Dead Astronauts: A Novel
Series: Borne
By: Jeff VanderMeer / Narrated By: Emily Woo Zeller
Length: 7 hrs and 45 mins
Dude! Most of us outgrew LSD, like, our second years of college…!
However, FORtunately, unLIKE acid, VanderMeer’s Dead Astronauts is a 7 hr and 45 mins trip rather than 12-13 hours… Still, we’re talking around 8 hours worth of just waaaaasted time.
Apparently this is a part of a series, but trust me when I insist that I’m fairly sure listening to the first book wouldn’t have me nodding my head in appreciation of this verbal balderdash. One of the characters near the end says: You wouldn’t understand me. Even if I made sense.
Uhm… when you have to write that, Mr. VanderMeer, you should really, like, REALLY second-guess your entire writing style for the book. Like, p’raps, writing a story with, say, characters in it who aren’t all formless and gormless. P’raps writing a story with, say, a plot. P’raps writing a story with, say, a point. P’raps writing a story with, say, a FREAKING STORY in it!!!!
So let’s see, let’s see, let’s see what actually IS in this 7 hr and 45 mins worth of a snooze fest (And dude, seriously, I fell asleep EIGHT times and woke up each time to find the same sentences being chucked at me with suuuuuuch great severity!).
There are kinda three characters who take on “the Company” and fight to save the world, but they’re doing the same thing over and over and over, until they don’t. There’s a gray fox who’s somewhat hyper-intelligent and his story is kinda sorta the same as the astronauts, but it’s not. There’s a homeless girl/woman who cares for a journal, to a certain extent. There’s an evil dude with a tragic background, until the story moves away from him. And a big ol’ fish who has trouble remembering his origins.
-AND-
Sentences. Same sentences. Same sentences. Same sentences. Same sentences. Image same image same image same image same image same image. Uhm? dramatic writing dramatic writing dramatic writing dramatic writing dramatic writing
Big ol’ void void void void A-VOID like the plague!
I can just picture VanderMeer in his writing cubby, at his desk, thinking By GOD I SHALL take on horrors perpetrated against laboratory animals, ecological devastation wrought by all of us, hypocrisy after hypocrisy. Yes I SHALL!
And I’ll do it by wording one sentence with passion passion passion. MAKE the reader/listener sit up and take notice! Oh JAYZUS, abandon interest, all ye who enter here.
Emily Woo Zeller is pheNOMenal as a narrator. At first I was indeed kinda sorta liking the whole trippy stuff, liking the initial three characters however lamely they were portrayed -because- Zeller soooo had the seriousness down pat. A blighted landscape, ecological devastation, hope held on the most gossamer of threads; Zeller’s tones were AWEsome. Then when VanderMeer would go on his jags where sentences were repeated repeated repeated, she’d give each sentence its own weight and gravity, kiiiiiiinda staving off the inevitable glazing over of one’s eyes. She rocked what she was given, did what she could. The only thing that would’ve made her performance perfect woulda been if she popped in a shrieked sentence to wake the listener up from the eventual doze, if she coulda reached out and wiped the drool from the dozer’s face/chin. Gosh, I woulda appreciated that.
Yes yes yes VanderMeer smiths those words like crazy. And many a reader/listener appreciated and enjoyed this, so I’ll leave it to them. If you like stories without points, and if you like your allusions to Man’s Inhumanity to his Fellow Man/Nature/Other Creatures pounded into your head—Have at this, I say.
Me? Dude, I can’t even say it was cuz I’d scarfed something sweet that made me all sugar-crashed and dozy whilst listening to this. CRIPES was I soooo glad I got this during a Chirp sale, and tho’ it was from Chirp rather than Audible, I STILL heard in m’ head the departed Rick Lewis saying that he hoped I enjoyed this program.
My response was a grateful sigh as the ordeal was over and I could do something productive like clip my toenails, wash my hair, wipe up hairballs coughed on the bed…
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