Jeff VanderMeer’s Dead Astronauts is one such work – bewildering, perplexing, original – and I would recommend that readers allow it the concentration it demands. We experience his world from the point of view of Botch, a gigantic mutated fish feeding off Charlie X’s discarded experiments. We are offered glimpses of scenes and characters familiar from VanderMeer’s previous novel, Borne, to which Dead Astronauts is loosely linked. Dead Astronauts transmits its core concerns around environmental breakdown through the splintering of narrative into its component parts. • Dead Astronauts by Jeff VanderMeer is published by Fourth Estate (RRP £14.99).

Source: The Guardian January 16, 2020 07:30 UTC