Bizarre, weird and wonderful Vandermeer's writing has always delighted me. Will definitely look forward to reading the next one!

This book was, at times, difficult to read. It's a tough story in that the characters face some really hard situations. I liked the weirdness of the tech in the post apocalyptic world, and I loved the questions about consciousness in Borne. Definitely would recommend to readers who like weird sci-fi and don't need a lot of plot to keep them interested.

Unfortunately, while I enjoyed the author's first series, I really struggled with this one. It literally kept putting me to sleep. The premise was interesting...but I had to quit about halfway through because I just couldn't get into it.

The nitty-gritty: A strange, dangerous and magical glimpse into a future world, told in stunningly beautiful prose.

I received a NetGalley copy of Borne way back when, but even though this book was released in April, I just couldn’t get to it. At the same time, I signed up for a subscription box called Quarterly, and Borne just happened to be the featured book. It was a really cool package than included the author’s annotations scattered throughout the book (on stickie notes!), as well as some other interesting items. So when Sci-Fi Month rolled around, I thought it would be a great reason to go back and read it. And I’m so glad I did. Borne was simply brilliant, in my humble opinion, although I will say this book is NOT going to be for everyone. It’s fairly slow-paced and is one of those stories that unfolds gradually, until you realize you are completely invested in the characters. VanderMeer takes an unfamiliar landscape and populates it with both humans and non-humans who love each other, fight, feel jealousy and anger and sadness. In other words, they seem just like you and me.

Far in the future, what remains of a crumbling City is lorded over by several different factions. A giant bio-engineered flying bear named Mord rules over the Company building and is attended by an army of “Mord proxies,” smaller bears who move so fast that no one ever survives their attacks. A mysterious woman simply called the Magician is out to destroy Mord and take over the City, and along with her acolytes, groups of feral children, she’s well on her way to doing just that. Rachel and Wick have built a fortress for themselves in what they call the Balcony Cliffs, an old apartment building that they have fortified with secret tunnels and nasty traps for anyone stupid enough to invade. In short, this is a harsh world, which Rachel bravely faces in order to salvage whatever she can find: food, water or the raw biotech that Wick needs for his creations.

One day, Rachel discovers something she’s never seen before, tucked into the fur of Mord’s mountainous flank (which turns out to be a great place to find interesting things, as long as you’re careful!). She spies a sea anemone-like creature, rubbery and smooth, and decides to take it back to Wick, who will most certainly be able to use it for something. She names the creature Borne, and is astonished when Borne continues to grow and change shape and one day even starts talking. Wick doesn’t trust Borne and wants to take him apart to learn more about him, but Rachel is drawn to Borne and refuses to give him to Wick.

As Borne and Rachel grow closer, the Balcony Cliffs come under serious threat, and Wick and Rachel wonder if they’ll be able to hold their territory. When the Magician offers Wick a deal, ensuring their protection, Rachel begins to wonder if she can trust anyone, including Wick. And how does Borne fit into all this? Everything that Rachel feels certain about is starting to fall apart, and their chances of surviving attacks from the feral children, the Mord proxies, Mord and even the Magician are slim to none.

Jeff VanderMeer has created one of the strangest worlds I’ve ever had the pleasure of reading about, which doesn’t surprise me, having read and loved his Nebula award-winning Annihilation. Borne takes things to an entirely different level, creating a dystopian world with very little that the reader can recognize. From swimming pools full of biotech sludge to poisonous rivers to giant killer bears to worms that live under your skin and assess your health, Borne is full of the weird and the wonderful. In many ways, the City is your familiar dystopian setting, full of crumbling buildings, strange plant and animal life that has evolved due to chemical spills and perhaps global warming, and dangers around every corner. Mord is a wonderful creation, a gigantic bio-engineered bear who has taken on a life of his own after being created by the Company. He has grown so big that he literally blots out the sun, and at some point he’s developed the ability to fly! I love the idea of Mord, even though he wipes out buildings with a single swipe of his paw (sort of a furry Godzilla). In my mind he’s simply getting revenge on the Company for creating him for their own nefarious purposes.

But as much as I loved Mord, I was smitten with Borne. Borne’s shape is ever-changing, so it’s hard to imagine what he looks like, but I thought VanderMeer did a great job describing him:

“...a hybrid of a sea anemone and squid: a sleek vase with rippling colors that strayed from purple toward deep blues and sea greens.”

Borne and Rachel have a mother/child relationship that was agonizingly accurate. Rachel wants Borne to stay small and dependant on her, and is reluctant to let go when Borne starts to “grow up,” as most children do, wanting to set out on his own. The day that Borne decides to move to another apartment was a heartbreaking one for Rachel, and even though Borne still acts like a child in many ways, Rachel understands she has to let him move on. Borne continually asks Rachel if he is a "person," and what else could a mother say to her child but "yes"?

