RaveThe Guardian (UK)A genuinely innovative artwork requires time to fulfil its effect. Jeff VanderMeer’s Dead Astronauts is one such work – bewildering, perplexing, original – and I would recommend that readers allow it the concentration it demands ... typographical games...characterise these latter sections – paler and heavier typeface, isolated strips of text on an otherwise black page, figures in the margins reminiscent of biblical verse-numbering, only counting backwards ... How far readers will tolerate such self-conscious gamesmanship will come down to individual taste. For this reader at least, this kind of formal innovation is pure catnip, an indication that as a mode of literary expression the novel is still vigorous, still developing and still important. Far from being pointless or posturing, such devices serve as a reminder that the novel is not simply a narrative, it is also text, and that language can have an agenda apart from story ... Dead Astronauts transmits its core concerns around environmental breakdown through the splintering of narrative into its component parts ... There is a temptation to skip over such passages, yet in their obsessive reiterations they begin gradually to take on the quality of music, a whispered continuo that is both creepy and beguiling, conveying their message with a subtextual intensity that would be difficult to achieve through more conventional means ...it has become clear there is no subject more important to [VanderMeer] than the degrading and disastrous effect of human activity on fragile ecosystems. Employing stylistic and linguistic devices that reach beyond narrative, the author deliberately deconstructs the very concept of familiarity and forces us up against his subject matter in a way that demands we not only engage with it, but recognise its vast importance to our lives and futures.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay[/caption]
