It oughta be a movie: Borne, by Jeff Vandermeer
I found Borne on a sunny gunmetal day when the giant bear Mord came roving near our home…Borne was not much to look at that first time: dark purple and about the size of my fist, clinging to Mord’s fur like a half-closed stranded sea anemone…beacon-like, he strobed emerald green across the purple every half minute or so.
So begins this fascinating post-apocalypse tale that blends horror and beauty in equal measure. Our narrator is Rachel, a woman who has borne witness to the fall of civilization. She was born on an island now sunk beneath the sea at a time when it was still possible to dream of growing up to go to university, to become a writer1. Now she is a scavenger in a city sucked dry and contaminated by a biotech company. She lives in a carefully booby-trapped cliff/decaying apartment complex with her lover Wick, a former bioengineer who is now basically a drug dealer, trading in beetles that when inserted in the ear exchange bad memories for good. Even he isn’t sure what Borne is:
I set the sea anemone on a rickety table… “What is this thing?”… “What isn’t it? That’s the first question…Whispers come back to me. Of things roaming the city that owe no allegiance to Mord, the Company, or the Magician.”
As that quote suggests, the city is a battleground between two opposing forces. Mord, a giant bear who can fly without wings, was created by the Company as a guard but now is fearfully worshipped by what remains of that institution. The Magician is a woman who used to work for the company, but now aims to collect enough technology to beat Mord and his proxies – smaller bears with a venomous bite – to bring the city under her control. Unaligned individuals like Wick and Rachel have to scramble to keep out of the crossfire.
In the aftermath of an attack by a pack of not-quite-human children, Rachel learns that Borne is fully sentient. He is also now quite large and mobile and has acquired sight:
Each eye was small and completely different from the others around it. Some were human – blue, black, brown, green pupils – and some were animal eyes…When Borne saw me staring…his flesh would absorb all eyes but two…He must have thought he looked more normal that way.
After freaking out a bit when Borne first starts to talk, Rachel comes to interact with him as a sort of Lovecraftian toddler:
Borne and I would race down dim-lit dust-covered corridors, Borne afraid of colliding/congealing with the wall and tripping over his own pseudopods, wailing as he laughed: “You’re going tooooo fast!” or “Why is this fuuuuuuuun?”…I would show Borne a photo of a weasel in an old encyclopedia and he’d point with an extended tentacle and say, “Ooooh! Long mouse!”
But, for whatever reason, she hasn’t even told Wick that Borne can speak.
What makes someone a person is a big theme of this story. Wick is suspicious of Borne, given that he is carnivorous and a lot of biotech creatures were created as weapons. Borne worries about this himself:
“If I am a weapom, won’t you have to stop me? In the books, they’re always stopping weapons.”…”Let’s assume you’re not a weapon,” I said, “You’re not a weapon but something amazing and wonderful and useful instead.”…Always, he wanted to know that he was a person. He kept giving me different choices so one day I might slip up and say, “You’re not a person.”
Ultimately, the book seems to conclude that our relationships to each other are what make us a person: how we care for each other, and reaffirm each other’s value, and tell each other stories. And by that measure Borne is certainly a person, even if he is also a weapon. Rachel and Wick, too, share a bond that at first seems like it might be only about physical survival, and which is severely tested by Borne’s presence in their lives…but is ultimately about love and shared humanity. But there are a lot of twists, and lies, and low points that just keep getting lower before we get there.
What this story has to say about the Company and what is needed to save the world is very interesting too. Statements about the Company often read as a direct condemnation of imperialism:
They had made us dependent on them. They had experimented on us. They had taken away our ability to govern ourselves. They had sent out to keep order a horrific judge grown ever more unmanageable and psychotic…They had, in their way, created the Magician, because everything she did and everything she created was in opposition to the Company.
It is therefore interesting that this Post-Apocalypse story not only has a hopeful ending, but a very satisfying way of reaching it as well - though not without a cost.
Vandermeer also wrote ‘The SouthernReach Trilogy’. This book carries over a number of elements: the Lovecraftian creatures, the concern with identity, the sense of a world in flux. The horror elements are stronger, I think, for the same reason that ‘Mexican Gothic’ is horrifying – there is human consciousness behind the worst things that happen – but the world you get at the end is probably one that more humans would feel comfortable in.
1. A bit of author self-insert in more than ways than the obvious – Vandermeer grew up in Fiji.
Adaptation issues:
The main thing that makes this book perfect for a movie – the highly visual descriptions of strange creatures and action scenes – would also be the main challenge in adapting it. Borne, in particular, changes shape and color and size constantly and fully CGI creatures can still seem somewhat lifeless. However, given what they were able to do with practical effects in ‘The Thing’ (1982) one could probably go with puppetry for most of the creatures and for Borne’s basic shape in each scene. Then one could add in extra details – like his shifting color and eye positions – with CGI. It would be amazing to see both those subtle details and big spectacles like the kaiju battles involving Mord come to life on screen.
In terms of casting, while the screwed up conditions in the world of the story have clearly superseded any questions of race or ethnicity, humans in the book are diverse in their looks and it would be good to keep that. Wick is blonde, pale, and physically rather fragile. Rachel has dark brown skin and short frizzy dark hair – given her island origins, one should probably picture her as Fijian. And the Magician is described as having “thick dark hair and deep bronze skin and features that were lionesque or in some way regal, but for a scar that ran down her right cheek, hooking into her upper lip.” That scar shouldn’t be “prettied up”, I don’t think, nor should the scars, bruises, and dirt the other characters carry. The freedom the survivors get in the end is hard-won, after all.
I would very much like to see a story like this in movie format. Not only is it, like ‘The Windup Girl’ aesthetically quite distinct from all the grim-dark post-apocalypses with washed-out color schemes, but it contradicts the rather individualist “don’t trust anyone” messages of a lot of those tales (especially the zombie apocalypse, for some reason). ‘Borne’ doesn’t shy away from the dangers that trust and relationships can expose one to, but it demonstrates that those are exactly the things we need to get out of (or stay out of) a bad situation and to build anything positive. Humans might do a lot of terrible things, but we are ultimately a social, collaborative species; the ability to build on each other’s knowledge, skills, and inventions is the secret of our success. If we were really as unable to cooperate as many post-apocalypse stories seem to assume, we would have gone extinct 70,000 years2 before we ever developed the kind of technology that threatens our survival now.
2. Humans have very low genetic variation compared to a lot of mammals. Traces in our genome suggest that this may have resulted from one or more severe population declines in which our species nearly went extinct.