This is one of those stories that begs for a prequel. So much has gone on in our character’s lives before the story even starts, and Rachel touches on some of these events, but those quick mentions simply whetted my appetite for more. What really happened to Wick when he worked for the Company? What’s the real story of the dead astronauts that Borne digs out of the ground and takes to his apartment? I want to know more about the foxes and Borne’s origins and Rachel’s early years as a refugee. VanderMeer has already written a short story about the strange bird (which I haven’t even talked about in this review!), and you can bet I’ll be reading it as soon as I have time. This is a fertile world that I want to return to, and I sincerely hope that the author does too.

The last part of the story moves very quickly as Rachel and Wick and Borne are all in mortal danger. I absolutely loved the ending. It was satisfying in many ways, both emotionally and as a resolution to the events that take place. VanderMeer’s imagination and uncannily beautiful prose make this a very special book, and one of my favorites this year.

Big thanks to the publisher for providing a review copy.

As a big fan of all things post-apocalyptic when it comes to fiction, I was intrigued by this tale of two survivors of a biotech apocalypse, eking out a pitiful existence amongst warring factions led by The Magician and her army of psychotic children and Mord, a giant savage bear created by The Company who went rogue, and his swathes of mini-me proxies.
Rachel and Wick inhabit the Balcony Cliffs, doing their best to survive day-to-day on the scant resources left on the land, while avoiding marauding evil in its many forms. One day, Rachel discovers a weird squid-like plant hybrid stuck to Mord's fur, which she brings home. Initially thinking it's some kind of pot plant, when it starts to move around their apartments, she realises there's more to her find than meets the eye. She names it Borne, and begins interacting with it as if it were her child.
As Borne begins to grow and sneak out into the cruel outside world, it sets in motion a sequence of events that threaten their already seemingly impossible existence, taking them to the heart of The Company and into the worlds of the Magician and Mord.
Part fantasy, part dystopian, part post apocalyptic disaster, this is so much more than the sum of its parts. At its heart is a totally endearing tale of maternal love between Rachel and Borne, her quasi-adopted child, set against a bleak and unforgiving world. Hugely recommended.

The world Jeff Vandermeer built in Borne is strange and beautiful and terrifying; rampaged by extreme biological enhancements created in a failed attempt to adjust to a rapidly changing environment.

The characters were complex and fascinating, especially the titular character of Borne. The story touches on ethics, science, and emotional connection (romantic and family; human or otherwise). Reading & enjoying this made me even more excited to read Jeff Vandermeer's Southern Reach trilogy. I have a feeling I'm going to like it!

We all just want to be people, and none of us know what that really means.

Well, damn.

I am consistently impressed with VanderMeer's writing; and this book was no exception.

For some reason, I always think that I have to sacrifice beautiful prose for quality fantasy/science fiction - and then I read VanderMeer's work and I remember that he is the real deal; a fucking super-author who can do it all!

It took me a while to read Borne; I couldn't fly through it the way I could with the Southern Reach trilogy. However, this wasn't because it was poor writing or boring by any means - if anything the complexity and beauty of his writing slows me down, and in no way is this a bad thing or a complaint. Another reviewer commented that reading VanderMeer's writing makes them feel like a better reader, and I agree whole heartily with this statement.

I absolutely adored lil' Borne (who turns out to not be that little) and loved his relationship with Rachel. It was such a pure, yet terrifying relationship - and it was everything I didn't know I needed from a book.

VanderMeer took readers of Borne through one hell of an adventure that was equal parts clever, emotional, and thrilling.

Borne was an impressive read, one that I am already itching to reread, and is sure to remain one of my favorite reads of 2017.

This book was absolutely spectacular! Thank you for the opportunity to read and rate it!

"There had never been a time when all the people everywhere lived in peace. No one had ever had a lasting peace without ignoring atrocity or history, which meant it wasn’t lasting at all. Which meant we were an irrational species."

Jeff VanderMeer’s latest book, Borne, tells the story of one woman’s struggles in a horrifying dystopian future: where she (Rachel) must scavenge for biotech to survive, where a giant bear (Mord) and the Wizard vie to rule, and where any weakness will kill you.

It is on one such scavenging trip that she finds Borne, stuck on the fur of Mord:

"…like a hybrid of sea anemone and squid: a sleek vase with rippling colors that strayed from purple toward deep blues and sea greens. Four vertical ridges slid up the sides of its warm and pulsating skin. The texture was as smooth as water-worn stone, if a bit rubbery. It smelled of beach reeds on lazy summer afternoons and, beneath the sea salt, of passion flowers. Much later, I realized it would have smelled much different to someone else, might even have appeared in a different form."

