chamblyman 's review for:

Dead Astronauts by Jeff VanderMeer

5.0

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I gave this five stars because I thought it was totally original, enthralling, daring, strangely mournful, and very thought provoking. But it is also very not-for-everyone. I think this is Vandermeer's most challenging book. He pushes his style of allusive, poetic, and elliptical writing further than ever before. The reader has to put a lot of pieces together to make sense of it. He combines disparate parts and influences (I was feeling animal fables, environmental disaster, multiverse/time travel, J.G. Ballard, M. John Harrison, Angela Carter, Kathe Koja) into a pretty incredible, beautiful whole that takes the reader on a fascinating trip to a funhouse mirror world that reflects real life ecological and biotech concerns, as well as themes of love and friendship, existential identity, bodily metamorphosis, power, survival, meaning. This is science fiction for poetry lovers, fantasy that is sad and dark and weird and real and bleak and gorgeous, a mind-bending puzzle that is exciting as hell to solve (if you like that kind of reading.)