In Dead Astronauts, we mostly inhabit the minds of a strange trio trying to defeat the Company: Grayson, the leader, a woman with a blind eye that can see things no one else can Chen, a man who sees the world in terms of equations and who is maybe made of salamanders and Moss, who lacks consistent form and gender and possesses great and mysterious mental powers. If you’ve only read the Southern Reach (or seen Annihilation), think of the City as an inverted Area X-rather than a reclaimed, unpolluted alien wilderness, the City is a manmade bog of chemicals, egg-shaped buildings, and twisted, tortured, gene-spliced creatures made by a biotech firm, the Company. For one, there’s the dead astronauts themselves, who are a mystery mentioned passingly in Borne, but mostly there’s the nameless Company and the nameless City. A fresh horror made of old mistakes.įans of Vandermeer will notice bits of his older work echoing through Dead Astronauts. (Technically the name of the hideous fish, like most things in Dead Astronauts, is corrupted-Bosch to, almost too fittingly, Botch.) Like Bosch, VanderMeer has imagined Hell, a dead world of the dead, tortured and still bent on torturing one another. The author of the Southern Reach Trilogy and Borne, he’s worth reading because his visions of humans and the world they inhabit are less Hopper than Dali, or really, Hieronymus Bosch, who in Dead Astronauts lends his name to a leviathan charged with gobbling up failed biological experiments cast out of laboratories.
Of course, sense-along with other conventions like plot-is not what you look for in VanderMeer.
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