To Rachel, Borne looks and smells like the island refuge she and her parents enjoyed for two years before the discarded biotech of the Company ravaged their oasis with its poison and pollution. Borne represented a better time in her life, a time where she felt happy and at peace. And this was why, regardless of the fact that Borne might be dangerous, that he might cause trouble not only for her and Wick but for the rest of the city, she decided to keep him and raise him.

But, as Borne grew and developed, he began to ask what he was, as all children tend to do to understand themselves: “What am I?” It is something Borne struggled to answer about himself, with growing desperation – who was he? where did he come from? who made him? why was he there? – questions Rachel herself wasn’t even able to answer because she did not know either. He was unique, but who – or what – was he? At one point, Borne is trying to answer just that, filtering through possibility after possibility, but ultimately frustrated because there is no answer to be found in the confines of his own mind:

"My name is Borne.
[…]
I came here from a distant star.
I came here from the moon, like the dead astronauts. I was made by the Company.
I was made by someone.
I am not actually alive.
I am a robot.
I am a person.
I am a weapon.
I am not/intelligent.
[…]
What if I am the only one? What if I cannot die?
What if no one made me?"

Ultimately, this book seeks to define what makes a person a person.

"Wick never believed he was a person, was continually being undone by that. Borne was always trying to be a person because I wanted him to be one, because he thought that was right. We all want to be people, and none of us know what that really means."

One of the things I struggled with while reading this book was the feeling that Borne (the book, not the character) was trying to be too many things at once: a comedy, an allegory, a warning call, a message of hope, an intelligent piece of fiction. However, that’s not to say that makes the book bad. On the contrary, this idea of Borne being a complex melding and mixing of ideas and thoughts and feelings is one of the things that makes the book so powerful.

I really liked the personality of Borne (the character, not the book). He was complex and interesting and unique. I liked watching his development from “child” to “adolescent” to “adult,” for in many ways it mirrored the development of humans. He showed childlike curiosity and instability toward learning; he showed an adolescence desire for independence and freedom; and he showed an adult’s deepest desire: to understand why he was there and to figure out how to make a difference in the world around him.

Overall, Borne was an interesting look at this future, desolate, and nameless world. It didn’t question or delve into how it got to that point, instead, it gleaned over the details of how the Company essentially poisoned the Earth. Instead, the book is more concerned with the present: how do people survive and live, how to people feel about themselves and others, what relationships do people have, etc.? It follows these people – namely Rachel, Wick, and Borne – as they seek to understand the world as it is around them and how they fit in.

I think one of the reasons I didn’t enjoy this book as much as I might otherwise have is, because it was so dense, I don’t think it necessarily lent itself well to an audiobook format. This is the kind of book that you need to really read, immerse yourself in, and give yourself time to digest. (Though I will admit that one of the best things about the audiobook was the narrator’s impersonation of Borne!)

I also was a little disappointed by the vagueness of how the world got to the state it was in and wanted more details in terms of the specific role the Company played; my personal dissatisfaction may have slightly tinged my overall view of the book. Even though the way the book was written makes logical sense: the characters themselves would probably only have limited knowledge of what events happened as they gradually occurred over time, and left with only rumors after the “main event.” The author makes a point of saying as much:

"Names of people, of places, meant so little, and so we had stopped burdening others by seeking them. The map of the old horizon was like being haunted by a grotesque fairy tale, something that when voiced came out not as words but as sounds in the aftermath of an atrocity. Anonymity amongst all the wreckage of the Earth, this was what I sought. And a good pair of boots for when it got cold. And an old tin of soup half hidden in the rubble. These things became blissful; how could we names have power next to that?"

I do feel like a thorough reread of this book later down the line will instill a better understanding of the breadth and depth of this book as a whole.

I don’t want to dissuade you from this book, and if the premise sounds interesting to you, definitely give it a go! Even though I didn’t personally like it, I must say that Jeff VanderMeer is a great writer. The story itself is very well-written, both in terms of style and plot development. The characters (Rachel, Wick, Borne) are very complex and well-developed as well. The cover is also very eye-catching and one of the main reasons I was drawn to this book.

Thank you to NetGalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for an advanced copy of this eBook in exchange for an honest review!

This review has been posted on MBTB's blog:

It’s hard not to have thoughts that run parallel and in contrast to Jeff VanderMeer’s in his latest biological disaster book. You might also be able to hear an ironic soundtrack as the book spirals down into the pit of despair. Like: When Rachel met Wick. “It’s the end of the world as you know it.” “I see trees of green, red roses, too. I see them bloom for me and you. And I say to myself, What a wonderful world.”

There is strange life in the decaying, battered, dying world that contains Rachel and Wick. We meet them initially without much of a back story. They live in what appears to once have been an apartment building. The structure is disintegrating, much of the contents have been looted or torn apart. The same can be said for their immediate world: The City.

