Dead Astronauts

I will spare everyone an attempted plot summary as Dead Astronauts cannot be tidily synopsized. Just know that it features a messianic blue fox, a giant immortal fish, and human-ish characters seeking to end the reign of an evil organization across multiple dimensions...I think.

I had been frustrated by Borne's lack of penetrability, so I recalibrated my expectations before reading this one. That was the right move. This book is trippy, oftentimes incoherent, but all sorts of enthralling. There is an apt quote in the earlygoing which references “things that could pull a mind apart if examined up close.” That was a good encapsulation of this book for me – you'll lose your mind if you get bogged down trying to parse every tiny detail. Let the words and passages wash over you. The writing itself is quite mesmerizing with VanderMeer spinning some real poetry on each page.

Dead Astronauts is certainly not for everyone, and I don't even think it's for me, but I did like it? Maybe? Perhaps it's just fun to see what oddities VanderMeer can think up and bring to life. Not to mention, this may be the best book cover I've laid eyes on. I wasn't sure that I was going to read this, but the dust jacket really sold me.

See this review and others at The Speculative Shelf.

Dead Astronauts was my first Jeff Vandermeer read. I'm not familiar with his style(s) of writing and haven't read the predecessor novel Borne.

This is experimental literature — a term I picked up from researching this book midway through reading it. I connected somewhat with the story but not the delivery. It's written in a poetic style that seems intended to paint a picture with phrases, fonts and literary devices rather than using prose to take the reader on a journey or to a conclusion.

So much attention was paid to the mood and styling of the book that it neglected to go places raised by the story itself. Three astronauts are time traveling (or skipping between universes) to fight the Company, which we later learn created all or part of them in some way. Are they alive? Are they dead? Are they existing outside of time? How do these various iterations of the same place connect with each other? What's this number sequence we see repeated through different storylines?

Raise existential questions and I can go off and think about those answers myself. But raise plot questions posed in the story itself and I'd appreciate answers. Otherwise, I'm left wondering why I should care.

My least favorite aspect of the book is the use of various devices to present the story. It's written as poetry in the form of a novel. Sentences. Don't flow. Normally. This made me pay more attention to the format rather than the content. And it has lots of “It's a book. Not a book.” phrasing. Huh?

And the final few chapters include two or three sections that are nothing but the same few sentences repeated dozens or hundreds of times on the following pages. Maybe that's an effective technique to demonstrate how something begins to cycle until it becomes mechanical. But assuming the author wrote the book using a word processor, he likely wrote those first sentences and then copied and pasted to make the next several pages. If he's not going to take the time to write something, should I take the time to read it? Is the idea for me to simply skip through those pages after I “get it”?

There is a story here but it's not getting told. The author is instead trying to make it felt. Enthusiasts of poetry or experimental literature will likely appreciate this book far more than I did. I prefer a writing style that doesn't get in my way of comprehending the story.