This somewhat classic opening is a bit of a head fake because both the genre and the narrative perspective are soon to change. In this case, it’s a city (called simply “the City”) instead of a tower. Like the gunslinger from Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series, the astronauts are on a journey through a desert, one among many in a multiverse, to get to a landmark that exists across dimensions. Their aim is to destroy a cross-time villain: the Company, a biotechnological firm dedicated, either directly or incidentally, to the environmental destruction of the universe. The titular dead astronauts enter next, three protagonists with varying degrees of humanity: Grayson, “a tall black woman of indeterminate age,” Chen, “a heavyset man from a country that was just a word now,” and Moss, a shape-shifting, semigodlike, plant-based entity. The plot might not be clear, but the message is: VanderMeer has no intention of providing an orderly accumulation of sense to form a sensibility.ĭead Astronauts: A Novel, by Jeff VanderMeer.
The first chapter has a version designation (3.1, like Windows) and details the doings of a leash of foxes about to encounter its messiah. The proceedings begin with a dialogue whose lines zigzag down the page with a seemingly random number in front of each quote. Jeff VanderMeer’s latest, Dead Astronauts, takes this particular string of science fiction DNA, unzips it, and never really puts it back together. In Anathem, Neal Stephenson puts a full-blown pseudodictionary definition at the beginning of the first 50 chapters or so. Robert Heinlein’s phrase, “The door dilated,” is often cited as a classically economical example of establishing the quotidian as futuristic. The logic becomes the “world” of the book - and its parameters the axis of the plot. Information provided in the text builds on itself until it develops its own internal logic.
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