The environment doesn’t seem too dissimilar to our world, but it is one ravaged by ecological and environmental disaster.

VanderMeer plays with words, as does his title creation, Borne. Who is Borne? He is some sort of entity. At first he appears to be a sea creature (a long way from any sea) or a plant. As he grows he resembles a vase with lots of eyes and tentacles. (Here is a link to a sketch VanderMeer drew of Borne. The rather fanciful picture on the book cover doesn't correlate with VanderMeer's description!) His only friend is Rachel. Rachel becomes his surrogate mother. She has plucked him off the fur of a giant flying golden bear and raised him. If it sounds like a fairy tale, it’s a gruesome and apocalyptic one.

Rachel and Wick scavenge food, water, and medicine. It is the only way to exist in a world that no longer appears to be capable of producing anything useful. Some creatures may be living in and/or escaping from a stew of biological experiments gone wrong and chemical waste. Although help does not appear to be forthcoming, they persist in surviving. The story is told from Rachel’s viewpoint, and she still has her humanity intact, for the most part. She sees other people, mostly young ones, trying to survive as well. But it has come to the point where humanity is being lost in the struggle for the limited resources left.

The struggle is made even more difficult by the angry, crazy, marauding flying bear, the strange woman they call The Magician who can wink in and out of existence, and the smaller bears who are acolytes of the giant bear.

The Company, an anonymous, ominous sounding organization, whose headquarters has been mutilated by the giant bear, is somehow linked to the disaster. Animals who are familiar in face, but not especially in habits, flit in and out of sight. Other creatures are dreadful amalgams of human and biotech twisting.

Back to the word twisting by VanderMeer and Borne. The giant bear is called “Mord.” Using Google to translate the word from several different languages, “mord” can mean bite, snout, murder. That about describes insatiable giant Mord. Borne (yes, he can talk) and Rachel joke that Borne was born somehow but that Rachel has borne him (like a burden, perhaps) home from the fur of the bear. As Borne’s linguistic skills increase, he plays with word sounds and stretches them into a jangle of far-flung words.

VanderMeer’s popular Southern Reach trilogy also had lifeforms evolving, combining in a terrifying, fascinating way. He uses the same theme here, once again in a terrifying, fascinating way. Some of his visions are creepy and hard to shake off. But evolution has been sped up by man and the world is heading towards either oblivion or balance.

Lots of science fiction/fantasy books are difficult to read quickly until the jargon, landscape, and hierarchies are understood. “Borne” is always off-balance and redefining what the story is about, so often the going is slow. “Borne” is a cautionary tale, undoubtedly, as were his Southern Reach books. Are we listening?

From our LitReactor review by Max Booth III:

I picked up this book expecting something completely different than what I read, but I was not left disappointed. At its heart, Borne is a story about motherhood. How far mothers will go to protect their children. How a mother’s life changes for the better, and for worse, as she adapts to this new creature, this new person. It’s also a story about identity, about what makes a person a person. Have you ever stopped and truly considered it? If not, Borne will definitely get the contemplations rolling inside that little noggin of yours.

This book falls under the same category as movies like The Iron Giant and E.T. Although, instead of a child taking care of an alien or robot, we have a badass woman tending to...something unnatural, but also, at the same time, more natural than anything that’s ever existed. Plus, as previously mentioned, there’s a giant fucking bear tearing shit up. As usual, VanderMeer’s worldbuilding is concrete, and to read this book is to take a small vacation into another world.

I instantly fell in love with Borne, and also Borne the character, and I’ve no doubt in my mind you will as well.

This is a must-read.

Amorphous shapeshifting blobs, winged children, and giant flying bears, oh my. Jeff VanderMeer’s Borne is a lyrical and lovely novel whose stylistic aplomb, weird inventiveness, and great heart more than compensate for what might have ordinarily been noted as flaws in the book. Sure, there are issues, but I loved nearly every minute of Borne, and if it hadn’t come in the same month I’d finished the exceptional City of Miracles and A Gentleman in Moscow, it would have been my best read of the month.

Borne is told from the first-person perspective of Rachel, a scavenger trying to survive a post-apocalyptic world in the near-ruins of a city ruled over by a Godzilla-sized flying bear named Mord. The city is home to The Company, a once powerful and mysterious biotech organization that created Mord and then, as almost anyone could have predicted, was destroyed by him. Mord alone is inventive enough (how does he fly? Who knows? Who cares?). But VanderMeer rarely settles for the “normally weird,” and so he adds the twist that people follow Mord in order to scavenge the flotsam and jetsam that gets stuck in his fur as he travels the city. Sometimes they just wait for it to fall off; other times that scale his mass as he sleeps, searching for something of value.

