The blue fox and the dark bird

[bloodygranuaile]

For BSpec book club we read Jeff VanderMeer’s Dead Astronauts, and then spent, like, an hour and a half trying to collectively decipher… what happened in it? It is experimental fiction of the sort I usually don’t read, and I am either not smart enough or not used to it enough to figure out quite what is going on here. But it’s definitely an experience. It involves three astronauts battling a biotech megacorporation known only as the Company, across a number of different versions of reality. From then it gets even weirder, involving a large fish monster of some kind, a vengeful blue fox, a predatory dark bird with an unsettling backstory, and a lot of talk about equations but thankfully no actual math I’d have to follow. 

 

Admittedly the first section was a little hard for me to get into because it was clear there was some kind of coherent story *there* and I was just having trouble figuring it out, later on, stuff got even weirder and I got more content just rolling with whatever was going on on the page and not trying to make it make too much sense. It was clearly very violent and gruesome, which is the sort of thing I like, and had some political points about climate change and corporate-driven pollution, which I also like. I am not sure it really makes me want to read Borne, at least not right away, because that seems like it would be a bit much for my brain to take all at once, but I’m still glad I got out of my normal comfort zone and read it.