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Named one of the best books of 2017 by The Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, PopSugar, Financial Times, Chicago Review of Books, Huffington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, Thrillist, Book Riot, National Post (Canada), Kirkus and Publishers Weekly
From the author of the Southern Reach Trilogy comes Jeff VanderMeer's Borne, a story about two humans and two creatures.
“Am I a person?” Borne asked me.
“Yes, you are a person,” I told him. “But like a person, you can be a weapon, too.”
In Borne, a young woman named Rachel survives as a scavenger in a ruined city half destroyed by drought and conflict. The city is dangerous, littered with discarded experiments from the Company—a biotech firm now derelict—and punished by the unpredictable predations of a giant bear. Rachel ekes out an existence in the shelter of a run-down sanctuary she shares with her partner, Wick, who deals his own homegrown psychoactive biotech.
One day, Rachel finds Borne during a scavenging mission and takes him home. Borne as salvage is little more than a green lump—plant or animal?—but exudes a strange charisma. Borne reminds Rachel of the marine life from the island nation of her birth, now lost to rising seas. There is an attachment she resents: in this world any weakness can kill you. Yet, against her instincts—and definitely against Wick’s wishes—Rachel keeps Borne. She cannot help herself. Borne, learning to speak, learning about the world, is fun to be with, and in a world so broken that innocence is a precious thing. For Borne makes Rachel see beauty in the desolation around her. She begins to feel a protectiveness she can ill afford.
“He was born, but I had borne him.”
But as Borne grows, he begins to threaten the balance of power in the city and to put the security of her sanctuary with Wick at risk. For the Company, it seems, may not be truly dead, and new enemies are creeping in. What Borne will lay bare to Rachel as he changes is how precarious her existence has been, and how dependent on subterfuge and secrets. In the aftermath, nothing may ever be the same.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherMCD
- Publication dateApril 25, 2017
- File size28724 KB
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Editorial Reviews
From School Library Journal
Review
May be the most beautifully written, and believable, post-apocalyptic tale in recent memory...VanderMeer...outdoes himself in this visionary novel.
-- "Los Angeles Times"Borne...represents a high-water mark in an ascendant strand of science fiction, one that looks with a sharp eye toward a near future of ecological calamity, chaos, and monumental ethical battles.
-- "Literary Hub"Borne is VanderMeer's trans-species rumination on the theme of parenting.
-- "New Yorker"A story of loving self-sacrifice, hallucinatory beauty, and poisonous trust...[with] engrossing richness.
-- "Washington Post"A thorough marvel.
-- "Colson Whitehead, National Book Award winner and #1 New York Times bestselling author"Creepy and fascinating.
-- "Stephen King, #1 New York Times bestselling author"I you haven't read his haunting Southern Reach trilogy, prepare yourself-this is Walden gone horribly wrong.
-- "Esquire"Narrator Bahni Turpin brings a haunting melancholy to VanderMeer's enormous weird world, transforming what initially seems an outlandish dystopian tale into a deeply personal journey...Turpin...build[s] a palpable and audible bond between Rachel and Borne that makes this story gripping, unsettling, and thoroughly memorable.
-- "AudioFile"Reading like a dispatch from a world lodged somewhere between science fiction, myth, and a video game...Something more than just weird fiction: weird literature.
-- "Publishers Weekly (starred review)"Superb: a protagonist and a tale sure to please fans of smart, literate fantasy and science fiction.
-- "Kirkus Reviews (starred review)" --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.About the Author
Jeff VanderMeer is an award-winning novelist and editor. His fiction has been translated into twenty languages and has appeared in the Library of America's American Fantastic Tales and in multiple anthologies. VanderMeer also writes for the Guardian, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and New York Times Book Review, among others. He grew up in the Fiji Islands and now lives in Tallahassee, Florida, with his wife.
Bahni Turpin has guest starred in many television series, including NYPD Blue, Law & Order, Six Feet Under, and Cold Case. Her film credits include Brokedown Palace and Crossroads. She has won numerous AudioFile Earphones Awards and three prestigious Audie Awards.
