participating in atrocities. As these threads intersect, the landscape of the City slowly reveals the ways in which life thrives in unexpected and terrifying ways.
Unlike Borne or the Southern Reach Trilogy, this work proceeds as a collection of ten interrelated stories. Although some chapters feature the same protagonist, many do not, and one of the collection’s most terrifying entries arises from a singular and too briefly examined point of view. VanderMeer varies his formal approach throughout the collection as well, shifting between poetry and prose and making formatting choices for surprising moments of emphasis. “Can’t Remember,” which arrives at about the midpoint, sent chills down my spine, inducing its own mid-book hangover as I grappled with its slowly unveiled horror. Its images of haunted realization imprinted on my memory more indelibly than did its morbidity, though I enjoyed and remember both.
Unsurprisingly, the book also grapples with the vicious realities within nature, both the precariousness and persistence of its survival, and the ways in which it slowly reclaims a dying world from the species that no longer deserves it. Beaks hammer, flesh tears, and maggots writhe. Yet the weird, disgusting, and sublime elements appear in restrained or innovative ways that left my unease more psychologically than viscerally felt. It never emphasizes the grotesque so as to become unenjoyable or unreadable. The book demonstrates an impeccable commitment to the ongoing craft of creating excellent prose.
It also includes a surprisingly diverse cast and captures a sense of queer affection, threading the hope for a happy ending alongside one’s wondering how that ending appear. Even as I raced down the book’s closing passages, I felt my understanding of the universe grow in equal proportion to my curiosity and fear at whom these characters might become. When I finished the book, I let myself walk through the neighborhood for a good half hour, mulling it over, and then I found myself scanning the pages again, trying to make sense of what had been a wondrous and overwhelming experience.
If I had to criticize any aspect of this piece, then it’s that the adventurousness of its form and the execution of several chapters leave it reading so differently from its predecessor that it seems to come from another universe altogether. That’s not to suggest that works within a series require some sense of uniformity — by no means! But, at times, I found myself distracted by the impulse to draw connections between the two books, and I worry that impulse delayed my comprehension. I could have seen this for what it was had it been left to stand alone.
