Eventually, what’s left of Strange Bird get caught up in the Wars, with surprising results. One object from those dreams also makes the leap into waking life: an enigmatic “compass” that serves more like a beacon or alarm, calling for help. Yet even ill-used remnants hold onto shreds of past consciousness – thanks to surreal “Dreams” where she is still a woman, talking with a close friend. Lying helpless in her lab, Strange Bird endures probes to show “what you’re made of.” Later experiments seem more like deconstruction, reducing Bird to something like a robe designed for camouflage. The Magician seems to be a mad scientist, and plays a major role in Borne. Though the lab won’t release its creations, she finds a way to escape, and early episodes chronicle her brief freedom.Īll too soon she gets wounded, and seized by new captors: first The Old Man (a sadist with a manic compulsion to write on a typewriter that doesn’t really type) next the bizarre “bat-faced man” then that creature’s boss, someone we’ve met before. The title character was conjured in a lab where what had been a woman is turned into a creature that’s part avian and capable of flight. The Strange Bird-from New York Times bestselling novelist Jeff VanderMeer-expands and weaves deeply into the world of his critically acclaimed novel Borne. Jeff VanderMeer’s short novel The Strange Bird is a spinoff from the novel Borne, with the same background: a wrecked, far-future Earth, now being devastated by techno/magical, quasi-mythic Company Wars.
I argue that the novella takes the point of view of the nonhuman without rendering the plot genre-formulaic and depoliticised on the one hand, and without succumbing to pure allegory on the other.The Strange Bird, Jeff VanderMeer ( Farrar, Straus & Giroux 978-32 $2.99, 86pp, eb) July 2017. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017) in light of ongoing discussions in ecocriticism, posthumanism, and narrative theory. p.277-296 Author Gry UlsteinĪbstract This chapter close-reads The Strange Bird by Jeff VanderMeer (The Strange Bird: A Borne Story. Nonhuman agencies in the twenty-first-century Anglophone novel.
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