--This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Borne
A Novel
By Jeff VandermeerFarrar, Straus and Giroux
Copyright © 2017 VanderMeer Creative, Inc.All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-374-11524-1
CHAPTER 1
WHAT I FOUND AND HOW I FOUND IT
I found Borne on a sunny gunmetal day when the giant bear Mord came roving near our home. To me, Borne was just salvage at first. I didn't know what Borne would mean to us. I couldn't know that he would change everything.
Borne was not much to look at that first time: dark purple and about the size of my fist, clinging to Mord's fur like a half-closed stranded sea anemone. I found him only because, beacon-like, he strobed emerald green across the purple every half minute or so.
Come close, I could smell the brine, rising in a wave, and for a moment there was no ruined city around me, no search for food and water, no roving gangs and escaped, altered creatures of unknown origin or intent. No mutilated, burned bodies dangling from broken streetlamps.
Instead, for a dangerous moment, this thing I'd found was from the tidal pools of my youth, before I'd come to the city. I could smell the pressed-flower twist of the salt and feel the wind, knew the chill of the water rippling over my feet. The long hunt for seashells, the gruff sound of my father's voice, the upward lilt of my mother's. The honey warmth of the sand engulfing my feet as I looked toward the horizon and the white sails of ships that told of visitors from beyond our island. If I had ever lived on an island. If that had ever been true.
The sun above the carious yellow of one of Mord's eyes.
* * *
To find Borne, I had tracked Mord all morning, from the moment he had woken in the shadow of the Company building far to the south. The de facto ruler of our city had risen into the sky and come close to where I lay hidden, to slake his thirst by opening his great maw and scraping his muzzle across the polluted riverbed to the north. No one but Mord could drink from that river and live; the Company had made him that way. Then he sprang up into the blue again, a murderer light as a dandelion seed. When he found prey, a ways off to the east, under the scowl of rainless clouds, Mord dove from on high and relieved some screaming pieces of meat of their breath. Reduced them to a red mist, a roiling wave of the foulest breath imaginable. Sometimes the blood made him sneeze.
No one, not even Wick, knew why the Company hadn't seen the day coming when Mord would transform from their watchdog to their doom — why they hadn't tried to destroy Mord while they still held that power. Now it was too late, for not only had Mord become a behemoth, but, by some magic of engineering extorted from the Company, he had learned to levitate, to fly.
By the time I had reached Mord's resting place, he shuddered in earthquake-like belches of uneasy sleep, his nearest haunch rising high above me. Even on his side, Mord rose three stories. He was drowsy from sated bloodlust; his thoughtless sprawl had leveled a building, and pieces of soft-brick rubble had mashed out to the sides, repurposed as Mord's bed in slumber.
Mord had claws and fangs that could eviscerate, extinguish, quick as thought. His eyes, sometimes open even in dream, were vast, fly-encrusted beacons, spies for a mind that some believed worked on cosmic scales. But to me at his flanks, human flea, all he stood for was good scavenging. Mord destroyed and reimagined our broken city for reasons known only to him, yet he also replenished it in his thoughtless way.
When Mord wandered seething from the lair he had hollowed out in the wounded side of the Company building, all kinds of treasures became tangled in that ropy, dirt-bathed fur, foul with carrion and chemicals. He gifted us with packets of anonymous meat, surplus from the Company, and sometimes I would find the corpses of unrecognizable animals, their skulls burst from internal pressure, eyes bright and bulging. If we were lucky, some of these treasures would fall from him in a steady rain during his shambling walks or his glides high above, and then we did not have to clamber onto him. On the best yet worst days, we found the beetles you could put in your ear, like the ones made by my partner Wick. As with life generally, you never knew, and so you followed, head down in genuflection, hoping Mord would provide.
Some of these things may have been placed there on purpose, as Wick always warned me. They could be traps. They could be misdirection. But I knew traps. I set traps myself. Wick's "Be careful" I ignored as he knew I would when I set out each morning. The risk I took, for my own survival, was to bring back what I found to Wick, so he could go through them like an oracle through entrails. Sometimes I thought Mord brought these things to us out of a broken sense of responsibility to us, his playthings, his torture dolls; other times that the Company had put him up to it.
Many a scavenger, surveying that very flank I now contemplated, had misjudged the depth of Mord's sleep and found themselves lifted up and, unable to hold on, fallen to their death ... Mord unaware as he glided like a boulder over his hunting preserve, this city that has not yet earned back its name. For these reasons, I did not risk much more than exploratory missions along Mord's flank. Seether. Theeber. Mord. His names were many and often miraculous to those who uttered them aloud.
