| Birds -- Fiction. |
| Monsters -- Fiction. |
| Science fiction. |
| Fantasy fiction. |
| Aves |
| Avian fauna |
| Avifauna |
| Wild birds |
| Freaks |
| Monsters, Double |
| Monstrosities |
Available:
Library | Shelf Number | Shelf Location | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
Searching... Fall River Main | FIC VAN | Stacks | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Foxboro - Boyden Library | FIC VANDERMEER | FICTION | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
The Strange Bird --from New York Times bestselling novelist Jeff VanderMeer--expands and weaves deeply into the world of his "thorough marvel"* of a novel, Borne .
The Strange Bird is a new kind of creature, built in a laboratory--she is part bird, part human, part many other things. But now the lab in which she was created is under siege and the scientists have turned on their animal creations. Flying through tunnels, dodging bullets, and changing her colors and patterning to avoid capture, the Strange Bird manages to escape.
But she cannot just soar in peace above the earth. The sky itself is full of wildlife that rejects her as one of their own, and also full of technology--satellites and drones and other detritus of the human civilization below that has all but destroyed itself. And the farther she flies, the deeper she finds herself in the orbit of the Company, a collapsed biotech firm that has populated the world with experiments both failed and successful that have outlived the corporation itself: a pack of networked foxes, a giant predatory bear. But of the many creatures she encounters with whom she bears some kind of kinship, it is the humans--all of them now simply scrambling to survive--who are the most insidious, who still see her as simply something to possess, to capture, to trade, to exploit. Never to understand, never to welcome home.
With The Strange Bird, Jeff VanderMeer has done more than add another layer, a new chapter, to his celebrated novel Borne . He has created a whole new perspective on the world inhabited by Rachel and Wick, the Magician, Mord, and Borne--a view from above, of course, but also a view from deep inside the mind of a new kind of creature who will fight and suffer and live for the tenuous future of this world.
Praise for Borne
* "Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach Trilogy was an ever-creeping map of the apocalypse; with Borne he continues his investigation into the malevolent grace of the world, and it's a thorough marvel." --Colson Whitehead
"VanderMeer 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 twenty-first century will be as good as any from the twentieth, or the nineteenth." --Wai Chee Dimock, The New York Times Book Review
Reviews (2)
Kirkus Review
A lyrical if dark-hearted sidenote to VanderMeer's wonderfully inventive dystopian novel Borne (2017).When the singularity arrives, as it surely will, it will do so on extended wings. Where Borne, the blobby union of various genetic brews, escaped from the ruins of a biotech factory owned by the spectacularly malign Company, the Strange Bird, as she is called, "did not know what sky really was as she flew down underground corridors in the dark," experiencing the rapturous freedom of flight while not quite understanding what was happening to her outside her cage. The Strange Bird, like all critters in this hellish place, is not just bird, but comprises bits and pieces of biotechnology, other DNA, and even some human materialthough this heritage does not incline her to like or trust humans, not in the least. Good thing, for just about every human she encounters has designs on her, from the old man who captures her out in the desert and assures her that otherwise she "would be in something's belly by now" to the magician who marvels at the "sad, unlucky lab bird that never existed before" even as she speculates about how the Strange Bird, ever worse for the wear, might be remade into something more immediately useful. Mord the giant bear, Rachel, Wick, and other figures from Borne turn up to join in fun and games that make the future world of the Terminator film series seem right jolly. The story doesn't always quite add up, and there's some spackling and grouting to do to make it neatly join up to its parent novel, doubtless the work of sequels to come. Still, Vandermeer writes circles around most fantasists at work today, and the story, while rewarding of itself, is of an elegantly bleak piece with its predecessor, reminiscent of the best of Brian Aldiss and Philip K. Dick.VanderMeer fans will treasure this installment in the Borne saga while hoping for something more substantial to followand soon. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Before the end of the Company, before the rise of the cruel Mord and the discovery of the creature Borne, there was the Strange Bird, created in a distant lab in a dying world for an unknown purpose. One of many experimental creatures, she escapes the lab and discovers true freedom of flight, of choice, of self-awareness until it is snatched away by cruel humans. Eventually, she is taken to the Magician, a mad scientist who surgically remakes the Strange Bird to suit her own needs, in a horrific scene. But the true anguish is what comes after, living on as a helpless tool with the consciousness of marginally better times; Strange Bird longs to go back to the place where she could not tell the time at all. Yet, as with Borne (2017), Vandermeer leaves a little light to guide his devastated creation on her long journey. With hallucinatory imagery and expressive prose, this companion novella to Borne is beautiful and bleak, painful and rewarding in equal measure.--Hutley, Krista Copyright 2018 Booklist