Once upon a time, I spoke to three dead astronauts. Past, present, future? All so proud, so determined. All so doomed.
I was sent an ARC of Jeff VanderMeer's Dead Astronauts, and despite not having read the related novel Borne, and despite having failed, utterly, to connect with VanderMeer's Annihilation, I decided to give this book a whirl – and am glad I did. This book is weird – surreal and poetic – and even if I rarely had a complete picture of what was going on, I was happy to sit back and let the words wash over my brain. This was an experience beyond passive reading – VanderMeer demands that you meet his thoughts half way with your own, and the results were worth the effort to me (others' experience may vary). Note: I read an ARC and passages quoted may not be in their final forms. And as this book opens upon a completely mysterious scene, I reckon any commentary ahead could be seen as spoilers.
Somewhere out in the City, the rest of the foxes were playing. Learning. The duck still stood sentinel. The leviathan lumbered between holding ponds. She spun out into the desert. Blind. Unaware. Reckless. Stripped of sense. Unable in that moment to recover herself. The three dead astronauts behind her.As Dead Astronauts opens, three people are making their way towards “the City”, bent on a mission of destruction. We eventually learn that only one of these people is human: Grayson is, indeed, an astronaut; a black woman and the lone survivor of a space mission who returned to a ruined Earth. Chen (who looks like "a heavyset man, from a country that was just a word now") was formerly an employee of “the Company” in the City, and is now the physical expression of a series of mathematical equations? And a cohesive organism made up of thousands of discreet salamanders? Go with it. And Moss is, well, a moss-like organism in human form, and probably the most essential member of the group: We learn that the three are in a multiverse or an alternate timeline of some sort, but since Moss' memory persists across all of time and space, she is the brief and the map for the mission. We learn that many times before, Grayson has found Moss when she returns to Earth (and many more times, Grayson didn't survive her space mission), and that this is the seventh time that the two of them have been able to turn Chen against the Company and join them in their quest to destroy it. What Grayson and Chen don't know, and what Moss does, is that they don't have unlimited attempts at this mission: as the three have learned and adapted their strategies in every do-over, so too have the City's defenders – a black duck, a blue fox, a tidal pool-lurking behemoth, doppelgängers, and a madman in the desert – been adapting, and Moss (who is involved in a romantic relationship with Grayson in every iteration) is desperate to change the script. The how and why of this world is never really fully explained, but the following describes the mystery:
Chen said: Any theory at this point made as much sense, since no theory made sense. That the fox could be inhabited by an alien intelligence. Or it could be a particularly devious AI wormholing back under the power of a self-made destiny. If the paths were open, porous, then other sorts of doors could open as well. Even though Grayson, the only astronaut among them, said aliens had never been encountered by humankind out in the universe. That human beings never mastered AI.And making the world's origin inexplicable (beyond it being the byproduct of some terrible bio-experiments performed by the Company, spun out of control) is really okay: this world exists and there's a mission underway to destroy this world, in order to save this world. Included in the narrative are the perspectives and origin stories of the duck and fox and Behemoth and old Charlie X in the desert, as well as a story from the POV of a homeless woman living in our own near future, and the point seems to be that you don't need to imagine the end effects of unconstrained Capitalism into the distant future in order to recognise its dangers, we're already living in a dystopia of our own making (with commentary included on animal experimentation, climate change, child labour, etc., my only complaint would be that I didn't need this all to be spelled out to me.)
Some favourite quotes that seem to describe this world (and I think I particularly like the questions VanderMeer poses because they urge a mental response):
Dark bird. Dark secret. They knew not what it hid, what was artifice and what was content. Peel away that layer, find a deeper monster still.
A creator who no longer remembered the creation: Wasn't that one definition of a god?
Moss couldn't extend the field. But, at a price, she could become a door – they walked through her and she followed, and wasn't that the definition of sacrifice?
What was a person but someone who turned monstrous, anyway? What was a person, in Moss' experience, but a kind of monster.
A soul is just a delusion that lives in the body. No delusion survives death. Death is more honest than that.
And a taste of the more poetic:
Behemoth could no longer. Had no. Become Leviathan. Ravenous a sacrifice to Nocturnalia. Hunger an empty stomach that felt full. Tried to remember and forget: Nocturnalia. The house on the hill. Nocturnalia: The tidal pools that must be holding ponds. Cool nothing of mud against the hot itch of scales enflamed by rheum and cracks, comfort against battle scars under the stars, the night surcease, too, a different kind. In kind.Overall, I was surprised at how much I liked Dead Astronauts; surprised enough to round this up to four stars.