In one of her scavenging trips, Rachel finds, well, she’s not sure what it is. At first she thinks it (looking like a “half-closed stranded sea anemone”) a plant, then a dumb animal, then, as becomes clear, something more. Rachel is intrigued, her roommate Wick (who once worked for the Company) more worried, especially as Borne starts to demonstrate several traits: speech, an accelerated growth rate, intelligence (though with the knowledge of a young child), shapeshifting, and most worrisome—the ability to absorb or “sample” living things.

Borne then becomes several books as it moves forward. One is a post-apocalyptic novel that makes use of all that genre’s tropes (in original fashion): ecological disaster, refugees, distrust, scavenging, a dog-eat-dog ethos (balanced, as is often the case in other such works, with moments of surprising—and thus all the more effectively moving—kindness and compassion). It’s also a mystery. Or several mysteries. Who/what is Borne? Where did he come from? Who created him and for what purpose? Why did Wick leave the Company? What is the Company and where did its advanced tech come from? Who is The Magician (a mysterious figure seeking to reclaim the city from Mord)? Even Rachel’s own muddled memories of her refugee childhood offer up a potential mystery. Borne is also possibly a love story (Wick and Rachel), though VanderMeer expertly keeps us dancing on the edge of that one, portraying their relationship with all the complexity one would expect of any such pairing in a world such as this.

But perhaps most centrally, it’s a story about being a parent. For Borne is the quintessential blank slate per Rousseau’s view of childhood. He “absorbs” everything, not just matter but information, ethics, emotions. Always growing, evolving, questioning. His name itself is a clue to this aspect, as Rachel tells us she “bore” him. As are Borne’s questions, which any beleaguered parent will recognize as all too familiar (“why is water wet?”). At first VanderMeer is content to let the reader themselves make these connections, as for instance when she early on treats him first as a house plant, then as a pet, and finally as more, as she reads to him, tries to teach him the difference between right and wrong.

Finally, a point comes when the two of them look out on the same view, but what to her is terrible is to him beautiful, and Rachel thinks:

I realized right then in that moment that I’d begun to love him. Because he didn’t see the world like I saw the world. He didn’t see the traps. Because he made me rethink even simple words . . . That was the moment I knew I’d decided to trade my safety for something else. That was the moment . . . I had crossed over into another place.

That scene reminded me of how the first time pushing my infant son in the stroller for the first time I thought to myself as I waited for a car to cross before us that I would throw my body between my son and that car if I needed to. Instantly. Without thinking. I had “crossed over.”

As the book progresses, the parenting theme becomes ever more explicit even as it becomes more emotionally fraught, culminating in Rachel’s simple declaration: “I’m like a mother to Borne . . . He’s like my child.” Which is a good decision I think, since as the parallel grows ever more clear, keeping it unnamed just starts to seem overly cute. Besides, such direct acknowledgement allows for yet another shift in their relationship.

Because of course children don’t “not see the traps” forever. Nor do they stay home. They begin to want to explore the wider world. They start to wonder who they are, who they might turn out to be. Soon Rachel and Borne’s conversations are more and more complicated, eventually Borne decides he needs to “move out” — first down the hall and then, later, for reasons I won’t spoil, even farther.

Beyond the book’s mature themes, it’s filled as well with a wild inventory of creativity — feral children with “gossamer wings”, Mord “proxies,” intelligent foxes, minnows that act as cocktails, biotech camouflage robes, beetles that when “shoved in your ear . . . could rid you of memories and add memories . . . someone else’s happier memories from long ago, from places that didn’t exist anymore.” Some of these, such as the children, come and go a bit too quickly, or are dropped without being on stage long enough for full impact, such as The Magician. But these flaws pale beside the emotional heft of the relationships in the book — Rachel and Borne, Rachel and Wick — as well as the larger issues explored in the novel. The ways in which we impoverish ourselves and our world. The ways in which that world will respond in ways we cannot anticipate or even, perhaps, cannot even comprehend as “response” (themes found as well in VanderMeer’s excellent SOUTHERN REACH trilogy). What it means to be human. How we react when faced with the inhuman. Thanks to those few flaws, Borne is not a perfect book. But thanks to the way it moves the reader’s heart, provokes the reader’s mind, and thanks as well to its literarily lyrical language, it edges up pretty close to being a great one.

The notion of genre fiction has become considerably more nebulous in recent years. While there have always been authors who refused to be bound within genre confines, it seems that the trend toward using genre conventions to inform more literary-minded fiction has been on the upswing.

