First Impressions Review: Dead Astronauts, by Jeff Vandermeer

 

'Borne' was already a very weird book, in which a woman living in an apocalyptic future picks up an anemone-thing that grows into something like a Lovecraftian toddler. But it was still a book told from a human perspective. In THIS book only two of the characters are (mostly) human - though not entirely sane - and Vandermeer uses a surreal, poetic, artsy style of writing to try to show us the world not only through their eyes but through the eyes of a blue fox, a woman made of sort-of-moss, a “manufactured” man, a monstrous fish, a "duck with the broken wing" that is a kind of murderous bio-weapon, and more. Even more than ‘Borne’, it feels like a blend between sci-fi and magical realism.

 

"The sentimental tale. The tale you always need to care. Which shows you don't care. Why we don't care if you care."- The Blue Fox
This book is brutal when it comes to pointing out humanity's brokenness, destructiveness, and hypocrisy. But in a tough-love kind of way, because humans are also a part of nature, just not as important a part as we tend to think!

The "dead astronauts" of the title refers to literal-astronaut Grayson ("a tall black woman of indeterminate age...Her left eye was white and yet still she could see through it; why shouldn't she?...Now she glimpsed things no one else could, even when she didn't want to."), Chen ("a heavyset man, from a country that was just a word now, with as much meaning as a soundless scream or the place Grayson came from which didn't exist anymore either"...except he doesn't actually come from anywhere, really), and Moss (who "remained stubbornly uncommitted - to origin, to gender, to genes, went by 'she' this time but not others...Moss could open all kinds of doors.").
The three are a partnership (that is also heavily implied to be a polycule) intent on traveling alternate timelines to try and find a way to stop the Company before it does whatever it did that destroyed the earth. Or at least earth-as-we-know-it, because there is still life, scattered and broken but finding a way (as Ian Malcolm might say).

 

And that is where their purposes cross, and perhaps conflict, with the Blue Fox, another entity that can move between times/worlds and who has a much less human view of what saving the world means:
"You say why save an empty earth? I can smell it on you, hear it in your voice. The way you can't remember because how could you live. But it's only empty to your eyes. It's only empty because you helped make it so, and thought nothing of it.
There is no end to us. Only to you. You'll never understand that. You'll never understand that without us, you don't exist. You wink out of existence. You become something else. Forever. And when I'm gone, what will remain? Everything.
Everything will remain."

 

The Blue Fox has a lot of rage toward humanity, at least at first. Some of the targets are obvious:

“The furriers who kept our arctic brothers and sisters in tiny pens and then skinned them alive for their fur…The last one of them wheeling arms, red-faced, shouting for mercy. If only he had not been clad head to toe in fox, perhaps we could have forgiven a single, solitary soul.”

Or those whose voices he translates thus: “Do you have the new phone yet that someone made continents away because they were forced to and then someone else starved to death because when they mined the components they destroyed all the crop lands and the forest?”

But even ecologists like myself are not spared:

“We had seen the ones who when they flew off after banding were too disoriented to avoid the predator…But it’s a species, not the individual…Here’s a kingfisher. I had to kill it so I could save it…’We need data from you’, I explained to the old biologist.”

 

            The beauty and power of nature is a major theme of the book:

“Over all. Ruled the forest mind. Which seemed to slumber and not remember and be simple. To be made of earth and trees and clouds and birds. But was actually awake in a way no person could be awake. Slumber that was not slumber. Mind that was not mind. A person could never imprison that mind, only destroy parts of it, bit by bit. But as long as even a small part remained, it could never die. Would never die.”

But so is the beauty and power of love, most exemplified by Grayson and Moss:

  7    “Do you trust me?”

    7    “I do”

      7    “Do you love me?”

        7    “I do”

      7    “Hold onto me, then”

    7    “I will”  

  7    “Even when I’m not me”

7    “I will, Moss”

0    “And I will always be there”

        Even before I know you.

        Even after I’ve known you.

        Even then.

 

 

I was somewhat confused by the ending, so I re-read 'Borne' to see if the unexpectedly optimistic ending of that book was directly linked to the actions of the protagonists here. That isn’t entirely crucial, of course – this is a book about vibes and environmentalism more than plot. But the clues Vandermeer drops in the “big ball of wibbly wobbly timey wimey…stuff” (to quote Doctor Who) DO actually paint an interesting story if you connect them.

