In other realities, the Company has been destroyed and the City that serves it has been reduced to a ruin, polluted and rendered alien by vast, voiceless creatures from the quantum void. In some versions of reality there is nothing left but the Company, its grinding machinery still energised by poisoned rivers. They hope eventually to stumble upon its origin story: the company before it became the Company, when it could still be destroyed. The astronauts project themselves through time, engaging the Company across multiple iterations in a repeating battle that most resembles a deadly game scenario. This kind of formal innovation is pure catnip, an indication that as a mode of expression the novel is still vigorous The three are helped along their journey by Charlie’s failed experiments: the blue fox, the duck with the broken wing, the leviathan called Botch, a hive-mind of salamanders. The enemy they seek to defeat is the Company itself, and more specifically its agent, a deranged Dr Moreau-type biologist named Charlie X. Our heroes are Grayson, a black woman and sole survivor of a disastrously failed mission to explore deep space Chen, an indentured worker bound in perpetuity to an invasive corporation known only as the Company and Moss, whose name was once Sarah, now a complex, composite organism who has been partially absorbed into the structure of the worlds they move through.
The opening third poses as a quest narrative, a fantastical variant of the classic western: three battle-scarred gunslingers set out across an ecologically ravaged landscape in pursuit of an enemy. Jeff VanderMeer’s Dead Astronauts is one such work – bewildering, perplexing, original – and I would recommend that readers allow it the concentration it demands. A genuinely innovative artwork requires time to fulfil its effect.
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