Borne – A Dazzling & Puzzling Dystopian Fiction

Borne is the latest novel (published April 2017) from acclaimed New Weird author Jeff VanderMeer. As in Area X: The Southern Reach Trilogy (Annihilation, Authority, Acceptance), VanderMeer’s central concept in Borne is quite bizarre and totally unbelievable on the surface. But good thing about the writer’s works is that he doesn’t only use sci-fi platform to try and predict the future or perceive real-world problems through metaphorical or allegorical lens. At the crux of his discursive and unpredictable narrative course, there often lies a very humane story that’s equal parts profound and touching. With Borne, VanderMeer once again plunges into environmental themes and creates a weird yet immersive world, full of tantalizing details.

The novel is set in an unnamed city in a post-apocalyptic world. The city is the victim of a prolonged environmental catastrophe.  It’s inhabited by survivalists, known as scavengers, and myriad of cast-off, experimental bio-tech creatures, created by a mysterious and domineering corporate simply called ‘The Company’. Twenty eight year old, brown-skinned Rachel is our protagonist and narrator. She lives with her partner Wick in the Balcony Cliffs, an abandoned apartment complex which the couples have turned into their stronghold. Wick is a scientist who once worked for the Company and he uses fragments of biotech to make ends meet; the biotech includes memory ‘beetles’ which can either remove or supplement memories, diagnostic worms, and minnows which all brings a sort of drunkenness. Rachel is an experienced scavenger who is adept at setting traps, and finding food plus bio-tech supplies.

The most threatening factor of the city is Mord, a giant despotic bear that’s produced by the Company. It also has the ability to fly. Nevertheless, when the bear slumbers, Rachel precariously scavenges from the shaggy fur of Mord. It often provides treasure trove of bio-tech supplies. During one of these salvaging missions, Rachel finds a small, strange beacon-like pod, entangled deep in the hairy mass, which she describes as, “looked like a hybrid of squid and sea anemone………strobed emerald green across the purple every half minute or so”. She doesn’t know what it is: organic or company’s creation. Rachel brings it back to Balcony Cliffs, but refuses to allow Wick to take apart the ‘thing’.

A woodcut of Mord, the giant flying bear, created by Theo Ellsworth.

The city is also home to tribe of murderous, biologically-altered children, led by a mysterious woman, hailed as The Magician. It’s unclear whether she’s from the company or an emigrant, but she’s using bio-tech enhanced powers and gathering human force to defeat Mord. Rachel names the small ‘thing’ as Borne and wonders about it’s gradual growth, which still appears to be a plant. Soon, Borne begins to move, and to Rachel’s dismay, starts to speak. She begins teaching Borne and protects the creature as if it’s her own child, whenever Wick proposes to take it apart by insinuating that it might be a ‘weapon’. Although, Borne doesn’t remotely resemble a human child, Rachel starts to anthropomorphize the creature, by calling it a ‘he’, and assigns personality traits.  And, Borne grows exponentially, both in terms of size and intelligence. What started as a fist-sized ball now sprawls over the room and can use its flexible exterior to change shape and form. Rachel instills the sense of right and wrong to Borne and believes it’s as innocent as a child. But sudden drop in the local population of lizards, spiders, and other little living things besides themselves, proves Rachel otherwise. She later finds out that she can’t truly control Borne’s nature, but rejects Wick’s idea that her surrogate child might be a threat to their lives. Borne also sees itself as a person, loves Rachel like a mother, and tries its best to hide the malevolent side. As Rachel & Wick’s conflicted relationship with Borne reaches a threshold point, war for power begins to brew between Mord, its bear-like minions known as ‘Mord Proxies’, and the Magician (the Magician character and the destroyed world reminded me of anime master Miyazaki’s thought-provoking feature Princess Mononoke).

The best thing about VanderMeer’s prose in Borne is how he establishes the relationship between individual and the place. Oft we could read vivid details about the unnamed, ravaged city through Rachel’s sense of smell (there’s recurring reference to scent of ocean or pungent smell of bio-tech tidal pools) and acute perception. Nevertheless, the characters aren’t domineered by the texture of the strange wilderness. They actually stand out despite the bewildering setting. VanderMeer’s works repeatedly pay hefty tribute to nature’s resilient quality and suggests the interconnectedness of nature and whole human experience. He hints at how our humane quality (or morality) depends on the way we treat nature and other organisms. Mord, The Company, and the strange bio-techs could stand-in as the allegory for climate change and our rejection of nature’s inter-connectivity. But Borne doesn’t only stay as clever metaphor for tangible real-world problems, but also carries a deeply emotional tale at its heart.  Rachel’s relationship with Borne strikes a fine balance between the ultimate futility of anthropomorphizing all living organisms and the necessity to de-centralize human experience; to not see everything in human terms and also be mindful of how limitless and complex the world could be. Through Rachel’s narration or limited perspective, VanderMeer examines how we project personality onto animals, and yet not truly understand the creature’s unique beauty and importance.  