However, that pendulum swings both ways. Take a guy like Jeff VanderMeer, a writer who in many ways seems to be doing the opposite. That is, he’s folding more “serious” fiction concepts into works of speculative fiction. He sits among the vanguard of the literary mélange known as the “New Weird,” embracing and discarding tropes as he sees fit and rearranging them in unexpected ways to create strange and compelling works.

His latest is “Borne,” a difficult-to-pigeonhole exploration of a dystopian future that follows a woman carving out a hardscrabble existence as a scavenger on the outskirts of a ruined, poisoned city. Her life is thrown into chaos when a new, unknown quantity enters her world and changes everything.

Rachel ekes out a meager life amidst the rubble of a destroyed city, a city whose downfall came at the hands of the shadowy and half-remembered Company, a biotech corporation whose deterioration led to massive destruction and the creation of inexplicable monstrosities – most notably the still-active guardian of Company headquarters, a building-sized golden bear known as Mord who also happens to possess the power of flight.

She and her companion Wick – a biotech homebrewer and black marketer – live in a shoddy, run-down sanctuary that they have rigged with tricks and traps to protect them from not only Mord, but the forces of the mysterious power-seeker known only as the Magician.

But when Rachel winds up finding a mysterious organism – plucked from the fur of Mord himself – everything is irrevocably altered. This little green lump is indistinguishable as animal or vegetable, natural or manufactured. Yet Rachel finds herself growing attached – naming it “Borne” - as it somehow elicits memories of the bygone days before the world changed forever.

Despite knowing that attachment will only weaken her, she continues caring for Borne – much to the chagrin of Wick. And as Borne grows, he begins to move … and to talk … and to grow some more. His rapid development is infused with an innocence that Rachel can’t help but find appealing, living as she does in a place where innocence seemed lost long ago.

But there’s more to the situation than Rachel truly understands. As Borne becomes something she never anticipated and seismic shifts in the city’s power hierarchy begin to shake everything apart, Rachel soon discovers that even the little she thought she knew – about Borne, about Wick, about herself – can be called into question. She believed that her life was all about surviving, but now, she will learn what it really means to be a survivor.

VanderMeer’s world-building gifts are on full display. The richest fictional worlds are the ones that manage to be meticulously detailed and boldly rendered while avoiding the trap of expository hand-holding; this one, with its piecemeal history and ragged flashbacks (and occasionally unreliable narration) is as rich as they come. It’s an immersive and incredibly complex environment, yet it is conveyed with a smooth ease that snap-captures the imagination of the reader.

And the characters who populate that world, well … they’re magnetic. Too often, genre fiction allows character to fall by the wayside; the focus on ideas or plot resulting in characters rendered vague or flat by disinterest. In “Borne,” we’re instead treated to complicated and fluid relationship dynamics, an almost-love triangle between Rachel, Wick and Borne that is surprising both in its emotional impact and its narrative execution.

There’s a deep-down twistedness to this book; it’s one of VanderMeer’s hallmarks. One of the more notable shared qualities among the writers of the New Weird is a knack for combining the cerebral and the visceral; with the possible exception of China Mieville, VanderMeer’s likely the best of the bunch when it comes to that head-scratch/stomach-punch one-two.

“Borne” is a work that exemplifies the notion of pick-and-choose literature; there are elements of science fiction and fantasy of course, but also flavors of thriller and love story and coming of age. And regardless of genre influence, there’s a crackling intelligence on every page. It’s new, it’s weird … and it is wonderful.

I tried but I just couldn't get into this. Understand that it's not one of my wideranging genres and that I'm quite certain others will adore it. I did not finish; am sure I missed a well done novel.

A remarkably weird book. Flying gigantic bears, other creatures made by biotec that could be human,
environmental disaster, pollution and a pretty great heroine. What could be better?

This one is hard to rate.
I was so excited to read this....And when I started reading it, oh how much I loved the very beginning, the characters, and the world-building, (I mean there's a flying bear-how rad is that?!) yet, after awhile, I felt this just really dragged and then with the constant secrets-like nothing was answered till like 94 % in the book-which was just a little too long to have anything revealed in the little amount of book left.

Overall, a unique book; however, it was just a little too slow for me.

I received a copy of this book through NetGalley for an honest opinion. My thanks to Jeff VanderMeer and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for the opportunity.

Borne is Jeff VanderMeer’s first new novel since his Southern Reach trilogy. I was stunned by reading it, and I am not sure that I can really do it justice. The novel is set in a post-apocalyptic landscape: a nameless city that was first transformed by a biotech enterprise known only as the Company, and then abandoned when the Company broke down or abandoned the region (it is not entirely clear which). The Company itself seems to have come from elsewhere; perhaps it is (as the novel suggests at one point) a mechanism of “the future exploiting the past, or the past exploiting the future,” or “another version of Earth” enriching itself at the expense of this one. (The issue is not resolved, but I find it suggestive: it’s a far better version of Nick Land’s fantasy of capital as an alien parasite from the future). (The idea of the future exploiting its own past — which is our present — is one that I find especially compelling; something like this is also the premise of Grant Morrison’s Seven Soldiers).

