Wednesday, December 25, 2019

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Dead Astronauts by Jeff VanderMeer




Dead Astronauts is the latest novel from SF/F author Jeff VanderMeer, most well known for Annhilation (and the rest of the Southern Reach trilogy).  VanderMeer is known for writing "Weird SciFi", a genre that is hard to explain except as what it sounds like - the stories deal with settings and beings that are truly weird and out there, looking seemingly nothing like our real world.  VanderMeer often also includes ecological/environmental ideas in his books - the ideas of how humans are affecting the planet are pretty self-evident in even his most surreal fiction.

And while anyone who's read any of him should be expecting more of all of the above, Dead Astronauts takes all of the above to a new level.  Ostensibly set in the same world as his last novel, Borne, Dead Astronauts doesn't really have an overlying plot, a hero, or even a protagonist, as the book features a number of beings - most of which non-human - in various states of disarray as the destruction of their world, through the evil actions of greedy selfish humans of the entity known as the Company, changes everything about them.  The book feints like it will have a plot centered around the eponymous "astronauts" and then...doesn't.  It's easily the most confusing novel I've ever read, filled with thoughts and screeds, page long repetitions, and multiple viewpoint characters in states of insanity.  Some may call this brilliant....and others may call it a crazy pile of babble, and I can't really disagree with either assessment.

Note: While I mention above that this book shares a world with Borne (as well as Borne's spinoff novella, A Strange Bird), this book is entirely stand-alone, and events in Borne basically never come up, although certain parts of the narrative may very much be alluding to the events in Borne.


Normally, I begin my book reviews with a summary of the plot of each novel - both because I find book summaries on Amazon/Back-Covers to often be misleading and because I find putting a book's plot into summary helps me focus on what I think was important about a book.  I can't do that with this book - Dead Astronauts defies much of a summary, to the point where anything I'd write would feel misleading - the Amazon summary just lists the general ideas of each chapter and character for its summary, and that's about the best I think as could be done. 

For essentially, that's what this is, a collection of stories of Beings affected by the actions of The Company, the biotech firm centered in The City, who acted without morals in creating more and more disastrous biotech, furthering the ruin of all others.   I say "Beings" instead of "People" for a reason, since our chapters rarely focus upon humans: so we get a Blue Fox who may be far more intelligent, and able to travel through time, space and parallel universe; we get a trio of explorers/astronauts seeking to destroy the Company - one of which is an actual returning astronaut, one is a former human (or maybe not?) made up of other beings, one is a universe/time-traveling sentient pack of Moss; we get a scientist who grew up in The Company and had his childhood affected by his demanding and monstrous father until he himself was a monster (literally and mentally); we get a giant fish/monster.....etc.

Each chapter (more or less) features a different being as the focus of the story, and the story jumps in time through each chapter in many different orders (and at times may even be being told out of order, although that may or may not be clear).  And given the madness of many of the book's narrators, the result is often seemingly utterly confusing.  The book is not long (it totaled 154 pages in my e-Reader, which makes this only a bit longer than Annihilation in the same reader) and in many parts, the confusing narrative makes it seemingly impossible to understand what is being written, even after a reread - one character for example is introduced seemingly at random in another character's bout of madness, is then later revealed to be another narrator in a later arc, and then shows up again later seemingly out of the blue, and while I think now I have a handle on what happened with her, the out of order nature of it all makes it not exactly easy.

Still, I do think Dead Astronauts has a lot to recommend it through it all, as VanderMeer makes his strongest case against the horrors of unethical science, of capitalism (one segment has honestly the funniest bit on a capitalist party I'd seen - and it makes no sense to anyone I'd show it to out of context), and a strong case for love and freedom over hatred and control as a way for people to try to live and find themselves. Very few, if any, of the beings that are focused upon here find any sort of happy ending, but moments do come here and there, showing that some things are worth it, even amongst the mess left by all the others.  If Borne showed the aftermath of the destruction caused by Greed, Dead Astronauts shows the direct impacts on everything.  It may not have any form of protagonist, but this is definitely a novel with an antagonist, even if that antagonist is a concept in the abstract.

So yeah, Dead Astronauts is something.  Is it a good something?   Is it an utterly confusing and dumbfounding mess?  Yes.
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