The Courtyard of Dead Astronauts by Kayla Harren

Perhaps the frustrating thing about the writer’s works is this limited perspective. His stories are strange and inexplicable, in a Lovecraftian sense. And, when all is said and done, the details still remain obscure although there’s a leftover feeling of having experienced something beautiful and strange. It may be akin to waking up from vivid dream and contemplating the slow dissipation of surrealistic mind-images. Moreover, VanderMeer often plays with readers’ preconceptions. He writes all the stock characters and big action set-pieces we come to expect from post-apocalyptic atmosphere. But the dynamics between the characters and outcome of battles largely deviates from our expectations (we initially compare Borne to E.T. but its much more complex than the stranded alien being). On a basic level, Borne could be read as a story chronicling the struggles and dilemmas of parenthood. Despite the fundamental weirdness in Rachel’s maternal feeling, the readers are thoroughly immersed in her palpable sense of love towards Borne. Like every ‘normal’ parent, she is elated to watch her surrogate child grow up, while at the same time trying to hold on to ‘him’; she wants to remain close to Borne, while also teaches ‘him’ to be independent. In spite of the interesting final twists, thrilling actions, and highly imaginative writing of bio-tech riddled atmosphere, what truly makes Borne a dazzling read is the profound ways Jeff Vandermeer uses the setting to get to the emotional truths. In the end, to the author’s credit, Borne (336 pages) doesn’t come off as a fantastical tale of flying, giant bears and talking tentacle monster; it’s actually a piercing tale of love, trust, sacrifice, and humanity’s undetachable relationship with the natural world. 

The Southern Reach Trilogy – A Bewitching Science Fantasy on the Bounds of Human Perception

“Perhaps so many journals had piled up in the lighthouse because on some level most came, in time, to recognize the futility of language. Not just in Area X but against the rightness of the lived-in moment, the instant of touch, of connection for which words were such a sorrowful disappointment, so inadequate an expression of both the finite and the infinite.”

         --   Jeff VanderMeer, Acceptance

American author and literary critic Jeff VanderMeer’s The Southern Reach Trilogy is about broken systems, transitioning ecosystems, and limits of human reasoning and moral imperatives. The trilogy of novels comprises of an ill-fated scientific expedition, an otherworldly zone in the earth, and paranoid characters, all the fine ingredients for cooking up an apocalyptic thriller with limited questions and definite answers. But what if there are no concrete answers, and the characters tasked to solve the mystery doesn’t have the means or substance to do so? The Southern Reach Trilogy is definitely a page-turner which derives its majestic power from its terrifyingly surrealistic and vivid imagery. However, in a Lovecraftian sense, Jeff VanderMeer doesn’t package the uncanny and unsettling to serve a predictable narrative arc. The novels instantly entangle us with in its spooky environment and provide no due catharsis to escape from the spooky feeling. Eventually, what we come to acknowledge from Southern Reach Trilogy is the limits of human consciousness and cognition and our own peripheral status compared to the powerful ecological forces. An uncomfortable yet thoroughly absorbing work to read in the Age of Anthropocene.

The paranoia and hallucination-riddled Southern Reach Trilogy comprises of Annihilation, Authority and Acceptance, all three titles released in 2014 (in February, May, and September respectively). Although all the three novels are about the mystery of Area X – a forgotten coastal area transformed into a ‘pristine wilderness’ by an unknown transformative event 3 decades ago and spawns weird organisms – VanderMeer’s narrative tone couldn’t be enclosed within a particular genre framework. The first one and the most page-turning one of the three, Annihilation pretty much looks like a combination of Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris (the conscious alien planet Ocean) and Strugatsky Brothers’ Roadside Picnic (the unfathomable Zone) accompanied with a Lovecraftian sense of observing the horror of unknown. The second one Authority surprisingly revolves around bureaucratic conflicts inside Southern Reach – a secretive quasi-governmental body, established by wholly mysterious governmental institution ‘Central’, to investigate the Area X – that’s Kafkaesque, in terms of evoking paranoia and delirium. The third and final one Acceptance moves in a literary fashion with multiple timelines, multiple character perspectives, and strong emotional impacts (which heavily relies on incidents from previous novels).