In any case, the city in which Borne is set is basically a desert; and there is nothing left but ruins, noxious chemicals, and the remnants of the Company’s biotech — much of which is mutated and broken. There are many dangers: polluted water, violent feral children, venomous beasts, and a gigantic flying bear named Mord who ravages and destroys whatever he cannot control. There doesn’t seem to be any exit from this hellscape: there are remembered past scenes, and the elsewhere from which the Company emerged, and to which it has presumably returned — but none of these are accessible to the characters in the world of the novel.

In this landscape, the novel’s narrator Rachel ekes out a living as a scavenger, venturing out into the ruins to find usable bits and pieces of abandoned stuff — anything that can either be eaten, put to work, or somehow repurposed. Her partner, Wick, is a broken man who used to work for the Company, and still manages to engineer working biotech from the fragments Rachel brings him: worms that, introduced under the skin, can clean and heal wounds; bugs that provide new memories, or erase old ones; “alcohol minnows” that can be swallowed to get you drunk. All this is background; Rachel meticulously describes it in a flat and direct manner. This is the given: that which must be taken for granted, the reality in front of her — even if she has fragmentary memories of a happier childhood, before the world was destroyed.

The novel’s landscape/background is vividly drawn, imposing, and indeed sobering — since VanderMeer is in fact warning us about how bad it can get if we continue down our current route of environmental catastrophe, and of using technology which has no end or rationale except subordinating everything in the world, and extracting maximum profits. However, at the same time VanderMeer is also warning us that this devastation isn’t the end — there is also the existential dread of surviving the end of the world, of living on in its aftermath, of having to outlive the ruination of everything that made living worthwhile. Of having to go on, and to discover that things can become even worse than what you thought was already the worst we could endure. As Rachel remarks at one point: “Apparently we’d been richer than we thought, to suffer such continual diminishment and still be alive.”

But all this is still only background. What really makes the book, what really impassions the reader (or, at least, me as a reader) is two things: Rachel’s voice; and the creature known as Borne, who gives the novel its title. As for the first: Rachel is a survivor, but this fact/condition is not romanticized (as it all too often is in dystopian fiction). Rachel’s voice is weary and matter of fact, even when she recounts the most bizarre and incredible things. There is no triumphalism in her; she is not any sort of savior. Surviving itself is the most that she can hope for; but survival always has its price, since the more you survive the more you suffer. The novel has a provisionally happy ending, but it is still one in which survival — even with something of an improvement in one’s circumstances — is tenuous and fragile, always subject to revocation, to new shocks and surprises. The desolation remains. There is no moment of self-congratulatory resilience.

As for the second: Borne is a bit of biotech that Rachel discovers one day. She initially refers to Borne as an “it”; but quickly she moves to referring to Borne as a “he.” At first, Borne is tiny, something “like a hybrid of sea anemone and squid: a sleek vase with rippling colors that strayed from purple toward deep blues and sea greens.” But as Borne grows, Rachel discovers that he can change his shape at will, and mimic or impersonate just about anyone and anything. Also, Borne learns to speak, and to read and write. Rachel at first raises him like a child; but soon she has to accept his independence from her guidance, as any parent must with any growing child. In any case, Borne is the novel’s richest and strangest creation. Along with Rachel, we come to love and admire him, for his childlike enthusiasm and wonder, as well as for the way he loves her back. But in the course of the novel, along with Rachel, we are ultimately forced to realize that — for all his beauty and lovability — Borne is also a monster, and a danger to survival.

Rachel insists on regarding Borne in human terms. She assures him over and over that he is a person, in the same way that human beings are persons. But she (and we, reading her narrative) are finally forced to recognize that Borne is not, after all, human; and that the “human” itself — whatever essential or merely contingent attributes we might assign to it — is not a viable construction in and of itself, but must always rely on — or be dependent upon, or find itself networked with — that which is not human, which is inhuman, and which cannot ever be humanized. This would be true even in the case (not envisioned in the novel, and probably never having existed) of a vital and unspoiled Nature; and it is all the more true in the denatured nature, the aggressively “humanized” nature, within which Rachel finds herself — and, I am inclined to say, within which we in the Anthropocene inevitably find ourselves. “Turn and face the strange” — as David Bowie sang, in what might well be the motto for all Weird Fiction; though especially for Weird Fiction today — much more than in the time of colonialism and of Lovecraft. How antiquated Lovecraft’s vision of alien powers appears today. Lovecraft mythologized an indifferent Nature, whose horror resided in the fact that it does not care for us, is not in any way concerned with us, and may well crush us out of simple negligence (rather than anything that can be moralized as “evil”). Today, Lovecraft’s cold materialist vision seems outmoded, and hopelessly naive; and it even works as a sort of consolation. The menace of Cthulhu is so much simpler than the actuality of systems that threaten us precisely because we are so intimately intertwined with them. VanderMeer has often, rightly, rejected comparisons of his work with Lovecraft’s; books like Borne (and like the Southern Reach and Ambergris trilogies) indeed forge a new path for Weird Fiction, away from Lovecraft’s outworn metaphysics and towards a new sense of how the inhuman impinges upon us, all the more so because it cannot be recuperated in human terms.

