Dead Astronauts

“Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.BY ORDER OF THE AUTHORperG.G., CHIEF OF ORDNANCE”

Mark Twain (aka Samuel Clemens) kind of called the shot with this book, a complicated, difficult, arcane and puzzling tale about . . . something. It's never really clear what the point of this sequel to the enviro-disaster novel Borne actually is other than, perhaps, to provide some sort of outlet for the assorted notes and sketches Jeff Vandermeer accumulated while writing it. Where it fails, for me, is in the hazy narrative which takes a variety of perspectives but can't quite focus on anything. The dead astronauts of the title, first seen in Borne, are some kind of shape-shifters capable of moving through time and space. Ostensibly human, they are apparently the creation of The Company, a sinister, nebulous entity that tinkered with biotechnology and (I guess) interdimensional portals. Their creations, both dangerous and innocuous, fill the landscape through which the astronauts move on a mission to . . . do . . . something. Then there's Charlie X (a name deliberately or innocently nicked from a classic Star Trek , episode about a young boy with godlike powers (so, maybe it wasn't as innocently used as I first thought)) who seems to have been responsible for the creation of some of the worst/most dangerous biotech creatures like The Blue Fox and the Behemoth, both of which cast menacing and dark shadows over the story as they . . . do . . . something. Again, the beams lose their coherence.
Vandermeer's fiction is called Weird for good reason. It is not just that the subject matter is strange and exotic; it's not just that the story (for lack of a better term) is elliptical and indirect; it's more the whole premise of a world gone to hell (cue the old sci-fi trope of Misused Technology Gone Bad) filled with bizarre new creatures. In a sense, he has turned traditional science fiction inside out: instead of elaborate stories about interstellar space travel to new worlds with bizarre alien life, he has centred the story on earth and put all the expensive gadgets and toys in the service of creating wacky biotech. No need to leave the planet when we can have the monsters here. And what could be a worse “alien invasion” story than one in which the monsters are of our own creation. Frankenstein meets the 21st century with predictably dire results. On a side note, I recently read Margaret Atwood's Madadam trilogy and have to confess that the worlds of these two series are so similar that I kept expecting characters from Atwood's books to appear in this one.
So Vandermeer can write, there's no doubt, but it's not always clear in this book what it is he's writing about, or even for. I imagine his poor editor, sitting across from him all headachy and confused, saying “ok, Jeff, I get what you're saying, but what the hell is going on here?” The book is kaleidoscopic and vivid but ultimately it's devoid of anything resembling plot, structure or narrative. Maybe that's Vandermeer's point: in a post-human, fragmented world the stories are equally distorted, fragmented and incoherent.