Dead Astronauts by Jeff VanderMeer

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux/MCD on December 3, 2019

Dead Astronauts is told, in part, from the perspective of a fox who merged with a biomechanical version of itself and was sent on missions of exploration, apparently to other times or universes. The fox plotted revenge against the humans who, in its view, were torturers. After all, humans hunt foxes for sport because foxes can’t hunt humans. When it is the fox’s turn to kill, it muses: “Killing is easy. I think that’s why people do it so much.”

One theme of Dead Astronauts is that after centuries of being hunted or used as test subjects, animals might have the last laugh. Scientists who try to un-fox a fox might find themselves outfoxed. In that regard, Dead Astronauts might be viewed as an animal rights story, a reminder that our fear of alien abduction is no different than a bird’s fear of being caged by humans, that gathering data by harming an animal is no different than an animal tearing apart a human to satisfy its curiosity. It’s all just a matter of perspective.

The story might also be viewed as a cautionary tale of the consequences that follow from the human capacity to block unhappy thoughts. The fox imagines what humans might ask if they were honest: “Do you have the new phone yet that someone made continents away because they were forced to and then someone else starved to death because when they mined the components they destroyed all the crop lands and the forest?”

While this is in part the story of a fox, it is also the story of all foxes, because the fox as a species knows how to burrow down, to hide, to survive, perhaps to outlast humanity. Sometimes it is the story of birds and fish, both specific creatures and a species in general. We’re all part of the same world, the novel suggests, one that humans are insufficiently meek to inherit.

Yet the story is also told, in part, from the perspective of Charlie X, a human who was still just Charlie when, as a boy, his father worked for the Company. Charlie’s gift was the creation of new creatures, biomechanical life forms with altered genes, some of which he created without the Company’s knowledge. Charlie, like the blue fox he created, viewed his own creator — his father — as a torturer.

Charlie and the Company made something of a mess. The scientists who made the mess, likened to magicians, left destruction in their wake, at least in one universe. A homeless woman from the past named Sarah, contemplating an apparent journal from the future, seems to suggest that there might be something worth living for, even if that thing is unknowable. Just ask the fox.

Maybe those few facts are spoilers (although I would have found a user’s guide to be helpful) because the first three quarters of the novel leave the reader clueless about what’s going on. Those chapters introduce three characters: Grayson, Chen, and Moss. One of them might be a dead astronaut, or perhaps they all are. Shape-shifting Moss might literally be moss, but perhaps none of them are human, at least not now. They seem to be living different versions of the same history over and over, repeatedly encountering a blue fox and a duck with a broken wing, not knowing from one encounter to the next whether those creatures will be allies or enemies. They seem to be looking for Charlie X, although what they hope to accomplish by finding him is unclear. I assume they want to change the past or damage the Company through a strategy yet to be invented.

Does such a baffling story merit a recommendation? At times the narrative approaches incomprehensibility. I suppose the same might be said about Ulysses, a highly regarded classic by those who made it the end, so perhaps hard sledding isn’t a reason to condemn a novel. I can say that the fox has more characterization than is given to the typical fictional fox, and that the broad outlines of biogenetic engineering that form the novel’s background, while common in science fiction, are intriguing. I can say that the prose is sometimes poetic, although Jeff VanderMeer sometimes abandons poetry to repeat the same cluster of sentences dozens of times over the course of several pages. I can say that I would probably get more out of the novel after a second reading, but I don’t know if I will ever find the energy to struggle through it again (I’m still awaiting the strength to take another stab at Ulysses). Since struggle can be its own reward, I’ll recommend Dead Astronauts guardedly with the caveat that the novel isn’t for readers who want the clarity offered by a writer who spells everything out.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS