With every new Jeff VanderMeer book it seems to get harder and harder to nail down or classify his work, which is why when pressed for something tangible, so many readers circle back to one word: Weird. The same qualities that make his novels difficult to classify make them equally difficult to rate. Is this Art? Literature? Genius? Garbage? Is it poetry? Narrative? Is the villain of this novel a corporation, a salamander...or a murderous duck?! Where Borne to my mind told a more linear, accessible story, Dead Astronauts (set in the same universe), feels more like the oozing, slippery, fractured world it depicts. It's much more impressionistic, so rather than going from point-A to point-B, the narrative and structure shifts perspectives radically, and even mimics the many frankensteined creatures that exist in this surreal world. I wouldn't say this is the type of book you can just put in anyone's hands and tell them it's amazing, but for the patient and adventurous, it's a strange, beautiful, and intriguing trip.

I loved Borne. This felt like Borne was ramped up on the writing and the worldbuilding, but dropped that character building. It was a bit of a slog for me to get through. I don't think it was bad, but I didn't love it as much as I hoped I would.

Beautiful prose, with some very compelling vignettes, arcs, themes, and characters. This book does not prompt you to expect that there will be narrative coherence among the various elements, but I still hoped that the disparate pieces would hang together better. As it is, it's a fragmented, kaleidoscopic narrative. This may be better for some readers, but unfortunately I was not one of them. (Note: I have not read Borne, which may have helped me with this book.)

Jeff VanderMeer is one of my auto-buy authors and especially when the book is set in the universe of Borne. I loved Borne and The Strange Bird so I had to pick this one up too and I was not disappointed.

The story takes place in the same nameless city as in Borne and explores the story of the three dead astronauts, Grayson, Morse, and Chen, we come across in the previous books. They are caught up in a battle against the Company, a biotech enterprise that has produced bio-engineered creatures and organisms which subsequently changed the face of the earth forever: Not only has the environment been destroyed, time and space have lost their meaning too. Throughout the book, the three astronauts travel through various versions of the city while arriving at various stages of the Company's power to try to intervene.

This is another weird and wonderful novel by Jeff Vandermeer. If you loved Borne or The Southern Reach Trilogy you will love this one too. I’d also recommend this to fans of weird fiction about climate change and the perils of bioengineering and technology.

I must not be intelligent enough to understand this book, because I was extraordinarily confused the entire time. I didn't see how anything connected to anything. The first half of the book focused on three people, the middle of the book was a bunch of random stories about foxes, and the end of the story focused sort of on Charlie X and also the fox again? And other stuff? No idea how any of it went together, everything seemed extremely disjointed and unclear. I understood none of it, but I read through the entire thing anyway. Not the book for me.

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 of the universe. 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 who looms large over the narrative. 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 for 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 to be 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 it. 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.

A great continuation of the Borne universe. I look forward to seeking it adapted for television. Recommended for anyone that wants to learn more about the Company in the original story.

I can see why some people find this confusing, but I loved every bit of it! I especially love how James VanderMeer's books put a visceral face on the horror inherent in the harm humans are doing to the life and the environment around us. I also love how he is able to both do something unconventional with language and keep the emotions fresh- I really cared about these three Astronauts even though they are so alien and abstract.

While the AREA X books are unlikely to be unseated from the seat of my "Peak VanderMeer" throne of love and adoration, DEAD ASTRONAUTS is a gorgeous book inside and out. Seriously, though: have you admired that hallucinatory jacket yet? AND have you slipped that jacket off to admire the Lovecraftian horrors so beautifully figured in blue on black beneath? One might say that the aesthetic of this book is that of a supersaturated bruise. In all seriousness, though, this is a book that demands a long and thunderous savor. Let its beautiful sentences pummel, even honeycomb you. Let yourself be washed away. Fall in love with the ephemeral by way of the eternal. Fall in love with Moss. The other astronauts keep doing so. And yes, another detail I love to report: This book is extremely queer, depicting what amounts to a loving, supportive, polyamorous relationship between the three astronauts. Quite apart from their relationship--which could be sexual but could also not be, depending on how you perceive the interactions of bodies that are not always bodies and not always coherent when they ARE--VanderMeer explores the intersections between bodies (or unbodies) and gender (or lack thereof) without stumbling into the usual ruts.

