Borne Examines Sapience Through a Biopunk Lens

This book tells the story of a woman who discovers an unusual plantlike creature, perhaps the result of genetic engineering, and befriends in an attempt to understand its alien nature. Many novelists have considered the question of created sapience, but few with such originality. Alongside New Weird flourishes—godlike bears, intelligent bioweapons, emotion-erasing beetles—VanderMeer uses an unreliable narrator and narrative structure to force us, and his characters, to thoroughly examine what it means to be a “real person,” regardless of their humanity.
While on a scavenging expedition up the flank of a titanic bear, a castoff from an experiment in genetic engineering, Rachel discovers Borne. A small green lump that randomly changes shape, Borne looks interesting, and exudes scents that remind Rachel of her past. Once she takes the unusual lump home, it immediately begins to grow and change, exhibiting a childlike curiosity about the world, and eventually even learning to talk. Rachel develops a kind of maternal attachment to the being, but Borne is its own lump, far more bizarre and alien than Rachel or her more cautious partner Wick realize. Soon, Borne’s presence will upset the balance and relative peace of their life in the crumbling, post-collapse city they call home.
While VanderMeer’s world is vast and imaginative, it’s the way he plants the seeds of an idea long before it flowers on the page that makes the environment of this unnamed city come alive. THe major players are built up with the quality of myth. There is Mord, a force of nature, a skyscraper-sized bear who inspires fear and awe as he flies over the city and lays waste to his enemies. Another power in the city, the Magician, appears twice; each time she does, she appears deadly dangerous and entirely in control, an enigmatic warlord in a chameleon-skin cloak who seemingly rules the ruins, engaging in open warfare with Mord and his venomous children. When their factions finally meet in the streets, the protagonists can only watch in horror, unsure of who to root for as two gods clash.
The mythic nature extends to the plotting, ripe with foreboding. Narrated by Rachel from some uncertain point in the future, it is dripping with a sense of foreboding, a small surface bruise promising rot within. Borne is both innocent and sinister, and its never clear, even at the beginning, if his innocence is an an act, an attempt to convince his human caretakers to trust him. Neither can we rely on Rachel to set us straight; the inconsistencies in her story eventually peel away, revealing hidden events of great import.

Rachel speaks to us in a kind of stream of consciousness recollection, as if retelling the story of her relationship with Borne to someone in a parenthetical, tangential style, filling in the blanks as she they occur to her. It’s an organic take on the concept of the unreliable narrator—isn’t trying to purposefully deceive us, or is forgetting things because of a mental disorder; instead, she is speaking her confession as it occurs to her. Memory is an unreliable thing at the best of times, filtered through nostalgia and hazy images of the past. In the context of a novel about what it means to be “a person,” (though not, strictly, a human) it becomes a powerful tool. Each blank Rachel fills in reveals more about what she thinks of herself and those around her a factual account of events might suggest.
If this all makes Borne sound incredibly odd, rest assured, it most certainly is. It’s also a book that augments its weirdness with strong characters and worldbuilding, and a narrator who manages to charm and unnerve in equal measure. It’s an unusual book, structured unusually, all to underline the stone of a question at the center of its flesh: what is a person? It’s a theme explored before in science fiction, but never like this. From its biotech creatures to its god-bear and attack beetles, Borne is intriguing, unnerving, and quintessentially VanderMeer.
Borne is available now.