So did Mord truly sleep, or had he concocted a ruse in the spiraling toxic waste dump of his mind? Nothing that simple this time. Emboldened by Mord's snores, which manifested as titanic tremors across the atlas of his body, I crept up farther on his haunch, while down below other scavengers used me as their canary. And there, entangled in the brown, coarse seaweed of Mord's pelt, I stumbled upon Borne.
Borne lay softly humming to itself, the half-closed aperture at the top like a constantly dilating mouth, the spirals of flesh contracting, then expanding. "It" had not yet become "he."
The closer I approached, the more Borne rose up through Mord's fur, became more like a hybrid of sea anemone and squid: a sleek vase with rippling colors that strayed from purple toward deep blues and sea greens. Four vertical ridges slid up the sides of its warm and pulsating skin. The texture was as smooth as waterworn stone, if a bit rubbery. It smelled of beach reeds on lazy summer afternoons and, beneath the sea salt, of passionflowers. Much later, I realized it would have smelled different to someone else, might even have appeared in a different form.
It didn't really look like food and it wasn't a memory beetle, but it wasn't trash, either, and so I picked it up anyway. I don't think I could have stopped myself.
Around me, Mord's body rose and fell with the tremors of his breathing, and I bent at the knees to keep my balance. Snoring and palsying in sleep, acting out a psychotic dreamsong. Those fascinating eyes — so wide and yellow-black, as pitted as meteors or the cracked dome of the observatory to the west — were tight-closed, his massive head extended without care for any danger well to the east.
And there was Borne, defenseless.
The other scavengers, many the friends of an uneasy truce, now advanced up the side of Mord, emboldened, risking the forest of his dirty, his holy fur. I hid my find under my baggy shirt rather than in my satchel so that as they overtook me they could not see it or easily steal it.
Borne beat against my chest like a second heart.
"Borne."
Names of people, of places, meant so little, and so we had stopped burdening others by seeking them. The map of the old horizon was like being haunted by a grotesque fairy tale, something that when voiced came out not as words but as sounds in the aftermath of an atrocity. Anonymity amongst all the wreckage of the Earth, this was what I sought. And a good pair of boots for when it got cold. And an old tin of soup half hidden in rubble. These things became blissful; how could names have power next to that?
Yet still, I named him Borne.
WHO I BROUGHT BORNE TO
There is no other way to say this: Wick, my partner and lover both, was a drug dealer, and the drug he pushed was as terrible and beautiful and sad and sweet as life itself. The beetles Wick altered, or made from materials he'd stolen from the Company, didn't just teach when shoved in your ear; they could also rid you of memories and add memories. People who couldn't face the present shoved them into their ears so they could experience someone else's happier memories from long ago, from places that didn't exist anymore.
The drug was the first thing Wick offered me when I met him, and the first thing I refused, sensing a trap even when it seemed like an escape. Within the explosion of mint or lime from putting the beetle in your ear would form marvelous visions of places I hoped did not exist. It would be too cruel, thinking that sanctuary might be real. Such an idea could make you stupid, careless.
Only the stricken look on Wick's face in response to my revulsion at the idea made me stay, keep talking to him. I wish I had known the source of his discomfort then and not so much later.
I set the sea anemone on a rickety table between our chairs. We were sitting on one of the rotting balconies jutting out from a sheer rock face that had inspired me to name our refuge the Balcony Cliffs. The original name of the place, on the rusted placard in the subterranean lobby, was unreadable.
Behind us lay the warren we lived in and in front of us, way down below, veiled by a protective skein Wick had made to shield us from unwelcome eyes, the writhings of the poisonous river that ringed most of the city. A stew of heavy metals and oil and waste that generated a toxic mist, reminding us that we would likely die from cancer or worse. Beyond the river lay a wasteland of scrub. Nothing good or wholesome there, yet on rare occasions people still appeared out of that horizon.
I had come out of that horizon.
"What is this thing?" I asked Wick, who was taking a good long look at what I'd brought. The thing pulsed, as harmless and functional as a lamp. Yet one of the terrors the Company had visited on the city in the past was to test its biotech on the streets. The city turned into a vast laboratory and now half destroyed, just like the Company.
