Borne was published by MCD / Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2017, and it may be VanderMeer’s most emotionally powerful novel — a work that combines post-apocalyptic worldbuilding with a deeply felt exploration of parenthood, love, and the ethics of creating new consciousness in a dying world.
Rachel, a scavenger in a ruined city dominated by a giant flying bear named Mord (a biotech creation of the collapsed Company), finds a small organism growing on Mord’s fur. She takes it home, names it Borne, and raises it — and Borne grows, develops language, develops intelligence, develops a personality that is genuinely other (not human, not animal, but something new). The novel follows their relationship as Borne becomes more powerful and more dangerous, and as Rachel must decide whether her love for this creature can survive her knowledge of what it is capable of.
The parenthood metaphor is precise and unsentimental: Rachel loves Borne, but Borne is not human, and his development does not follow human patterns. He absorbs other organisms; he grows unpredictably; his understanding of the world is alien in ways that Rachel cannot bridge. The novel asks what it means to love something you cannot fully understand, and whether parental love is sufficient when the child is capable of destroying the world.
Collecting Borne
First edition (MCD / Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2017): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $15–$35
- Signed first edition: $40–$100
- Without jacket: $5–$12