Dead Astronauts was published by MCD / Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2019, and it represents VanderMeer at his most formally radical — a novel that fragments narrative, perspective, and even language in pursuit of a vision that conventional storytelling cannot contain.
Set in the same ruined city as Borne (though in different timelines and iterations), the novel follows three “dead astronauts” — Grayson, Moss, and Chen — who travel through alternate versions of reality attempting to destroy the Company, the biotech corporation responsible for the ecological collapse that created Mord and Borne and the contaminated world they inhabit. But the Company exists in all timelines, and each time the astronauts think they have destroyed it, it reasserts itself in a different form.
VanderMeer uses this premise to explore the limits of narrative itself. The novel is not structured conventionally: chapters are told from radically different perspectives (including non-human ones), the typography and layout shift to reflect different modes of consciousness, and the story loops and fragments in ways that resist linear comprehension. This is deliberate — VanderMeer is asking whether the kind of ecological catastrophe we face can be told in traditional narrative forms, or whether such stories require new forms of language.
Collecting Dead Astronauts
First edition (MCD / Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2019): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $10–$25
- Signed first edition: $30–$70