But reader beware: This is more than just a *slightly* timey-wimey book. This is the most brain-bending swan song of a love affair between three beings that may or may not exist in any one dimension at any time. and place. Each sentence is an adventure and each sentence lands somewhere unmapped and unmappable. The overall effect is profoundly unsettling and completely unlike ANNIHILATION et al, which have obvious plot arcs and play with time and reality as aesthetic rather than medium. That said, I cannot recommend this book highly enough to those willing to push their brains into the unknown.

I really enjoy reading Borne by Jeff Vandermeer, but I do not understand what is going on in this book. I had to read paragraphs over again. I really want to like this book, but this is a confusing read and would like to pick this up again when I can understand what is going on.

I enjoyed this book though I felt I did not understand half of it after finishing it I realized it is a sort of prequel to the authors earlier books which I haven't read yet

I'm still of the opinion that VanderMeer's best book thus far is Annihilation. And while this made for an interesting read I'd propose that VanderMeer comes across as much more of a trained novelist as opposed to stories of the shorter form.

There will always be a place for straightforward narrative fiction. There will always be stories that need to be told, tales that move from Point A to Point B and so on, following a linear path from beginning to end. Tales filled with heartbreak and humor, driven by plot and character.

But sometimes? Sometimes, you just want to get weird. And for those times, well … Jeff VanderMeer can help you out.

VanderMeer – one of our leading purveyors of the literary subgenre dubbed “weird fiction” – has a strange and exquisitely opaque new novel. "Dead Astronauts" is a prequel of sorts to his equally bizarre 2017 novel “Borne,” its title a reference to a line in that previous book. It brings us back to the ravaged future VanderMeer created for “Borne,” only slightly earlier in the timeline of that technocorporate dystopia.

It is a challenging experiment of a novel, marked by the vivid weirdness and repetitive complexity that features prominently in VanderMeer’s work. There’s a narrative fluidity to it all, marked by an odd combination of optimism about and suspicion toward technology and the way it impacts the world around us in ways both miniscule and massive.

Synopsizing the plot of a book like “Dead Astronauts” is a fool’s errand. VanderMeer’s books tend to be idea-packed puzzle boxes driven by character and imagery; this one is no different. Our central figures are a dimension-spanning trio – one human and two nonhuman humanoids. The human is Grayson, an actual astronaut whose years-long mission into space came to a tragic conclusion upon a return to a crumbled husk of a homeworld. Then there’s Chen, a clairvoyant creature whose visions of the future come at the cost of a constant fight against a breakup into his component parts. Finally, there’s Moss, whose name comes from the fact that she is literally made of moss; her science experiment origins have left her with the ability to open doors between dimensions.

Together, these three roam from universe to universe, constantly seeking a parallel world where the mighty City has not yet fallen prey to the massive and predatory Company, a monolithic entity devoted to profit through progress (though their definition of “progress” seems inconsistent and unsettlingly opaque). In their journeys, they encounter strange creatures born of the Company’s horrible experiments – namely, a telepathic blue fox and a malevolent duck. Both of these beasts signify the rot of the world under the auspices of the Company.

But that’s not all. We’re also invited to look at this world through other eyes. A monstrous Leviathan grown large over the course of centuries in the dumping ponds of failed experiments. A deranged madman who sacrificed his sanity in service to the Company’s scientific efforts and flees the memory of his most dangerous creation. A homeless woman whose discovery of an unstuck-in-time journal from the pen of a Company scientist leaves her wondering at demons both real and imagined.

