Jeff VanderMeer’s deeply strange and brilliant new novel extends the meditation on the central question of non-human sentience in his earlier work. The alien intelligence that infected Area X in the Southern Reach trilogy was capable of such a profound biochemical mimicry that it shone a harsh light on the primitive nature of human cognition. Now, splicing together the DNAs of Godzilla and Frankenstein, VanderMeer gives us Borne.
In a world laid waste by a biotech company called, simply, “Company”, Mord, a massive flying bear more than five storeys high, is terrorising survivors. These include humans, mutants, animals and hybrid creatures which are revealed to be failed or aborted biotech experiments. Biotech spans a huge spectrum. Diagnostic beetles can enter a human system and heal illnesses and wounds. There are artificial living creatures such as feral children with wings and poisoned claws, and transgenic species that can morph from human to bear. Only three named humans inhabit this world. Our protagonist, Rachel, is a scavenger in the dangerous post-Company landscape. Her lover, Wick, is an ex-Company employee who makes biotech in his swimming pool laboratory. And “the Magician” is a shadowy creature who, it is rumoured, is collecting ammunition and soldiers to fight Mord and wrest control of the land from him. Then there are the “Mord proxies”, hundreds of smaller Mords who see the flying bear as their god and are impelled only by a ferocious bloodlust. Details slowly emerge of the kind of depredation wrought upon the world by the Company, along with a deliberately undersketched strand on the pre-Company world, disintegrating under unnamed political upheavals and wars that turn millions into refugees.
No one writes a post-apocalyptic landscape like VanderMeer, so detailed and strange in all its lineaments and topography
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