**Spoilers** below, obviously.

 

 

We can tell that the ‘Borne’ timeline is the main timeline in which ‘Dead Astronauts’ takes place by certain “markers”, most of which seemed insignificant in the first book: The three ‘dead astronauts’ at the crossroads AND the ones near the company building¹; the duck with the broken wing²; the leviathan fish that dies in a battle with the giant bear Mord; a mention of Charlie X as a psychotic scavenger³ who is killed by the Magician; the dollhouse in the balcony cliffs; the rains of red salamanders that help purge toxins from the world; a mention of “Company Moss”, described by the Bestiary as: “another animal-plant hybrid, with protein strands that resemble beef…Company moss contains neurons in simple synaptic relationships, which means it can think in a very limited way.” Or not so simple, when the moss pulls itself together to be Moss!

 

1. The first set telling Grayson that they accidentally came to this timeline twice!

2. Which just hangs out by the holding ponds and doesn’t do anything in ‘Borne’; In ‘Dead Astronauts’ Moss announces that it is neutral in this timeline.

3. He has already left the Company building and is wandering around like a ghost in ‘Dead Astronauts’.

 

The foxes are already an important element in ‘Borne’. Rachel sees the foxes playing in the desert, following Borne around, seemingly winking in and out of existence, and one of them leads her to the heart of the Company, where she finally understands what they were doing. None of the ones she sees are blue, but in the Bestiary, it says:

“The blue fox has been seen only 3 or 4 times, and none recently; it is rumored the blue fox was kidnapped by the Magician for her experiments. Scavengers tell the story that the blue fox was the secret leader of all the foxes…But the blue fox, even held by the Magician’s power and only a head upon a wall, could not be killed, for the blue fox did not truly live within our world. The blue fox had slipped over from elsewhere so that even if it should appear to die, it could never really die – not its heart, not its mind.”

In the beginning of dead Astronauts:

“Out of the desert came the Source. At a trot. With a familiar grin of fangs. The blue fox. Larger than them by half. Projecting to them what he wanted to project.

Love. Power. Fate. Destiny. Chance.

Showing them another world. Another way.

But why should they have a leader? Why should they not roam like wild things? For they were wild things...

I will tell you why, said the blue fox as he approached. I will tell you why it matters…There will be a terrible price to be paid. But I will pay it. If you follow me.

It made them braver. It made them fierce. It focused their thoughts through the prism of the blue fox’s mind.

Now their play had purpose.”

 

Grayson, the astronaut, had returned to earth to find an entirely dead city – scorched, burnt corpses under a chemical haze. She heads to the coast, where she encounters Moss tending tidal pools full of strange life. Moss “remembers” Grayson from other timelines: “You don’t come back often…most times you die up there.”

In this final timeline, Moss does something different, going alone to coat the leviathan fish with a green film. She does this because she sees the possibilities narrowing, and because the Blue Fox had told them that this timeline contains no version of Moss at all.

 

Moss is the gateway that allows the others to travel. Though she seems to “slough off” the leviathan, and the leviathan is killed by Mord, before that happened she had thought:“And perhaps seven brave acts were necessary too. Not just three. Infiltration from the sky, yes, but from the very rotting bones of the land. The carcass of a behemoth falling apart, rising up to meet the rain.” It seems she knew how this version of the fish would end up – although later she feels that her “double” in the holding ponds is failing. But then the foxes eat what’s left of Moss…and that’s what seems to give them their abilities to jump planes (“Delirious faux-fox surprise. Deliciousness of tiny journeys, miniature doors in the air”)! And she does seem to linger as a thought in the great fish, who remembers things he shouldn’t and lets some of the strange creatures pass, including the one who becomes Mord. Though Mord kills him, we hear a whisper of Moss’s voice to the fish: “In time, you will be as you were hatched from the egg. New, curious. And I will be the old one. And you will be the start of something new…again, through me.” From the POV of the duck, we see: “something emerged from the carcass…a person. One of the three, yet not one of the three.” And who are the seven Moss thinks of? The three astronauts plus the blue fox makes four. Borne and Rachel might be two more (or maybe the leviathan is one of those who sacrifice). But who is the seventh? Maybe ‘Sarah’ – but more on her in a moment.

 

            In ‘Borne’, Rachel notes:

“There was a mound of discarded diagrams and models for biotech. Boxes full of withered-away part. Each one had some version of Wick’s face. Crushed. Cracked. Discarded. Tossed aside. Abandoned. Discontinued. Wick had never been a person. But he had always been a person to me.”

Chen is much the same, a person made by the Company to work for them who later rebels. But he is less human than (though still as much of a person as) Wick, thinking in equations and being able to shape-shift. He has false memories of a human family far away – a trick by the Company. Chen has a true memory of a “wall of globes” containing various biotech experiments. And in one of those globes he saw a large salamander: “The piercing way it looked at him, the autonomy there, and he knew he could not fail that gaze a second time. Not and live…And so Chen had sent the salamander through the wall of globes into another world. One where the company had a foothold, but hadn’t conquered yet…sent Charlie X’s precious journal after.”

