And then there is an abused, feral runaway who lives in a tunnel and has found Charlie X’s mysterious diary. And someone with a weird transplanted face who lives in an alternate universe and is called “Charlie X” – and he was killed and remade by his father countless times. There is the gigantic, malevolent “Duck” that was made in a laboratory, and the spectre of a blue fox and the other laughing foxes, and a thing called “Behemoth” which seems to be some kind of sentient fish. There is the “dead astronaut” of the title, called “Grayson”, along with the other two characters, “Chen”, a “fortress-sentinel”, and a plantlike humanoid, “Moss”. Measured against conventional criteriaĬharacters – there are those, but not as one would think of them as people or narrators. I use the term, “Sci-Fi Prose Poetry”, which I think best describes the type of novel it is. It is simply not conventional enough to meet the criteria against which most fiction can be judged. I got the feeling that the first part of the novel is a narrative, and the rest is, well, whatever you think the mental ramblings of strange creatures are. Other pages are just a word, or just a paragraph or two. But some pages are just the same words repeated over and over and over.

It is actually 323 pages long in paperback, which does not make it a short or small novel. I had a hard time finding the words to describe this novelette or short novel. Sci-Fi and Fantasy are supposed to be largely fictional and imaginary, and VanderMeer is a writer of prodigious imagination, but this time he has outdone himself. Dead Astronauts – A Novel, by Jeff VanderMeer (Series: Borne Book 2, publisher: MCD, December 3, 2019, hardcover, 336 pages) This is despite some sections being about awful things, or nightmarish, surreal situations. But each part is, in itself, beautifully written, word for word, or just simply beautiful. Parts are futuristic and technical, others are pastoral, others are so unusual than I don’t know what to call them.

Some parts of this novel do rather look like they were written by a “weird Thoreau” (Henry David Thoreau), as VanderMeer is dubbed in the New Yorker – a suitable moniker since he is a writer of “New Weird Literature”. Rather than sit down and try to figure out what it means, like I tried to do, I suggest that you simply allow yourself to sink into the experience of reading this like into a deep, warm bath. If you enjoy poetry as well as Science Fiction, you will appreciate Dead Astronauts.

Dead astronauts book