Her lover, Wick, is an ex-Company employee who makes biotech in his swimming pool laboratory. Our protagonist, Rachel, is a scavenger in the dangerous post-Company landscape. Only three named humans inhabit this world. There are artificial living creatures such as feral children with wings and poisoned claws, and transgenic species that can morph from human to bear. Diagnostic beetles can enter a human system and heal illnesses and wounds. These include humans, mutants, animals and hybrid creatures which are revealed to be failed or aborted biotech experiments. In a world laid waste by a biotech company called, simply, “Company”, Mord, a massive flying bear more than five storeys high, is terrorising survivors. Now, splicing together the DNAs of Godzilla and Frankenstein, VanderMeer gives us Borne. The alien intelligence that infected Area X in the Southern Reach trilogy was capable of such a profound biochemical mimicry that it shone a harsh light on the primitive nature of human cognition. J eff VanderMeer’s deeply strange and brilliant new novel extends the meditation on the central question of non-human sentience in his earlier work.
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