VanderMeer, whose imaginative novels are fed by his fecund home state of Florida, wants us to inhabit the minds of his ravenous bird and the massive fish held in a tank. We know from the title what fate awaits them what’s a surprise is that we eventually start getting the points of view of the killer creatures too. The astronauts are trying, the best they can, to battle evil: Charlie X, the forces behind him and the bloodthirsty creatures he has unleashed. What is certain is that he was at least in part responsible for setting all the strange hybrids out into the world. There are many unknowns - whether he is there, alive, sane. The astronauts hope to get inside the Company complex, where they might (or might not) find a man they call Charlie X. Holding ponds of biotech rejects always hunched up against the side, a convenient hell or purgatory, full of dying life, then lines of invisible defenses across the wasteland beyond.” “The Company always looked basically the same whether an enormous white egg or a vast gray triangle or a ziggurat of series of spires, like a fractured cathedral. Maybe it’s best to think of it as a multiverse, folded there are multiple versions of what the astronauts find. The before of one timeline doesn’t match up with the after of another. What first seems to be a single timeline jumps to several, to 10, maybe more.

In that, “Dead Astronauts” serves as a kind of backstory to “Borne,” explaining how this world came to be. How they got that way is played out in the book. The City, the Company, the space in between - all are in ruins. The Company is a complex where some kind of bioengineering took place, but that was long ago. Here, they are very much alive: Chen, Moss and Grayson land near the City, with an unstated mission taking them to the Company on its outskirts. This will all be familiar to readers of 2017’s “ Borne,” in which VanderMeer introduced us to this richly imagined world, or last year’s addition, “The Strange Bird.” Having read those books isn’t required to understand this one - in “Borne,” the dead astronauts are simply window dressing, a trio of dusty spacesuits that serve as a landmark in the desert landscape.

And the astronauts of the title, although when we meet them they are not dead yet. The final pages of Jeff VanderMeer’s “Dead Astronauts” tie everything together, making sense of what came before.īut first, readers land in a dystopia populated by impossible creatures: a disappearing blue fox, a carnivorous duck with a broken wing, attack beetles, a deadly underwater behemoth, a coordinated swarm of salamanders.

Dead astronauts a novel