VanderMeer is a master of world-building – and not just in the manner you might expect. Yes, he has an incredible gift for the creation of elaborate universes, rich in detail. The structures of his settings are meticulous and fascinating, filled with visceral details that are complex and compelling. But he is also tremendously gifted at creating labyrinthine inner worlds, dropping us into varied psyches with individualized and vivid views of their circumstances. That ability to capture both the grand scale of a vast universe and the nuanced minutiae of an individual personality with equal aplomb is rare … and VanderMeer unleashes it here.

He’s unafraid to flout convention as well, shifting from perspective to perspective with little warning. Those varying perspectives also often come with stylistic shifts; VanderMeer moves from voice to voice with ease. The end result is a book that makes demands of a reader’s attention, but greatly rewards those who meet those demands.

It should be noted that while “Dead Astronauts” is a prequel, it stands strong on its own. You can read this book with no prerequisite; reading “Borne” would certainly contribute to your engagement, but it isn’t necessary.

“Dead Astronauts” is another literary challenge issued by Jeff VanderMeer, an experimental work aimed at exploring the possibilities inherent to pushing genre tropes to their limits and beyond. It isn’t an easy read, but it is 100% worth the effort. Bold, bizarre and bleakly beautiful, you’ve never experienced anything quite like it.

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux/MCD on December 3, 2019

Dead Astronauts is told, in part, from the perspective of a fox who merged with a biomechanical version of itself and was sent on missions of exploration, apparently to other times or universes. The fox plotted revenge against the humans who, in its view, were torturers. After all, humans hunt foxes for sport because foxes can’t hunt humans. When it is the fox’s turn to kill, it muses: “Killing is easy. I think that’s why people do it so much.”

One theme of Dead Astronauts is that after centuries of being hunted or used as test subjects, animals might have the last laugh. Scientists who try to un-fox a fox might find themselves outfoxed. In that regard, Dead Astronauts might be viewed as an animal rights story, a reminder that our fear of alien abduction is no different than a bird’s fear of being caged by humans, that gathering data by harming an animal is no different than an animal tearing apart a human to satisfy its curiosity. It’s all just a matter of perspective.

The story might also be viewed as a cautionary tale of the consequences that follow from the human capacity to block unhappy thoughts. The fox imagines what humans might ask if they were honest: “Do you have the new phone yet that someone made continents away because they were forced to and then someone else starved to death because when they mined the components they destroyed all the crop lands and the forest?”

While this is in part the story of a fox, it is also the story of all foxes, because the fox as a species knows how to burrow down, to hide, to survive, perhaps to outlast humanity. Sometimes it is the story of birds and fish, both specific creatures and a species in general. We’re all part of the same world, the novel suggests, one that humans are insufficiently meek to inherit.

Yet the story is also told, in part, from the perspective of Charlie X, a human who was still just Charlie when, as a boy, his father worked for the Company. Charlie’s gift was the creation of new creatures, biomechanical life forms with altered genes, some of which he created without the Company’s knowledge. Charlie, like the blue fox he created, viewed his own creator — his father — as a torturer.

Charlie and the Company made something of a mess. The scientists who made the mess, likened to magicians, left destruction in their wake, at least in one universe. A homeless woman from the past named Sarah, contemplating an apparent journal from the future, seems to suggest that there might be something worth living for, even if that thing is unknowable. Just ask the fox.

Maybe those few facts are spoilers (although I would have found a user’s guide to be helpful) because the first three quarters of the novel leave the reader clueless about what’s going on. Those chapters introduce three characters: Grayson, Chen, and Moss. One of them might be a dead astronaut, or perhaps they all are. Shape-shifting Moss might literally be moss, but perhaps none of them are human, at least not now. They seem to be living different versions of the same history over and over, repeatedly encountering a blue fox and a duck with a broken wing, not knowing from one encounter to the next whether those creatures will be allies or enemies. They seem to be looking for Charlie X, although what they hope to accomplish by finding him is unclear. I assume they want to change the past or damage the Company through a strategy yet to be invented.