Wick smiled the thin smile of a thin man, which looked more like a wince. With one arm on the table and left leg crossed over the right, in loose-fitting linen pants he'd found a week before and a white button-down shirt he'd worn so long it was yellowing, Wick looked almost relaxed. But I knew it was a pose, struck as much for the city's benefit as mine. Slashes in the pants. Holes in the shirt. The details you tried to unsee that told a more accurate story.
"What isn't it? That's the first question," he said.
"Then what isn't it?"
He shrugged, unwilling to commit. A wall sometimes formed between us when discussing finds, a guardedness I didn't like.
"Should I come back at some other time? When you're feeling more talkative?" I asked.
I'd grown less patient with him over time, which was unkind as he needed my patience more now. The raw materials for his creations were running out, and he had other pressures. His rivals — in particular, the Magician, who had taken over the entire western reaches of the city — encroached on his thoughts and territory, made demands on him now. His handsome face beneath wispy blond hair, the lantern chin and high cheekbones, had begun to eat themselves the way a candle is eaten by flame.
"Can it fly?" he asked, finally.
"No," I said, smiling. "It has no wings." Although we both knew that was no guarantee.
"Does it bite?"
"It hasn't bitten me," I said. "Why, should I bite it?"
"Should we eat it?"
Of course he didn't mean it. Wick was always cautious, even when reckless. But he was opening up after all; I could never predict it. Maybe that was the point.
"No, we shouldn't," I said.
"We could play catch with it."
"You mean, help it fly?"
"If we're not going to eat it."
"It's not really a ball anymore."
Which was the truth. For a time, the creature I called Borne had retreated into itself but had now, with a strangely endearing tentative grace, become vase-shaped again. The thing just lay there on the table, pulsing and strobing in a way I found comforting. The strobing made it look bigger, or perhaps it had already started growing.
Wick's hazel-green eyes had grown larger, more empathic in that shrunken face as he pondered the puzzle of what I had brought to him. Those eyes saw everything, except, perhaps, how I saw him.
"I know what it isn't," Wick said, serious again. "It isn't Mord-made. I doubt Mord knew he carried it. But it isn't necessarily from the Company, either."
Mord could be devious, and Mord's relationship with the Company was in flux. Sometimes we wondered if a civil war raged in the remnants of the Company building, between those who supported Mord and those who regretted creating him.
"Where did Mord pick it up from if not the Company?"
A tremor at Wick's mouth made the purity of his features more arresting and intense. "Whispers come back to me. Of things roaming the city that owe no allegiance to Mord, the Company, or the Magician. I see these things at the fringes, in the desert at night, and I wonder ..."
Foxes and other small mammals had shadowed me that morning. Was that what Wick meant? Their proliferation was a mystery — was the Company making them, or was the desert encroaching on the city?
I didn't tell him about the animals, wanted his own testimony, prompted, "Things?"
But he ignored my question, changed course: "Well, it's easy enough to learn more." Wick passed his hand over Borne. The crimson worms living in his wrist leapt out briefly to analyze it, before retreating into his skin.
"Surprising. It is from the Company. At least, created inside the Company." He'd worked for the Company in its heyday, a decade ago, before being "cast out, thrown away," as he put it in a rare unguarded moment.
"But not by the Company?"
"It has the economy of design usually only achieved by committees of one."
When Wick danced around a subject, it made me nervous. The world was already too uncertain, and if I looked to Wick for anything besides security, it was for knowledge.
"Do you think it's a mistake?" I asked. "An afterthought? Something put out in the trash?"
Wick shook his head, but his tight frown didn't reassure me. Wick was self-sufficient and self-contained. So was I. Or so we both thought. But now I felt he was withholding some crucial piece of information.
"Then what?"
"It could be almost anything. It could be a beacon. It could be a cry for help. It could be a bomb." Did Wick really not know?
"So maybe we should eat it?"
He laughed, shattering the architectural lines of his face. The laughter didn't bother me. Not then, at least.
"I wouldn't. Much worse to eat a bomb than a beacon." He leaned forward, and I took such pleasure from staring at his face that I thought he had to notice. "But we should know its purpose. If you give it to me, I can at least break it down into its parts, cycle it through my beetles. Discover more that way. Make use of it."
