Dead Astronauts by Jeff VanderMeer
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Good news, VanderMeer fans!

Just look at that cover and imagine, if you will, a book just like a massive acid trip filled with disjointed alternate realities, or reality versions, where men and hybrids, monsters, demons (or daemons), foxes, Shrodinger's ducks, and spawning pools populate your colorful biotech apocalypse.

And then know that the real trip lies within these pages, not on the cover.

I say good news for other reasons, however. It's not merely a nightmare of continuity issues, melding and morphing bodies, strained, molded, and transformed identities made from beasties, cold scientists, and long-lived leviathans who have forgotten their own stories.

The core of the text DOES have a major theme, if not anything more than a remotely identifiable plot. Of course, you might find one if you are a massive wall-charter, handy with yarn, have access to revisionary transparent overlays, and you maintain a hearty respect for novels that triples as a prequel to Borne, a contemporary, and a sequel.

I happen to love the theme. By the end of the novel, I'm rocking hard to it. It's tragic, obvious, and it truly condemns the three reality-hopping astronauts from the beginning of the tale. (The same dead three we see from Borne.)

Or, of course, any prospective reader would do just as well to sit back and relax into the brilliant, wild, and totally freaky imagery. Just trip balls. Open your mind, man.

I would love to see someone do a scholarly analysis of this s**t.

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