He will eat anything: crumb, pebble, any worm or insect. At that point Borne is no more than the size of Rachel’s fist, catching her attention only because “beacon-like, he strobed emerald green across the purple every half minute or so.” But he soon gets bigger, sometimes doubling or even tripling in size in a matter of weeks. At the center is the titular hero, a nondescript object when first introduced by the narrator and aspiring mother Rachel, who plucks him off the fur of the gigantic flying bear Mord. All of this is magnified a hundredfold in “Borne,” his new novel. VanderMeer is that rare novelist who turns to nonhumans not to make them approximate us as much as possible but to make such approximation impossible. The gray caps in “Finch” (2009), new rulers of Ambergris, spend their nights building fungus-draped towers that look “shaggy, almost as if they had fur, were flesh and blood,” while emitting a “smell like oil and sawdust and frying meat.” The mushrooms in “City of Saints and Madmen” (2001) are blue-tinged, four or five feet tall, with a stem as thick as an oak the locals nickname them “white whales.”
The golden green and highly infectious nodules in the Southern Reach trilogy (2014) show up as English words and sentences - literally, the writing on the wall. Especially in their fungal forms, they can be both plant and animal, their alienness at once unabashedly fictive yet almost empirically cataloged. They have unclassifiable shapes, complicated smells and inexplicable behavior. His nonhumans are genre bending and taxonomy defying. VanderMeer turns that differential ratio on its head. But most sci-fi nonhumans tend to be human in appearance, resembling us in size, anatomy and general disposition, and departing from us only in one or two highlighted traits: the ears and super-rationality of the Vulcans in “Star Trek,” say, or the supposed lack of empathy in Philip K. In one sense this is nothing new it’s the pride and glory of science fiction. Jeff VanderMeer likes to imagine nonhuman life-forms.
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