The Anthropocene means that “we” (human beings) have irreversibly altered the entire biosphere; but it also means that, in doing so, we have exposed ourselves, more fully and more nakedly than ever before, to the geological and biological forces that respond to us in ways that we cannot anticipate or control. This seems to me to be the core of what Jeff VanderMeer is exploring — and seducing us to recognize. In Borne, the material forces unleashed by the Company do not do what the Company wanted them to do, nor what anyone else might want them to do. These material forces have an impetus, and an intelligence, all their own. They have twisted, both for good and for ill, into strange and ungainly patterns that stretch well beyond us — and that may continue, with their own interests and desires, even when we are gone. As Rachel says, very near the end, the animal descendants of the Company’s mutant creations “will outstrip all of us in time, and the story of the city will someday be their story, not ours.” This is the point to which Borne brings us, and the prospect with which it leaves us. We live in an ongoing catastrophe; but we may be able to outlive it, or to maintain ourselves beyond it. The novel leaves us with a diminished world, but one in which the worst destructive forces have been defeated (or have just played themselves out), and in which we can perhaps indulge hope for a yet more distant future, beyond our own extinction, in which things might at least be slightly better, or even (these are the last two words of the novel) “truly beautiful.”

In a devastated city, a young woman named Rachel carefully climbs up the side of a gigantic, sleeping bear in order to scavenge for useful biotech components. She finds something about the size of her fist that reminds her of a sea anemone and brings it to the crumbling building she calls home. She names it Borne and becomes strangely attached to it as it grows and learns to speak. Eventually, this being becomes something/someone that changes the future of her ruined city.
This world that Vandermeer has created is filled with amazing creatures of all sorts, human, animal and biotech. It is rich with detail and I found myself fully immersed in it almost immediately. I felt an affinity for the well developed and complex main characters, which made their perils more suspenseful. I was especially fond of Borne, who was always asking, "Am I a person?" I'd definitely say yes. Although this world was wildly different, I was easily able to suspend my disbelief and accept the bizarre events that unfolded.
I enjoyed this book very much and recommend it highly. I had a hard time putting it down. I hope there will be sequels as I'm still haunted by this world and wondering about the future of this city and how Rachel and her friends will fare.

I received this ARC from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Tired of the YA dystopian books that have over saturated the market these past few years? VanderMeer brings in a breath of fresh air to the dystopian genre (not YA) with this novel about environmentalism, pollution, genetic engineering, and parenting. The setting is reminiscent of Area X in his Southern Reach trilogy.

Jeff VanderMeer has a very specific writing style, which I found pretentious and tedious when I read Annihilation. However, it worked for me in this book. Another reviewer mentioned it having to do with the fact that there's an emotional center and I have to agree completely.

While the landscape and environment play a large role in the book, the main focus of the story is on the characters. Rachel, Wick, and Borne (as well as the Magician and Mord) and their relationships are what set this apart from Annihilation.

VanderMeer manages to capture the mood he seems to like for his books, but this time succeeds in creating characters to care about. You need to know and care about the relationships to figure out the mysteries scattered throughout.

The fight scenes aren't over written, but detailed enough for those who like that sort of thing.

4.5 stars rounds to 5.

Just as it is almost impossible to describe the plot of this novel, I can't explain why it touched me so much. Set in an apocalyptic landscape dominated by a gigantic bear called Mord, this is the story of Rachel, a scavenger who finds Borne. He is not human, but he is a person. And/or a weapon. Or not. Rachel teaches Borne everything she can, and it's in these conversations that lies the heart of this book. Borne asks her questions, much like a child would, and the beauty, sadness and poignancy of these dialogues make this an outstanding book. But I'm making it sound like it's all talk, and it's not. The action is also outstanding. Some parts are unbearably suspenseful (it may have something to do with bears), and so well written that you can feel the heat pounding on your head, the thirst, the panic... Now I'm making it sound too serious, but it is also funny sometimes. Some parts are hard to read, but the story is also full of compassion. Borne the novel, as Borne the character, is full of contradictions and it's worth getting to know. Five stars.