Thus begins an unexpected relationship, often tinged with mother-child dynamics, that will carry most of the powerful emotional effect of the novel.įrom the outset, Wick is suspicious of Borne and wants Rachel to give him up so that he can mine the creature for biotech.

She brings it home and christens him Borne. In one of her perilous salvaging missions, Rachel rescues from the furry depths of the sleeping Mord’s flank a creature “like a hybrid of sea anemone and squid: a sleek vase with rippling colours that strayed from purple toward deep blues and sea greens”. Details slowly emerge of the kind of depredation wrought upon the world by the Company, along with a deliberately undersketched strand on the pre-Company world, disintegrating under unnamed political upheavals and wars that turn millions into refugees.

Then there are the “Mord proxies”, hundreds of smaller Mords who see the flying bear as their god and are impelled only by a ferocious bloodlust. And “the Magician” is a shadowy creature who, it is rumoured, is collecting ammunition and soldiers to fight Mord and wrest control of the land from him. Her lover, Wick, is an ex-Company employee who makes biotech in his swimming pool laboratory. Our protagonist, Rachel, is a scavenger in the dangerous post-Company landscape. Only three named humans inhabit this world. There are artificial living creatures such as feral children with wings and poisoned claws, and transgenic species that can morph from human to bear. Diagnostic beetles can enter a human system and heal illnesses and wounds. These include humans, mutants, animals and hybrid creatures which are revealed to be failed or aborted biotech experiments.

In a world laid waste by a biotech company called, simply, “Company”, Mord, a massive flying bear more than five storeys high, is terrorising survivors. Now, splicing together the DNAs of Godzilla and Frankenstein, VanderMeer gives us Borne. The alien intelligence that infected Area X in the Southern Reach trilogy was capable of such a profound biochemical mimicry that it shone a harsh light on the primitive nature of human cognition. J eff VanderMeer’s deeply strange and brilliant new novel extends the meditation on the central question of non-human sentience in his earlier work.

Borne jeff vandermeer