The Strange Bird’s first thought was of a sky over an ocean she had never seen, in a place far from the fire-washed laboratory from which she emerged, cage smashed open but her wings, miraculous, unbroken. He lives in Tallahassee, Florida, with his wife. Jeff VanderMeer is an award-winning novelist and editor, and the author most recently of the national bestseller Borne and the Southern Reach Trilogy. But now the lab in which she was created is under siege and the scientists have turned on their animal creations. The Strange Bird is part bird, part human, part many other things. 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 new kind of creature who will fight and suffer and live for the tenuous future of this world.The following is from Jeff VanderMeer’s novella, The Strange Bird. With The Strange Bird, Jeff VanderMeer has done more than add another layer, a new chapter, to his celebrated novel Borne. Never to understand, never to welcome home. 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.

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. 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. Flying through tunnels, dodging bullets, and changing her colors and patterning to avoid capture, the Strange Bird manages to escape.īut she cannot just soar in peace above the earth. The Strange Bird is a new kind of creature, built in a laboratory-she is part bird, part human, part many other things.

The strange bird jeff vandermeer