Does such a baffling story merit a recommendation? At times the narrative approaches incomprehensibility. I suppose the same might be said about Ulysses, a highly regarded classic by those who made it the end, so perhaps hard sledding isn’t a reason to condemn a novel. I can say that the fox has more characterization than is given to the typical fictional fox, and that the broad outlines of biogenetic engineering that form the novel’s background, while common in science fiction, are intriguing. I can say that the prose is sometimes poetic, although Jeff VanderMeer sometimes abandons poetry to repeat the same cluster of sentences dozens of times over the course of several pages. I can say that I would probably get more out of the novel after a second reading, but I don’t know if I will ever find the energy to struggle through it again (I’m still awaiting the strength to take another stab at Ulysses). Since struggle can be its own reward, I’ll recommend Dead Astronauts guardedly with the caveat that the novel isn’t for readers who want the clarity offered by a writer who spells everything out.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Firstly, I must start this review by stating that it is more rewarding to read Dead Astronauts after reading VanderMeer's Borne novel and Strange Bird novella.

Now.

This book is a very challenging read. Animals that are human and humans that are animal-like, all in a world where being dead is not a death sentence. Dead Astronauts is a beautiful book that is emotional, frustrating, lovely, and hangover-inducing.

Unfortunately, I hadn't read Borne prior to Dead Astronauts and I've been told by colleagues that I would have been better served if I had read Borne prior to this novel. VanderMeer is a genius and his writing is absorbing. I feel like I understand only a fraction of what is going on, but none the less enjoy his books. His work is great for book clubs and discussions - I love hearing other perspectives on what is going on. Thanks, netgalley!

Jeff VanderMeer is one of the best contemporary authors of what has come to be known as weird fiction, and specifically the New Weird (the title of an anthology VanderMeer edited with his wife, Ann VanderMeer). Most of his books have ecological themes, focusing on the ways that nature, and reality, are quite different from what our anthropocentric prejudices take them to be; many are especially concerned with the environmental destruction that we are causing. That said, VanderMeer is a writer of extraordinary breadth; he never does the same thing twice. DEAD ASTRONAUTS, his new book, is set (more or less - given that here we appear to be in a multiverse that features numerous slightly different versions of the same setting) in the same ravaged world as his previous novel BORNE (which I wrote about here: ). And yet, this is a very different book from BORNE: indeed, its experimental prose makes it quite different from anything else that VanderMeer has published. I was flummoxed at first by the unmooring caused by this new style; the book eventually won me over, but I feel far less sure about the book, what I understand and do not, what I can possibly say about it, than was the case with any of VanderMeer's previous texts. We have human figures traversing a radically disrupted landscape: the Company, familiar from BORNE, has destroyed everything with its crazed genetic experimentation, and its determination to exterminate both the natural world, and any of its own "unnatural" productions that do not serve its purposes of domination. But life persists in the ruins; much of this life is not human, and even the human characters are often not quite, or not entirely, human. In the course of the novel we get a range of viewpoints, human and nonhuman to varying extents; and their stories, though not entirely lacking, are dissolved and refracted into fragments of description and poetic evocation (and sometimes, brute repetition of the same horrendous phrases over and over). My provisional sense of the book is that, where in his prior novels VanderMeer sought to narrate the passing of the human-centered world - which also means narrating the passage into a world that cannot be described and understood narratively, here he tries to give us a book that has already come out of the other side: we get a world that cannot be narrated any longer, though distorted fragments of what used to be narratives still sort of exist as (small) portions of the overall post-human landscape. There is a lot of misery and degradation, but there are also strange hints of beauty, and even of meaning (albeit a non-human sort of meaning). VanderMeer is trying to evoke a world that is radically OTHER to us, and to our efforts at understanding it. I am not sure if he completely succeeds, but he does open up new vistas, take us to new ground. An attempt to apprehend radical otherness has been an important project both of speculative fiction and of what might be called "theory" in the humanities for the last several decades - all these attempts may be seen as responses to the collapse of our dominating anthropocentric world order, as we have been forced, by events ranging from rebellions against oppression to climate catastrophe to scientific discoveries, to abandon our previous humanist certainties. The only thing I can say with anything approaching certainty is that VanderMeer answers this imperative in a radically different way than any of the other thinkers and fiction writers involved in such a project have done. He is showing us the glimmerings of a new world, though I am not sure I can really see its outlines yet.

