Dead Astronauts

Reviews

"[VanderMeer] delivers vital ferocity in this darkly transcendent novel…It’s precisely that ferocity that makes ‘Dead Astronauts’ so terrifying and so compelling.”

“This is a Russian doll of a novel, with each chapter containing worlds upon nested worlds, all of them dreamlike and dark. In this shattered landscape, VanderMeer explores urgent ideas about capitalism, greed, and natural destruction.”

“A work of literary science fiction in which the fate of humanity is at stake.”

"[A] darkly transcendent novel filled with phantasmagoric visions, body horror, and tortured beings traversing a blasted desert hellscape. Think The Last Judgment but with more animals…So terrifying and so compelling.”

“The final pages of Jeff VanderMeer’s Dead Astronauts tie everything together, making sense of what came before.”

“A relentlessly experimental novel, shifting viewpoints and styles, skipping through time frames and across cosmic distances, changing formats…Despite this complex approach, however, it is utterly accessible.”

"Dead Astronauts is a kaleidoscopic and fractured mosaic…. The experience of reading it is a compulsively absorbing confusion…Yet the book is profoundly emotional.”

“Sections of the novel are beautiful even when they are chilling; multiplying perspectives on similar events build a complexly layered narrative…While the novel is fantastical in many respects, it’s certainly not whimsical; it’s a collection of narratives that startles.”

“Takes [a] sense of invention and playfulness to the extreme, giving us a modern and post-modern tour-de-force unlike any mainstream science fiction novel written over the last two decades.”

“Vandermeer is a master of literary science fiction, and this may be his best book yet.”

“Vandermeer’s follow-up to Borne explores the multiple pasts and futures of the City and the sinister Company that twists and destroys countless living things.”

“Narrator Emily Woo Zeller reprises her role as the listener’s guide through the beguiling postapocalyptic “Borne” world. While part of a series, the story is accessible as a stand-alone with its own protagonists…Attuned vocal characterizations of nonhuman characters—including an isolated behemoth, a dark bird, and a mysterious blue fox—facilitate entry into this mesmerizing realm.”

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