Map of Area X

Annihilation is narrated by a smart and introverted biologist who is one of the four members of the 12^th expedition team investigating Area X. The other three are psychologist (the expedition leader), the anthropologist, and surveyor (all unnamed for good reasons). Area X is enclosed within an invisible border and there’s one opening to allow in the human visitors. The previous expedition journey into Area X have mostly been disastrous: members met with gory death, gone missing or came back with their memory wiped out. The Area X may be an alternate version of Earth with all human toxicity completely purged. It’s hinted that behind the veneer of lush, transitional ecosystem – marshes, tropical beaches and pines packed inside a single ecosystem -- lies horrifying and unbelievably odd animals (what if the entrance is created to leave those things outside?).  But the foremost mystery of Area X that increasingly preoccupies the expedition members is the endless hole dug into the earth with a spiral staircase going down. Known as ‘topographical anomaly’, ‘tunnel’ and inverted ‘tower’, this cylindrical hole in the ground promises a whole lot of spine-chilling ‘alien’ encounters. But as it’s always the case, the biologist soon finds that apart from uncannily discomforting qualities of Area X, she can’t wholly trust her human counterparts too.

The book two Authority follows the maddening attempts of new interim director to Southern Reach whose real name is John Rodriguez, but asks his subordinates to refer him as ‘Control’ (a homage to John le Carre’s spy character?). There’s a plainly visible irony in this situation, since Control has zero control over anything in Southern Reach and has to put up with the politics between Central and obstinate assistant-director Grace. Although Authority unfurls in a modernist building, few miles from Area X, it sheds more light or raises more questions about the bizarre ecological phenomenon. Control’s chat with science team members Cheney and Whitby about the labyrinthine theories on Area X, which basically indicates the infantile quality of human reasoning when faced with something incomprehensible or uncategorisable (as Cheney remarks, “A circle looks at a square and sees a badly made circle…” or as another character says, “You could know the what of something forever and never discover the why”). The biologist plays an important role too in Authority. But there’s a question of, is she the real one or a mere replica (like the Ocean in Solaris creates known individuals from expedition members’ past for unknown reasons). The closing book Acceptance shifts back to rapidly expanding Area X which is as much about the characters’ inner selves as the complicated ecosystem. However, it’s also frustrating too; not entirely in a bad way as VanderMeer thwarts our generic expectations by placing the mystery of untamed Area X way beyond the cognitive boundaries of human mind. The final destination may not be something we’d anticipate, but the journey itself into the dreadfully imaginative unknown is well worth the read.

Natalie Portman plays the 'Biologist' in the upcoming adaptation of 'Annihilation'

Jeff VanderMeer’s works belongs to ‘New Weird’ fiction, an eclectic mix of dark fantasy, scientific speculation, pulp fiction, and surrealism. It possesses the merits of visionary fiction and philosophical knotiness without ever spoiling the page-turning qualities. VanderMeer’s Ambergris books, Southern Reach Trilogy and the latest biotech apocalyptic mystery Borne, are known for its Eco-philosophy musings and hard-science notions. The extraordinarily rendered atmosphere and profound characters of VanderMeer’s books easily overcomes the generally fussy denouements. The endlessly unfathomable aspects of the author’s works actually imprint the densely-constructed imagery in a more depthful manner, like any uncannily great works of science fantasy. The surrealistic encounters with the Crawler, inside the lighthouse or over invisible border, and all the ecologically strange elements linger in our mind, long after the ending.

 Jeff VanderMeer constantly evokes the sense of ecological terror as Area X represents some heightened, unexpected nightmare of human-inflicted damages. The horror actually doesn’t lies in its expression of how much we transform the environment, but in the imagination of a reverse effect: on how the nature or some mysterious phenomenon can easily choose to transform us; our bodies and identities that are believed to be special and unique becomes just another dirty part of a changing biosphere. The other significant theme in the trilogy is language that’s used as a tool for manipulation and as a representation of our limited consciousness. Although the intense use of hypnotic suggestion, and narratives revolving around ‘Séance and Science Brigade’ verges more on occult category than science, the author employs hypnotism to hint at the power of manipulation through human language. The manipulation is clearly visible at times when VanderMeer turns the table on us (readers) too to indicate we are also being deceived by language (there’s an interesting moment in Annihilation when the biologist says to readers that she withheld some crucial information to make us think her as ‘a credible, objective witness’). And, since Area X itself is only observed through the eyes of the unnerved characters, the futility or limitation of language becomes an intriguing aspect. Eventually, The Southern Reach Trilogy deftly showcases horrific encounters with the inexplicable and unfathomable to perceive the minuscule scale of human consciousness and achievements, compared to the vaster context of boundless universe.

[Annihilation is being adapted into a movie by British author and film-maker Alex Garland with Natalie Portman playing the biologist role and it's slated to release in February 2018. If the movie is a success, it would be very interesting to see how the other two nearly unfilmable books are turned into a movie].

 The Spooky Science of the Southern Reach