We were, in our way, equals by now. Partners. I sometimes called him my boss because I scavenged for him, but I didn't have to give him the sea anemone. Nothing in our agreement said I had to. True, he could take it while I slept ... but this was always the test of our relationship. Were we symbiotic or parasitic?
I looked at the creature lying there on the table, and I felt possessive. The feeling rose out of me unexpected, but true — and not just because I'd risked Mord to find Borne.
"I think I'll keep it for a while," I said.
Wick gave me a long look, shrugged, and said, too casually, "Suit yourself." The creature might be unusual, but we'd seen similar things before; perhaps he believed there was little harm.
Then he took a golden beetle from his pocket, put it in his ear, and his eyes no longer saw me. He always did that after something reminded him of the Company in the wrong way, unleashing a kind of self-despising rage and melancholy. I had told him confessing whatever had happened there might bring him peace, but he always ignored me. He told me he was shielding me. I did not believe him. Not really.
Perhaps he was trying to forget the details of some personal failure he could not forgive, something he'd brought on himself or actions he'd taken toward the end. Yet the job he'd chosen — or been forced into — after leaving could only remind him of the Company hour by hour, day by day. It was hard to guess because I didn't know much about biotech, and I felt the answers I wanted from him might be technical, that maybe he thought I wouldn't understand the details.
(Continues...)Excerpted from Borne by Jeff Vandermeer. Copyright © 2017 VanderMeer Creative, Inc.. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.
From the Back Cover
“Am I a person or a weapon?” Borne asks Rachel, in extremis. “You are a person,” Rachel tells him.
“But like a person, you can be a weapon, too.”
In Borne, the epic new novel from Jeff VanderMeer, author of the acclaimed bestselling Southern Reach trilogy, a young woman named Rachel survives as a scavenger in a ruined, dangerous city of the near future. The city is littered with discarded experiments from the Company—a biotech firm now seemingly derelict—and punished by the unpredictable attacks of a giant bear. From one of her scavenging missions, Rachel brings home Borne, who is little more than a green lump—plant or animal?—but who exudes a strange charisma. Rachel feels a growing attachment to Borne, a protectiveness that she can ill afford. It’s exactly the kind of vulnerability that will upend her precarious existence, unnerving her partner, Wick, and upsetting the delicate balance of their unforgiving city—possibly forever. And yet, little as she understands what or who Borne may be, she cannot give him up, even as Borne grows and changes . . . “He was born, but I had borne him.”
--This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.Review
Borne is VanderMeer's trans-species rumination on the theme of parenting.
-- "New Yorker"A story of loving self-sacrifice, hallucinatory beauty, and poisonous trust...[with] engrossing richness.
-- "Washington Post"I you haven't read his haunting Southern Reach trilogy, prepare yourself-this is Walden gone horribly wrong.
-- "Esquire"May be the most beautifully written, and believable, post-apocalyptic tale in recent memory...VanderMeer...outdoes himself in this visionary novel.
-- "Los Angeles Times"Turpin's memorable performance highlights the outstanding world building, lyrical prose, authentic characters, and richly layered story line. Turpin's clear and thoughtful reading guides listeners through the book's complexities, clarifying language and ideas and revealing its heartfelt center: What does it mean to be human?
-- "Booklist (starred audio review)"VanderMeer marries bildungsroman, domestic drama, love story, and survival thriller into one compelling, intelligent story.
-- "Booklist (starred review)"Superb: a protagonist and a tale sure to please fans of smart, literate fantasy and science fiction.
-- "Kirkus Reviews (starred review)"Creepy and fascinating.
-- "Stephen King, #1 New York Times bestselling author"A thorough marvel.
-- "Colson Whitehead, National Book Award winner and #1 New York Times bestselling author"VanderMeer's apocalyptic vision, with its mix of absurdity, horror, and grace, can't be mistaken for that of anyone else. Inventive, engrossing, and heartbreaking.
-- " San Francisco Chronicle" --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.Product details
- ASIN : B01M98T0J7
- Publisher : MCD (April 25, 2017)
- Publication date : April 25, 2017
- Language : English
- File size : 28724 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 366 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #32,118 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #237 in Contemporary Literary Fiction
- #279 in Dystopian Fiction
- #373 in Dystopian Science Fiction (Kindle Store)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

Called “the weird Thoreau” by the New Yorker, NYT bestseller Jeff VanderMeer has been a published writer since age 14. His most recent fiction is the critically acclaimed novel BORNE, which has received raves from the NYTBR, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, and many more. Paramount Pictures has optioned BORNE for film.
