Jeff VanderMeer’s novel Borne, and its companion novella, The Strange Bird, rely on an exploration of posthuman transformation and monstrosity to comment on the relationship between human (in)action, and ecological devastation. This contrasts with science fiction and fantasy narratives that posit a safe return to a pastoral and nostalgic existence (e.g. The Walking Dead). Rather than envisioning a future in which an apocalyptic event forces a return to a pre-industrial, Edenic status quo, VanderMeer suggests that a post-climate change world will mean redefining what it means to be human, sentient, and sapient. In contrast to the nostalgic and pastoral stories he critiques, the societal changes experienced by VanderMeer’s characters are radical and include physical and experiential shifts in how humans and non-humans navigate the world.
Key to VanderMeer’s examination of these ideas is the interaction between his human and non-human characters. The titular character, Borne, is a shapeshifting organism and surrogate child of the novel’s central female character, a mother against whom Borne measures its own humanity. Similarly, the bird of The Strange Bird is a creature crafted from hybrid components, including what amounts to the soul of a human being. In The Strange Bird, human death is transcended, replaced with an ever-transforming existence that combines human and non-human animal. In VanderMeer’s post-apocalypse, survival is a relative status, and one that necessitates fundamental changes to our definition of the human. In contrast to post-apocalyptic works like The Walking Dead, I argue, VanderMeer’s work posits a dead livingness that does not totally reject technology or science, but instead extrapolates on how our relationship to technology in a capitalist society transforms (and will transform) us at the experiential level. Monstrosity, in Borne and The Strange Bird, becomes a necessary component of our shifting relationship with the environment, and with non-human animals.
About the presenterEli Mason
Elliot Mason is a PhD student at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. His research focuses on monsters and the monstrous, particularly as they relate to issues of marginalization and community construction. He holds MAs in Russian Literature, Medieval Studies, and Religious Studies.