As for Chen himself, after being fatally damaged he would become:

“a rain of tiny salamanders…Always reduced to nothing by the morning, to be taken up to the sky, to rain down once more. Each time removing more toxins from the air, the soil, the water.”

 

            That salamander and the book become guides for a homeless woman who is at first nameless. The city and world in her time are more alive, but “Anything could happen, the closer to town you get. The closer to the factory. It’s better living under the bridge…The world beyond feels wrong. Infiltrated”. She forms a friendship of sorts with the giant salamander in the river, and writes her own thoughts in the journal, causing Charlie X to think: “it came back to him as a burning shed, befouled, the magic gone, his soul written on by another.” That shed is an important trauma in Sarah’s memory. Her mother had told her to burn it, only telling her once it was ablaze that Sarah’s stepfather had been tied up inside, because he was a “demon”. And yet the Moss who infiltrated Botch/Behemoth/Leviathan back in time noted: “Her doppelgänger peered out from a burning shed and said nothing more. Shut the door with herself inside…Burning at the heart of Botch.” And Botch remembers that shed, even though he shouldn’t even know what a shed is. I wonder if the stepfather was Moss, since “she” isn’t always a she, and he loved tidepools too.

 

As Sarah is pursued by a “dark bird” – the duck with the broken wing – she runs toward the shadow of a fox, through the tunnel and out into a desert version of the city: “the snow still falling, like a miracle, except now you see it’s ash and the Company building is aflame and around you lies the shattered bulk of a vast leviathan.” Charlie X says he thought Sarah too beautiful not to use – in his twisted art of biotech - but his “masters” grew suspicious of him. “The shame that would not leave. The name he could remember: Sarah. But also the other, and he could not overlap, could not overlap that name.” What name? Perhaps "Chen", but I’m not sure. As his mind descends into madness – becoming the psychotic scavenger the Magician kills in ‘Borne’ - he’s also paranoid about what the foxes are up to. From Sarah’s perspective, when Charlie X finds her: “Nods to dark birds. Nods to the men standing behind him. Swarming now. Merciless now. But the salamander’s there, too, at the edge of the river in your mind. And you give yourself over to him…In that moment, the salamander takes everything from you, before they can…All the poison and the need, all the imperfections and the want…Gives them to the ones who are killing you now. To the ones who deserve it…you’ll carry history with you…even though you don’t really escape until much later.” Sarah certainly doesn’t seem mad, when Grayson stumbles out of the desert and finds her by the tidepools, and decides that this is a place where she could live free.

 

            The Blue Fox’s ability to jump timelines and space is a product of Charlie X’s experiments: “They sought to un-fox me, but I out-foxed them. And in the end they seeded their realities with me. By mistake. Too many microbes and parasites and symbiotes in their broth. Unintended ecosystems that spoke to me.”

Those experiments seem also to be what led to the Company’s ability to infect all realities. But in one world the fox encounters a: “strange land everything was alive and nothing was dead, even the dead…Where rocks spoke to me and so did the water and so did the sand and so did the plants…What lived there had lost its name long ago. What lived there changed shape and form and spoke in different voices…It had known me before.” Future Moss, I believe! The duck spoke to a shapeshifter who mentioned that it would be part of everything one day.

 

Even when “nailed to the wall, neither alive nor quite yet dead”, looking down on Charlie X, the Blue Fox sees “in the shadows, my kind slinking through. My kind emerging from the tunnels below.” And THAT is significant, because in ‘Borne’ we see that the Company had delivered a bunch of bio-weapons, but the foxes sabotaged it:

“But the last shipment from the Company had been Borne – many Bornes…Dormant, trapped here by whoever among the remnants had had the foresight to close off the level.

Until the animals tunneled in.

… Everything that had spilled from those crates had been spiked, killed before it could live. There were only a handful that could have gotten out, and that could only have happened if the animals around me had wanted it to happen. If the fox had wanted it to happen…Was Borne the first that had awoke? And had they modified him before setting him free?...A quiet revolution sneaking up on us.”

In turn, Borne and Rachel kill Mord and the Magician, respectively, the last powers that derived in one way or another from the Company, setting the people and the new creatures free.

 

So THAT, I think, means that both the Blue Fox and the three astronauts succeeded! It was the remnants of Moss that allowed the little foxes to space-time jump and that, in the mind of the great fish, allowed Mord to escape company control, to where Rachel could pluck Borne from his back. And Chen’s salamander helped Sarah unintentionally infect the Company with madness, restoring her mind and allowing her and Grayson to heal each other. At least…that’s MY interpretation.