![]() ![]() If we imagine Borne as one globe, a single world - a well-tempered vision, full of characters, pulse and drama - Dead Astronauts is the rest of the room: an infinity of spheres, a collage of worlds across time and space. Somewhere at the heart of the novel there is a shadowy figure in a room full of globes. Dead Astronauts, alternatively, resists a succinct summary, and offers instead a hybrid of recognizable imagery and abstract, philosophical potential, all shape-shifting across alternate timelines. Told in the style of oozing, free-form prose-poetry, Dead Astronauts is a nearly-indecipherable literary anomaly: the novel boldly withholds typical conventions, replacing characters and plot with wisps of folklore carried over from Borne, an ecological sci-fi adventure about biotech monsters running rampant in a dystopian future. “You wouldn’t understand me even if I made sense,” the book dares. An unnecessary return to the world of his excellent 2017 novel Borne, Jeff VanderMeer’s Dead Astronauts is a prismatic, abstract attempt to both expand and disintegrate the lore of his previous work. ![]()
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