Borne by: Jeff VanderMeer

 

There is something fascinating when science fiction decides there’s an opportunity to throw out the stark, technical descriptions of the classic writers of the genre and do something surreal.  After all, as a speculative fiction genre there are many ways to fulfill that speculation.  Jeff VanderMeer is an author whom I’ve only read one book from before this, the novella Annihilation, which was an incredibly surreal experience.  Jumping to a full length novel from VanderMeer is by no means any less surreal, though it is a far more linear and accessible experience than the complete madness of Annihilation.  Borne is a novel VanderMeer uses to explore themes of what it means to be alive and to be human, spending much of the time contemplating through his characters an alien morality and the purpose of humanity in a world where they are no longer the apex of society.  The setting of Borne is at some point in the future, humanity having wiped itself out and the survivors are living, many mutated and changed due to biological technologies, in a city that’s long degrading due to a callous, amoral overlord.  This callous, amoral overlord is the flying bear Mord, a clearly intelligent creature but not one that sea humans on its level.  VanderMeer shows Mord only through the perspective of scavenger Rachel, our point of view for the novel, and as Rachel is one of the few humans left to spend her days searching the rubble, her narration isn’t necessarily a reliable one.  VanderMeer’s prose is intentionally written to be off-kilter, the descriptions are often brief but rooted in human universals applied to an entirely strange situation.  Rachel isn’t aware of the oddities in the post-apocalyptic future, thus the prose reads normal but finds its way into the reader’s head in a way that I can only compare to being almost under the influence of mild psychedelics.

 

Rachel as a character is also this person of uncertainty.  She has a daily routine that is disrupted by taking this thing off Mord, has a partner that is clearly meant to be read as romantic but intentionally written as a relationship of circumstance, and the entire novel is her growth to find a purpose in an especially uncaring world.  The title Borne comes from the thing Rachel finds on Mord one day, an initially anemone like creature depicted on the cover that radically transforms and grows throughout the novel.  This is Borne and it is a remnant of the Company, the biotech firm heavily implied to be responsible for ending the world  When involving the Company (always with a capital C), VanderMeer clearly intends for it to be read as capitalism leading to a lack of oversight in biotechnology leading to the destruction.  Rachel’s partner, Wick, does not trust Borne and he has every right not to.  Borne is a creature of contradictions, being seen to grow and learn whenever Rachel isn’t around, feeding on living and dead things alike, and slowly learning to exist and inhabit the world.  While referred to as he, it is truly represented as an it, allowing he because it only has Rachel as a frame of reference.  As with Rachel, Borne has to discover its purpose and as VanderMeer gives it more intelligence the more it realizes how amoral it is.  It is a simulacrum of life at first and that keeps the reader on guard throughout the novel, as Rachel and the reader can never truly understand it’s intentions.  While cosmic horror is not what VanderMeer is explicitly doing, Borne is something that can’t really be understood, yet by the end of the novel it has a purpose and it’s own agency.  Once Borne is explained VanderMeer has primed the reader for nothing but sympathy despite its horrific actions throughout the novel, the final sequence explaining the purpose and ending on this beautiful happy/sad moment of Rachel by a window.

 

Overall, while Borne is equally as surreal as the one other work by Jeff VanderMeer I have read, it is nevertheless an incredibly engaging novel.  Like many of the great works of science fiction it is often very contemplative and interested in humanity’s future while exploring an intended purpose of technology and the universe.  While perhaps just a little predictable in some areas it’s still this wonderful read and perhaps the better introduction to VanderMeer than the book he is more well known for.  9/10.