VanderMeer's Southern Reach trilogy was one of the publishing events of 2014, the trilogy made more than thirty year’s best lists, including Entertainment Weekly’s top 10. Paramount Pictures has made a movie out of the first volume of the Southern Reach, Annihilation, slated for release in 2018 and starring Tessa Thompson, Oscar Isaac, Gina Rodriguez, Natalie Portman, and Jennifer Jason Leigh.
His nonfiction appears in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, the Guardian, and the Atlantic.com. VanderMeer also wrote the world’s first fully illustrated creative-writing guide, Wonderbook. With his wife, Ann VanderMeer, he has edited may iconic anthologies. He lives in Tallahassee, Florida, with two wonderful cats. His hobbies include hiking, reading, and bird watching.
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Reviewed in the United States on July 24, 2022
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From over-consumption, capitalism without care for the consequences, climate change, isolation and the devolution of community, and over-dependence on the government to fix things and save us, it feels like the world is changing for the worse and that either we can't fix it or we won't fix it. We're confused about what to do and waiting on the next guy to figure it out. That's kind of this book in a nutshell. People barely surviving worsening conditions while fighting/avoiding/suspecting each other. Reading brings the confusion I mentioned to the forefront of one's mind, but there are several other relatable and thought-provoking explorations: what life deserves respect and at what level, what is sentience, what is moral and who decides, is there right and wrong at all and who decides, what line would you cross to survive, do we need each other, self-dependence or community dependence, and more! But I warn you, Jeff Vandermeer isn't trying to offer answers. You will exit this read still confused, but thinking.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on July 24, 2022
From over-consumption, capitalism without care for the consequences, climate change, isolation and the devolution of community, and over-dependence on the government to fix things and save us, it feels like the world is changing for the worse and that either we can't fix it or we won't fix it. We're confused about what to do and waiting on the next guy to figure it out. That's kind of this book in a nutshell. People barely surviving worsening conditions while fighting/avoiding/suspecting each other. Reading brings the confusion I mentioned to the forefront of one's mind, but there are several other relatable and thought-provoking explorations: what life deserves respect and at what level, what is sentience, what is moral and who decides, is there right and wrong at all and who decides, what line would you cross to survive, do we need each other, self-dependence or community dependence, and more! But I warn you, Jeff Vandermeer isn't trying to offer answers. You will exit this read still confused, but thinking.

The beginning starts tame enough. Just another day in the post-apocalyptic neighborhood, scavenging for biotech. Climbing giant psychotic killer bears and rifling through their stinking blood matted fur. Yes, that's the tame part.
Rachel brings home an odd piece of biotech she's never seen before and decides to name it Borne. He's an invertebrate sea anemone type creature who can change shape and size. Her lover and roomie Wick, an ex-biotech scientist and a memory beetle drug dealer, immediately wants to break him down, crack him open and see what's inside. But Rachel likes him. Rachel wants to keep him. Rachel puts him in the window like a decorative plant. This is where the fun begins.
Borne was far and away my favorite character here. I loved the way he spoke. I loved the way he learned and grew. I loved that you could never really trust him. I loved that when it came to Borne, Rachel wasn't exactly reliable. She loves him the way any mother loves her child, blindly. I enjoyed Rachel and Wick's characters as well, and I think Vandermeer did an excellent job making them all very human.
The story could be slow going at times. The action part of the plot is centered on day to day survival, while in the background the reader has all these mysteries propelling them forward. What is Borne? Can he be trusted? What is happening at the Company? What's wrong with Wick? Why can't Rachel remember what happened to her? The ending is ambiguous and will leave you with questions unanswered and many things to think about.
My only real complaint about the book, was that the world that all these characters lived in occasionally felt devoid of other humans. For example, Wick is a drug dealer. He sells memory beetles to people who can't cope with reality and just want to forget, or remember someone else's life instead of their own. I really would have loved for the author to have done something with this concept. The world is filled with monsters galore, but there were no other people (save for one other person, who I won't spoil). I just kept wondering, who is Wick selling all these memory beetles too? Where is everyone else? There is talk of territories between the drug dealers but it never seemed like there would have been enough humans to sell all these biotech drugs to.