Jeff Vandermeer has been on a hell of a roll lately. His SOUTHERN REACH trilogy is on my personal list of best series in the past quarter-century, Borne I argued was both an imperfect book and a great one, and now his newest, The Dead Astronauts — set in the same multi-verse of Borne — is quite possibly my favorite book by him yet.

That said, there’s no doubt that The Dead Astronauts is not going to be to everyone’s liking thanks to its elliptical, impressionistic, poetic style. But I highly urge everyone to try it, and also recommend that even if it seems not your cup of tea early on, or if you feel too adrift on a sea of language, that your forge onward, because the book I’d say is more off-putting (linguistically or narratively) on the surface than at its depths, as contradictory as that may seem. And readers who do continue on will be rewarded by a novel that is more clear at its close than at its start.

The novel is set in the same multiple realities of Borne and The Strange Bird, and while it isn’t wholly necessary to have read those works, it would help. The environment-destroying City and Company appear here, as well as several of the characters (human and non-human) seen or referenced in the earlier books, including the titular astronauts, whom we saw only as skeletons before, but who now are revealed to be adversaries across time and space of the Company/City. Their mission, along with the evolution of the Company/City into its destructive form and an exploration of what if anything may follow its own ruination forms the plot, such as it is, of the novel.

But “plot” is probably too concrete a term. Even though one can trace a narrative, as presented the story is highly fragmented, coming at the reader through the prism of a series of perspectives. The astronauts Chen, Moss, and Grayson yes, but also a homeless woman, a duck, a blue fox, and others. As such, while threads run throughout, the novel is more of a series of linked non-linear, almost fractal stories, which themselves run a gamut of sometimes incantatory and sometimes hallucinatory language and imagery. Even when the language isn’t as highly stylized in terms of vocabulary and syntax but is relatively straightforward, what is being described is so unfamiliar and strange it can be disorienting early on. Here are a few passages to just give a taste:

he compared notes with Moss, because their moves through fluid state were similar, even if his was a kind of fight against evaporation or ejection and hers an overabundance of accretion, a building up.
Flesh was quantum. Flesh was contaminated, body and mind.

As creatures rose to stare at him. Stuck. And tuck and luck. And other haunted words. But not the right word. But when he v.6.6
Came again the dance he did, taken to move to the side, to encircle or circle as … nothing. As nothing passed. What ghost was there he forced his mind toward, even the idea of ghost behind him . . .
They killed us with traps. They killed us with poisons. They killed us with snares. They killed us with guns. They killed us with knives. They strangled us. They trampled us .They tore up apart with hounds . . . They killed us with traps. They killed us with poisons. They killed us with snares (Where in the forest, where by the stream might you find me?) They killed us with guns . . .

Numbers play a role. Repetition obviously. Poems. Sketches. Typography. Blank space. Bold face. Some passages are introduced with decreasing “version numbers” (see v.6.6 in the above examples). Experimental is certainly an accurate term for much of what Vandermeer is doing here, but I know that term can be off-putting to a lot of people, as well as convey a bloodless sort of wordplay or structural gimmickry. But neither concern is warranted here.

First, as disorienting as some of the imagery or style can be, a grounding clarity always exists side by side. A clarity of mission, a clarity of theme, of tone. For the astronauts, for instance, it’s both a sense of mission and an abiding love for one another that cuts across all the strangeness and confusing multiplicity of timelines and worlds and doppelgängers. And, as noted, things actually get easier and more clear as the book goes on.

