PositiveThe New York TimesIn this novel featuring all the classic catastrophes of climate change but not the usual cause, the hand of God and the human hand are difficult to tell apart. Assigning responsibility is almost impossible here, and violence in the name of justice is all too common. Mazzy, a soldier in the Army, is deeply complicit — in her dealings with the U.S. government no less than with the fundamentalists. Still, the novel doesn’t seem to treat her actions as punishable crimes. It closes with a feast of golden berries the size of plums, picked by Ava Lynn, Mazzy’s lost sister. The ending doesn’t fully acquit Mazzy, but it does look like another beginning.
Jeff VanderMeer
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewVanderMeer is that rare novelist who turns to nonhumans not to make them approximate us as much as possible but to make such approximation impossible. All of this is magnified a hundredfold in Borne ... Here is the story about biotech that VanderMeer wants to tell, a vision of the nonhuman not as one fixed thing, one fixed destiny, but as either peaceful or catastrophic, by our side or out on a rampage as our behavior dictates — for these are our children, born of us and now to be borne in whatever shape or mess we have created. This coming-of-age story signals that eco-fiction has come of age as well: wilder, more reckless and more breathtaking than previously thought, a wager and a promise that what emerges from the 21st century will be as good as any from the 20th, or the 19th.
