Jeff VanderMeer’s Scream for Animals
Reviewers have taken notice of the environmental themes of VanderMeer’s acclaimed novels — but are they missing something?
Recent fiction by Jeff VanderMeer is devoted to themes of environmental degradation and global warming, or so rapt reviewers routinely note. Yet I’ve just read his two newest novels, Dead Astronauts and Borne, and what I’ve discovered has startled and thrilled me: VanderMeer is as acutely attuned to animal rights as he is to the climate crisis. These novels beg us to see animals’ suffering and work to stop it.
Though it’s the more recent of the pair, I began with Dead Astronauts. In it, an individual called Chen works for the Company, an all-powerful corporation. Chen labors at a wall of globes. What’s on the other side of the wall, Chen isn’t allowed to see; his job is to inspect, wearing protective clothing, what’s inside the globes.
Reading about the wall, clarity came to me slowly: What or who dwells in these globes? A first answer to emerge was “biotech,” a term VanderMeer uses to mean creatures who have been experimentally altered by a scientist called Charlie X who works for the Company. Charlie X’s experimenting fails at times, and when it does, the sick or dying creatures are ejected into the holding ponds just outside…
