Borne is the new novel from Jeff VanderMeer, the David Lynch of literary sci fi. Don’t know what I mean? Let me give you an example by summarizing the events leading up to the action in this book. In a post-apocalyptic world devastated by climate change and other, unspecified man-made disasters, an unnamed, partially-destroyed city is dominated by a biotech company (known, of course, as the Company). It’s not clear exactly what the Company makes (drugs? weapons? designer pets?), but at some point it creates Mord, a thing which grows into a giant bear the size of a building (it’s described as being three storeys high lying down). Mord develops the power to levitate and escapes the Company, wreaking havoc and destroying what remains of civilization in the city. In this environment our protagonist, a black (yes!) woman (YES!) named Rachel (fine), pairs up with Wick, a disgraced former Company employee who now manufactures biological hallucinogens in the form of beetles you insert into your ear, in a converted swimming pool that he’s made into a kind of swamp teeming with artificial life. They live in an apartment complex camouflaged as a cliff face overlooking a toxic river, which they’ve booby-trapped with weaponised biochemistry and other deterrents against trespassers. To help Wick, Rachel works as a scavenger, searching for biotech that can go into his drug-swamp-brew. The most fruitful source of this is Mord himself, and while he sleeps, Rachel climbs around in his fur looking for anything salvageable. Then comes page one.
Continue reading Borne
As I learned from an Amazon product review when purchasing this book, the title is “shorthand for some scientific term”. As I learned from a very straightforward google, it more specifically means, “a group of organisms believed to comprise all the evolutionary descendants of a common ancestor.” Starting in the near future, the novel follows the members of a family through the beginnings of the effects of climate change and into a full-blown planet-wide disaster. Continue reading Clade
The unhappy, child-encumbered housewife-trapped-in-stale-marriage almost certainly has the dubious honour of being both the most-experienced and (until the 20th century) least-written plot in Western literature. I understand why it’s important, but sometimes it feels like every novelist discovered it all at once and wants to lend her (or his) “unique” “perspective”. For that reason (TWIST!) it was a rare pleasure to encounter a book that explored the issue from an ACTUAL unique perspective. You might be aware of the synopsis (it was, after all, on the bestseller list): the bulk of the North American population of migrating monarch butterflies, which usually overwinters in Mexico, mysteriously turns up on the side of a mountain in Tennessee instead, on the farm of the Turnbow family. Continue reading Flight Behavior
Oh man, I don’t know what to say about this one. I loved, could not put down, the first (according to my Kindle) 87% of it. It ticks all my geek boxes: a serious and well-written piece of literature that touches on significant world issues but also has fantastical/magical elements, mystery and enigmatic prophecies. To be honest, it’s pretty surprising to me that a non-post colonial book with this much magic in it would be longlisted for the Booker, all things considered. And as a little bonus gift for me, we first meet the main/most frequently-recurring character as a punk-loving runaway teen in the 1980s named Holly. I mean, come on! To misquote Friends, this book could have been called “Be Your Own Wind-Keeper, Holly”! Continue reading The Bone Clocks
