Dead Astronauts
Under the watchful eye of The Company, three characters — Grayson, Morse and Chen — shapeshifters, amorphous, part human, part extensions of the landscape, make their way through forces that would consume them. A blue fox, a giant fish and language stretched to the limit.
A messianic blue fox who slips through warrens of time and space on a mysterious mission. A homeless woman haunted by a demon who finds the key to all things in a strange journal. A giant leviathan of a fish, centuries old, who hides a secret, remembering a past that may not be its own. Three ragtag rebels waging an endless war for the fate of the world against an all-powerful corporation. A raving madman who wanders the desert lost in the past, haunted by his own creation: an invisible monster whose name he has forgotten and whose purpose remains hidden.
Jeff VanderMeer’s Dead Astronauts presents a City with no name of its own where, in the shadow of the all-powerful Company, lives human and otherwise converge in terrifying and miraculous ways. At stake: the fate of the future, the fate of Earth – all the Earths.
Praise for Dead Astronauts: -
”'A genuinely innovative artwork requires time to fulfil its effect. Jeff VanderMeer’s Dead Astronauts is one such work - bewildering, perplexing, original - and I would recommend that readers allow it the concentration it demands … this kind of formal innovation is pure catnip, an indication that as a mode of literary expression the novel is still vigorous, still developing and still important” - Guardian
”'There's beauty as well as horror here; moments of weaponised whimsy, plus his usual clear-eyed ecological themes. This is wild science fiction, but it's also an angry book that's very much about the present day… you'll find some of the author's strongest writing and a genuinely original tale of environmental apocalypse” - SFX Magazine
”'An immersive, fantastical adventure, but also a compelling allegory for the role of individual resistance in the face of seemingly intractable planet-sized problems like climate change” - New York Times
Praise for Borne: -
”'Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy was an ever-creeping map of the apocalypse; with Borne he continues his investigation into the malevolent grace of the world, and it's a thorough marvel” - Colson Whitehead
”'Jeff VanderMeer’s deeply strange and brilliant new novel extends the meditation on the central question of non-human sentience in his earlier work … No one writes a post-apocalyptic landscape like VanderMeer, so detailed and strange in all its lineaments and topography” - Neel Mukherjee, Guardian
”'From being a very successful SF writer, VanderMeer will become mainstream - and Borne is full of signs that he is already thinking ahead of that easy transition, and perhaps subverting it” - Toby Litt, New Statesman