The Strange Bird Lib/E: A Borne Story(Borne)

The Strange Bird-from New York Times bestselling novelist Jeff VanderMeer-expands and weaves deeply into the world of his critically acclaimed novel Borne. The Strange Bird is a new kind of creature, built in a laboratory-she is part bird, part human, part many other things. But now the lab in which she was created is under siege, and the scientists have turned on their animal creations. Flying through tunnels, dodging bullets, and changing her colors and patterning to avoid capture, the Strange Bird manages to escape. But she cannot just soar in peace above the earth. 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. 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. 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. Never to understand, never to welcome home. With The Strange Bird, Jeff VanderMeer has done more than add another layer to his celebrated novel Borne. 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 creature who will fight and suffer and live for the tenuous future of this world.

About the Author :
Jeff VanderMeer is an award-winning novelist and editor. His fiction has been translated into twenty languages and has appeared in the Library of America's American Fantastic Tales and in multiple anthologies. VanderMeer also writes for the Guardian, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and New York Times Book Review, among others. He grew up in the Fiji Islands and now lives in Tallahassee, Florida, with his wife. Emily Woo Zeller is an Audie and Earphones Award-winning narrator, voice-over artist, actor, dancer, and choreographer. AudioFile magazine named her one of the Best Voices of 2013. Her voice-over career includes work in animated film and television in Southeast Asia.

Review :
The Strange Bird is a spinoff from the novel Borne, with the same background: a wrecked, far-future Earth, now be-ing devastated by techno/magical, quasi-mythic Company Wars...Eventually, what's left of Strange Bird get caught up in the Wars, with surprising results. To say more would be a spoiler. -- "Locus" A lyrical if darkhearted side note to VanderMeer's wonderfully inventive dystopian novel Borne...Vandermeer writes circles around most fantasists at work today, and the story, while rewarding of itself, is of an elegantly bleak piece with its predecessor, reminiscent of the best of Brian Aldiss and Philip K. Dick. VanderMeer fans will treasure this installment in the Borne saga. -- "Kirkus Reviews" Adds another prism to the world created in Borne. -- "Los Angeles Times" Nothing is what it seems in VanderMeer's fiction: bears fly, lab-generated protoplasm shape shifts, and magic undoes science. In this expansion of his acclaimed novel Borne...VanderMeer turns his attention upward. Up in the sky, things look a bit different. -- "Millions.com" With hallucinatory imagery and expressive prose, this companion novella to Borne is beautiful and bleak, painful and rewarding in equal measure. -- "Booklist (starred review)"