Overall I enjoyed it. It was unique. It was weird. It was fun. It gave me something to think about. I'd recommend this to anyone looking for something different, a little change in their regularly scheduled programming.
****
Jeff VanderMeer is America's closest answer to China Mieville, a crafter of weird new stuff (I won't hang the "New Weird" label on him, but his work is certainly weird in new ways). His previous work, the "Southern Reach" trilogy, has been translated into more languages than J.R.R. Tolkien invented, and is being filmed (or at least the first book, _Annihilation_, is). His newest novel is _Borne_.
_Borne_ is currently something of a nine-days' wonder, appearing on many "recommended summer reading" lists, some of them quite unlikely. Yet this is completely appropriate, and I add my own small recommendation. Read it.
What it's about is quite complicated. Rachel (the only name given for her) was born on an island nation that, due to rising seas, no longer exists. She ekes out a life in a post-disaster city as a scavenger. The city (also no name) is ruled, if that's the word, by a giant (many stories tall), vicious flying bear named Mord.
One day Rachel scavenges among the fur of the sleeping Mord and finds a ... thing. Sort of like a plant; sort of like a squid: she names it Borne and keeps it against the advisement of her lover and sort-of partner Wick, himself a biotech craftsman of some repute. Before everything fell apart, Wick worked for the Company (which also made Mord and then lost control of him).
Oh dear. I've not gotten past page fifteen or so, and a lot of what I've just said is backstory that *isn't* known that early. But it's the only way I know to even begin to explain what a tangled, glorious mess _Borne_ is. Plotlines include simple survival; a siege by Mord's proxies; Wick and Rachel struggling for trust; a struggle for control of the city between the forces of Mord and of the Magician; and Borne himself, who grows and grows. All this and much, much more, in little more than 300 pages.
Borne seems to take food in but not to excrete in any way. He learns to talk, to change shape, and to (maybe?) love. He wants to fix the broken world. (There may be an allegory there, but probably not.)
Rachel has a voice of her own, and VanderMeer hews to it faithfully. More to the point, she has a _soul_ of her own, as do Wick and Borne - not so much the other "characters," who are by-and-large only there, at least as we see them, for Rachel to respond/react to. She narrates the novel's many eyeball kicks exactly as she perceives and receives them. Even mediated through her voice, they are strange indeed.
This is a book that will take time and rereadings for me to truly grok. It isn't difficult in the sense of "what is going on here?" but in the sense of "what does what is going on here *mean*?" Surely it must mean something, for all the work VanderMeer put into crafting this dense text ... Or must it? Consider the Voynich Manuscript; consider _A Humument_. Sometimes a work of art simply _is_. And whatever else _Borne_ may do to its readers, it certainly _is_, complete and whole and self-contained.
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Into such a dystopian setting, VanderMeer introduces an amorphous creature Rachel finds nested in Mord’s fur on one of her scavenging expeditions, and which she names Borne (inspired by Wick’s reminiscing about a creature he had created as a biotech engineer with the Company, “He was born, but I had borne him”). Possibly a plant/animal/mineral combination or none of these, Rachel becomes obsessed with taking care of him as he grows and begins to show human intelligence, and the rest of the novel seeks to examine the philosophical question of what makes a human being human, in the midst of the horror of the city, as they defend themselves from mutated children and other Mord proxies, smaller versions of Mord (which I pictured as monster Care Bears for some reason) and the ominous Magician who seems to have a hold over Wick, and his secrets that he had taken with him from the now-defunct Company, a corporate biotech lab with their Frankenstein creations running amok, and as Rachel pieces together for the reader parts of her past and how she came to become who she is.
Like the Southern Reach Trilogy for which he is best known, VanderMeer’s forte is in his brand of psychological horror (though there’s also a fair bit of blood, gore and violence in this novel) and the unconventional choice of words and phrases that somehow reveal the uncanny in the most profound way. However, as much as his writing captivates, Rachel’s maternal relationship with Borne and how that complicates things with Wick, which supposedly drives the plot, did not much move me.



