In this landscape, the novel’s narrator Rachel ekes out a living as a scavenger, venturing out into the ruins to find usable bits and pieces of abandoned stuff - anything that can either be eaten, put to work, or somehow repurposed. There doesn’t seem to be any exit from this hellscape: there are remembered past scenes, and the elsewhere from which the Company emerged, and to which it has presumably returned - but none of these are accessible to the characters in the world of the novel. There are many dangers: polluted water, violent feral children, venomous beasts, and a gigantic flying bear named Mord who ravages and destroys whatever he cannot control.

In any case, the city in which Borne is set is basically a desert and there is nothing left but ruins, noxious chemicals, and the remnants of the Company’s biotech - much of which is mutated and broken.

(The idea of the future exploiting its own past - which is our present - is one that I find especially compelling something like this is also the premise of Grant Morrison’s Seven Soldiers). (The issue is not resolved, but I find it suggestive: it’s a far better version of Nick Land’s fantasy of capital as an alien parasite from the future). The Company itself seems to have come from elsewhere perhaps it is (as the novel suggests at one point) a mechanism of “the future exploiting the past, or the past exploiting the future,” or “another version of Earth” enriching itself at the expense of this one. The novel is set in a post-apocalyptic landscape: a nameless city that was first transformed by a biotech enterprise known only as the Company, and then abandoned when the Company broke down or abandoned the region (it is not entirely clear which). I was stunned by reading it, and I am not sure that I can really do it justice. Borne is Jeff VanderMeer’s first new novel since his Southern Reach trilogy.

Borne vandermeer review