Borne

Borne is a dystopian science fiction novel that follows Rachel, a scavenger, who is surviving in a city that was destroyed and being ravaged by biotechnology created by the Company. One day, she finds a squishy, beautiful creature that smells like the sea she names Borne. The story follows Rachel, Wick, and Borne as they navigate daily survival in a volatile city and as Rachel learns what it means to be a caretaker.

I'm not selling this well, but oh man this was an unexpected love! I didn't expect to feel so attached to a biotech creature, but here we are. Because the novel is written from a first-person perspective, the reader really feels like they're experiencing this world alongside Rachel and Wick, which I loved. VanderMeer has a way of writing and setting the scene that helps you to understand just how bad things are for these characters and how much the Company destroyed the city. It's a beautiful story about relationships, love, and being a parent but it's also a cautionary tale about the dangers of biotechnology, experimentation, and the practical and ethical implications of it.

2.25 out of 5 stars – see this review and others at The Speculative Shelf.

Rachel is a young woman scavenging the ruins of a dilapidated city. She comes across Borne, a sea anemone-like creature affixed to the side of monstrous bear that patrols her territory. Rachel must contend with Borne's growing sentience (and size) as her world crumbles around her.

Borne shares a lot of stylistic DNA with Jeff VanderMeer's Annihilation, one of my favorite books of all time. This novel did not jibe with me in the same way, unfortunately. While Annihilation dealt with the slow creep of the unfamiliar into our known world, Borne shows a world already gone — a world filled with biotechnological monstrosities and a destroyed civilization. It's a full embrace of the New Weird genre that VanderMeer has helped popularize, but it ultimately lost me along the way.

There are nuggets of really interesting ideas found within the pages of this novel, but I found the writing style to be ultimately inaccessible. Borne lacked a cohesive narrative and a compelling mystery, which made it difficult to stay invested. In the end, all the discordant sequences coalesced into something coherent, but it wasn't enough to rectify the disinterest and confusion that came before it.

Wow, what a story of struggle and maturing, being in love and but learning how to be loving, and biotech gone way mad. Certainly a straightforward story about what it means to be a sentient, feeling being. The world itself is set is a character, in and of itself, far more than just a setting for the action and I really can't wait to read other stories of the place. Well done Mr. VanderMeer, well done indeed.

DNF at 70%

Can't deny the beautiful imagery, almost every object or person, every place, almost every page, absolutely amazing imagery.

But to embrace good imagery you need a language and a depth to bring you in, to make you actually appreciate rather than just window shop. And, like with the Annihilation series, the poor pacing, and lack of anything to grip on to or immerse in, just ruins it. I also feel such imagery demands a better “more difficult” language, with at least some playfulness and experimentation with more complex and non-traditional sentence structures - make us do some work.

Wow! What a follow up to this author's “Three A's” trilogy of a few years ago! Those three books constitute one of the wildest, most thoughtful, weirdest, creepiest, and haunting fantasy series I've yet read. So, I had high expectations for this novel. And it didn't disappoint.

To say the world of this novel is “weird” is an understatement. Yet, somehow it worked for me as I could imagine it might actually arrive. In this nearly completely collapsed society, fantastic bio-tech creatures rule. They were created by the malevolent Company for which one of the protagonists once worked. The story is told by his lover, a resourceful woman who survived the vaguely described collapse of the social order. While the relationship between these lovers is engaging, the far more fascinating connection is between the narrator and Borne, an increasingly powerful bio-tech creature.

I won't spoil the fun of how both Borne and his/its relationship with the narrator develops. It provides a surprisingly sensitive meditation on parenting and the challenges of aiding another creature in its development of self-identity.

While the conclusion of the story was somewhat confusing and not completely satisfying, the world created, especially the wholly original Borne, is one I was disappointed to leave and to which I'd like to return. Might the author make this the first book of another trilogy?

This has been a really surprising book so far. I knew nothing about it when I began it and was really struggling with the writing style. It was slogging by and didn't feel like I was going to enjoy the story at all. Around 2/3 of the way through the first part it changed pace, and began to hit its stride for me. I began to enjoy Rachael and Borne's relationship at that point.

Other than that, I'm not sure I can make any other comment. This really was ‘new weird' and I'm not sure if I enjoyed it.

Excellent eco-dystopian piece w/ some of the most dreary visions of future maybe not as distant as one would think. Harsh, but in some sense psychadelic universe full of scents, sweat, biologically modified creatures (who however still resemble humans/animals just enough for reader to relate to or identify w/). Solid underlying concepts included. Unique off-the-wall gem of contemporary sci-fi.

If you've read a Jeff VanderMeer book before, you know what I mean when I say it's disorienting. VanderMeer's prose style is not so much dense as elliptical; oblique rather than straightforward, and you can't help but feel you've entered three chapters in and missed all the early exposition that sets up the story.

So it is with Borne, a novel set in an unspecified future post-apocalypse hellscape, one in which humans have messed about too adeptly with biotechnology and unleashed monsters. As with most stories of this ilk, humanity has been reduced to a paltry few, living as scavengers picking at the bones of civilization. They live in destroyed buildings, forests, valleys and wherever else they can make a meagre life, all the while dodging the monstrous bear, Mord and his proxy bears which seem to have no purpose other than rage-fuelled destruction. Did I mention that Mord, the bear, flies? And that his proxy bears are venomous?

So, yeah, it's strange, and it takes you on a complicated and weird journey through the remains of civilization with dark hints and glimpses at the causes of its collapse: the mysterious Company that seems to have been at the center of the aforementioned biotechnological meddling. The world, now filled with . . . creatures . . . is a land straight out of legend and myth.

In fact, I think that's what makes this book so interesting (and enjoyable). The legends and myths of our world have come down to us through hundreds of generations in a long, epoch-spanning game of broken telephone. We know that the stories of gods, demons, wondrous creatures, magic and all the other archetypal fantasy elements are the result of uncounted retellings around fires, at court, in villages, even in what we would now call nursery rhymes. What VanderMeer has done here is invert that model. In Borne the first-person narrator describes the mythic, fabulous events as she witnessed them. It's like we're at the birth of myth itself.

Which, come to think of it, is mirrored in the story of Borne, the creature cum Maguffin that begins as an unknown blob on the back of Mord and gradually evolves into . . . something. We witness its growth, see it acquire new powers that it brandishes like its many tentacles which, in case you missed the point, are like the many accretions of myths and legends that pile on over the generations, until the climactic, epic conclusion where Borne literally becomes . . . well, I'll leave it to you to see.

This, I think, is the value of the novel. The plot, such as it is, meanders (and owes a huge debt to Margaret Atwood's Maddaddam trilogy); the characters are barely fleshed out; the setting is straight out of the zombie movie playbook. What's left? What is the point? The birth, curation, and transmission of myth itself. We are meant to experience this story in the way those who came after its events would, hearing with wide-eyed wonder the story of monsters laying waste to the land (tip of the hat to the Welsh Arthurian legends of the great boar Trwyth), of magical beings (I mean, really, one character is called The Magician, for heaven's sake), of warriors and spirits and gods . . . it's Joseph Campbell and Jung and Eliot and Frye but rather than sitting in the lecture hall we're sitting around the fire ourselves.

So give it a read and think of it in terms of what it's trying to do rather than what is going on. VanderMeer writes strange, challenging books that raise a lot more questions than they resolve. That's good. He leaves space for his readers to suggest some of their own.