Praise for The Strange Bird
"With hallucinatory imagery and expressive prose, this companion novella to Borne is beautiful and bleak, painful and rewarding in equal measure." —Booklist (starred)
"A lyrical if dark-hearted sidenote to VanderMeer’s wonderfully inventive dystopian novel Borne . . . VanderMeer writes circles around most fantasists at work today." —Kirkus
Praise for Borne
“The conceptual elements in VanderMeer’s fiction are so striking that the firmness with which he cinches them to his characters’ lives is often overlooked . . . Borne is VanderMeer’s trans-species rumination on the theme of parenting . . . [Borne] insists that to live in an age of gods and sorcerers is to know that you, a mere person, might be crushed by indifferent forces at a moment’s notice, then quickly forgotten. And that the best thing about human nature might just be its unwillingness to surrender to the worst side of itself.” —Laura Miller, The New Yorker
“Borne, Jeff VanderMeer’s lyrical and harrowing new novel, may be the most beautifully written, and believable, post-apocalyptic tale in recent memory . . . [VanderMeer] outdoes himself in this visionary novel shimmering with as much inventiveness and deliriously unlikely, post-human optimism as Borne himself.” —Elizabeth Hand, Los Angeles Times
“VanderMeer’s apocalyptic vision, with its mix of absurdity, horror, and grace, can’t be mistaken for that of anyone else. Inventive, engrossing, and heartbreaking, Borne finds [VanderMeer] at a high point of creative accomplishment.” —Michael Berry, San Francisco Chronicle
The Strange Bird: A Borne Story
Narrated by Emily Woo Zeller
Jeff VanderMeerUnabridged — 3 hours, 5 minutes
The Strange Bird: A Borne Story
Narrated by Emily Woo Zeller
Jeff VanderMeerUnabridged — 3 hours, 5 minutes
Overview
The Strange Bird-from New York Times bestselling novelist Jeff VanderMeer-expands and weaves deeply into the world of his critically acclaimed 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 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 creature who will fight and suffer and live for the tenuous future of this world.
Editorial Reviews
2017-11-28
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 material—though 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 follow—and soon.
Product Details
| BN ID: | 2940169917185 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Blackstone Audio, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 08/15/2017 |
| Series: | Jeff VanderMeer's Borne Series |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
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