Second, The Dead Astronauts is far removed from “bloodless.” There is more than one love story embedded within. Passion runs rampant. Both the human and the non-human voices compel both empathy and horror. And underlying it all is a theme that has wound its way through much of Vandermeer’s writing — our despoiling of this world, our willful separation of ourselves from nature, our attempts to “improve” on nature, our wholesale slaughter and eradication of the others we share this world with on a scale that is unfathomable, though Vandermeer does his authorial best in finding ways to make it so via giving voice to the voiceless creatures as well as by the weight of accumulation.

Accumulation and fragmentation are perhaps the two touchstone words for this work. The individual segments of the novel are beautifully written in a lyrical prose-poem mix (though Vandermeer also throws in some actual poems), a series of brilliant facets each giving off its own kind of light on the story, and the accretion of these various segments coalesces into a moving, thought-provoking, and beautiful picture. An ambitious and greatly rewarding work.

DEAD ASTRONAUTS, by Jeff VanderMeer, starts off as time-bending sci-fi adventure where three rebels are fighting a corporation who appears bent on expanding and dominating until it takes over this alien world. Their struggle happens over and over, they are constantly defeated and yet each time they begin the fight anew, the knowledge of the previous demises informs them on the approach the next time. The book seems to drift off into a dream state after a while and we lose track of the rebels and enter a stream of consciousness that is reminiscent of one long night's sleep. Things don't make sense, moments of clarity flash by only to dissolve away, some moments seem to carry a certain weight on several levels of thought, while at other times, there seems to be no point to any of it.
The linear plot in the beginning of the book, even with the discussion of time and space and doing something over and over again, seems to have a steady flow to it, like a traditional novel. The conformity of storytelling and character development fade away after a time and the reader is left with a wild ride. Many moments on the wild ride make sense and even present valid commentaries on nature vs automation, acceptance, even the purpose of life, but I struggled at times from spiralling into to total confusion. Maybe I crave structure more than most, but having not enough if it left me exasperated sometimes.
VanderMeer bucks conformity and tradition in DEAD ASTRONAUTS. Many people will embrace this style of book and I appreciate what a unique book this really is, but on a personal level I found it a challenge to get through.

I have a very self deprecating sense of humor.  But trust me when I say: it's no joke that I am neither intelligent enough or creative enough or abstract-thinking enough to appreciate this book.  I don't want to trash it completely- because I can appreciate this for the literary experiment that it is.  I just don't know that it's a literary experiment that works.

VanderMeer can string words together on a page better than most, but hot damn, this was a total slog for me.  It took me longer than I care to admit, to realize this is a non-linear story, and on top of it's non-linearness it's also very repetitive in parts.  We explore many different realities and alternative timelines in separate parts, never coming together to add up to anything.

I think this is supposed to be the story of Charlie X, the rise and fall of the Company introduced in Borne.  But if I'm being honest, I don't remember Charlie X all that well from Borne, and I didn't think anything about the Company that was revealed really contributed any additional understanding.  I guess the questions I cared about, like what happened to humanity and what was the purpose of the Company, weren't explored enough in any detail to make me care.

We also don't get to spend enough time with any of the many characters to grow to care about them.  Astronaut dies.  Astronaut dies.  Astronaut dies again.  Blue fox sneaks in and says some clever foxy stuff.  I just don't know what the point was.  Maybe for some there doesn't need to be a point.  For me- there needs to be a point.

If, like me, you were hoping for more of Borne, if you were hoping for an origin story to the villain (villain being the company or the sorceress), I think this is safe to skip.  If you're looking for something to bend your brain and make you work for it, by all means, pick this up.  The writing is beautiful.  Unfortunately that's the only thing to leave an impression on me.

Dead Astronauts releases on December 3, 2019 and can be found on GoodReads or Amazon.  Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley who sent me an eARC in exchange for a review.