Saving the Future by Tidal Pool Rules

Next to a city, known only as "the City," is "the Company," a biotechnology firm that has polluted the landscape with poison, populated it with living monsters, and seeded it with other, more formless horrors. In Jeff VanderMeer's Borne (2017), to which Dead Astronauts is a sequel, we learned of a series of overlapping crises through which human life on Earth had become a largely stateless, disorganized scene of slow attenuation, scavenging, and mutual predation. Only hinted at in Borne is the extent to which the Company's activities are spread across a range of different Cities: the Company, we learn, "had tick-engorged itself across all timelines," and might even "come from the future to infect the past," co-opting and supplanting whatever systems of geopolitics, economics, geography or even causality we might otherwise have found on those versions of Earth (33, 180). This is perhaps Dead Astronauts' most central novum, if the term can be applied to such a deliberately mysterious process: there is some mechanism by which the Company took hold of multiple time-lines and perhaps multiple times within timelines, turning them all to the same purpose. Only the company, it seems, can communicate across timelines, rendering it a single entity on fragmented temporal ground. This seems to be the reason for the abstraction that extracts "Company," "City," and "Earth," but abandons any specific referents within time or space such as "Cincinnati" or "the year 3500."

The novel begins with three protagonists united in "their purpose, for they meant, one of these days or months or years, to destroy the Company and save the future. Some future. Nothing else meant very much anymore, except the love between them" (9). They travel across timelines searching for the version of the City and Company that is the most central, in hopes of contaminating all Companies at once. In each of the Three (and indeed even in the novel's antagonists), we find models of posthuman existence, in the sense of the obsolescence and outright rejection of the category of human. Moss, for example, is "stubbornly uncommitted—to origin, to gender, to genes, went by 'she' this time but not others" (8). She "had already given herself over to a cause beyond or above the human," and even beyond individuality as such: she can make copies of herself at will, and when she meets a doppelgänger from another timeline they end up merging into a single, indistinguishable entity (9). Moss, we are told, only assumes human form for Grayson's sake. Grayson, the only actually "human" character, is described as "a tall black woman of indeterminate age," and was an astronaut before she returned to the ruined Earth (8). Chen, the third, presents as a human man but was probably created by the Company. Besides, he struggles continually not to dissolve into a swarm of salamanders. Traveling across timelines, the Three live in a kind of intermingled intimacy that subverts not only heteronormative love but even the separateness and individuality that underlie human relationality: "to lie down on upon a bed with two others enfolded there, not cheek to cheek but the same cheek as one" (61).

Beyond the posthuman 'humans' in the novel, there are substantial attempts to conceive of other umwelten, whether animal, alien, or collective. It is usually in these efforts that the novel engages in a variety of innovative formal techniques, of which I can mention only a few. For example, during a chapter about the birth and death of an enormous fish named "Behemoth," the text fills only the bottom ¼ of the page and is alternately in paragraph and prose poem form. Several of the blue fox chapters are verbatim repetitions of the same few sentences over and over. They read as lists: "They killed us with traps. They killed us with poisons […] They withheld water. They killed all our prey […] They cut out our tongues so we bled to death. They skinned us alive," and so on (270). The passage...