Ground Control

In The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics (1983), Martin Heidegger hierarchizes orders of being based on their access to the world: stones are “worldless”; animals are “poor in world”; and humans are “world-forming.”A stone simply is, indifferently; an animal has some level of awareness of the world — simple “irritability” at its lowest threshold, a reaction to the environment — but only humans are aware of their awareness of the world; only humans properly and fully exist, according to Heidegger. Or do they? One feature of what we now call the Anthropocene is (in counterpoint to its morbid apocalpyticism) an almost gleeful upending of this kind of thinking, a speculation on the affordances and intensities of other modes of being than human being. SF and fantasy engaging with this aspect of the Anthropocene often foreground, with Linnaean exuberance, the wild diversity spawned in the wake of human obsolescence. “New Weird” fiction in particular seems to explore the uncanny fecundity of our toxified world, finding life — animal, vegetable, and mineral — in all sorts of unexpected places, like the “Construct Council” in China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station (2000), an artificial intelligence distributed across millions of discarded electronic components in a landfill. Conversely, humans in these fictions are often abjected, reduced to scavengers, flailing ineffectually with intellectual tools absurdly inadequate to the world they attempt to understand and control.

Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy (2014) is a case in point. Its human characters grapple — intellectually, emotionally, and at times even physically — with Area X, an ever-expanding and alien ecosystem. A series of failed military and scientific expeditions only deepen its mystery and the source of its many terrifying prodigies. Expert knowledge is mooted, leaving only the poetics of experience. Humans in this and other of VanderMeer’s fictions are effectively “worldless” and, when not simply dead, often tend towards inertial and fugue-states, catatonias, forms of diminished or ghost-being (with their own paradoxical intensities). Biological and mineral matter is meanwhile endowed with varying levels of vitality and sentience and these categories of being must now compete for the resources necessary for survival. Which isn’t to say that survival — let alone flourishing — always means the same things for all creatures. The readerly frisson of the New Weird often results from an encounter with utter incomprehensibility, a sense or intuition of a totally other life agenda. The drama of Being that we’re used to is overwritten or edited, the familiar stakes and antagonisms made strange. Call it “ground control,” this new dilemma is a competition not only for the physical resources of the planet, but for the ground of existence itself — its philosophical perimeter. The Southern Reach trilogy stages this new drama in a remote stretch of the coastal US (based on the St. Marks Wildlife Refuge in Florida), but what if it had occurred in a densely populated zone, like a city, and furthermore, what if it — the disaster itself — had not an extraterrestrial origin, but a wholly human one? This rather more disturbing (because all too plausible) situation forms the premise of VanderMeer’s ongoing Borne (2017) series.

The titular creature — imagine a lump of talking konnyaku or sentient Silly Putty — is discovered by the novel’s protagonist, Rachel, on the flank of a five-story tall psychotic bear named Mord. Rachel, a scavenger eking out a meager existence with her partner Wick, is intrigued by the creature and, thinking it cute and harmless, brings it home. The world of Borne is in a state of advanced ruination, apparently accelerated by “the Company,” a shadowy organization whose biotech experiments (like Mord) now run amok. As Borne’s true nature is slowly revealed — protean and insatiable — the question becomes whether the world would be better off under its rule or Mord’s. The setting of the novel, called simply “the City,” is one of those extraordinary places — like Miéville’s New Crobuzon or M. John Harrison’s Viriconium — that feels as if it could produce countless narratives. At once barren and fertile, chaotic...