#reading: dead astronauts

[dandelion-network]

Slowly but surely making my way through Dead Astronauts by Jeff VanderMeer - roughly 60% through. I'm a big fan of VanderMeer and was excited to read this having read Borne a few years ago.

Dead Astronauts feels more like a dreamscape than Borne, meditative even. I can see why some people struggle with the writing style of this particular work by VanderMeer compared to the others but I find it comforting, it's comforting me through the loss of a friend. Perhaps its the acceptance of death, loss, change experienced as a creature experiencing life. Change being the most prominent theme throughout all of VanderMeer's works.

In this story you kinda have to just accept what is being described and painted and transmitted to you, sorta letting it glide through your fingers like water. If you try to grasp onto it with a vice grip, you're going to struggle with it for sure. In a way, though again I'm still reading it, the story feels like it's happening backward. Spacetime works very differently but I'd say the narrative itself is slowly walking backwards to explain what you've already experienced in the first half of the story.

All of this to say, I'm really liking Dead Astronauts.

[pseud0knots]

started listening to gideon the ninth and it is like very obvious theyre setting up a “I had a crush on a girl and I didn’t know what to do so I wrote a note telling her to get out of my House” dynamic but it’s fun so. like i do get where people on this website are coming from re: the prose being Unserious at times but like who cares it’s fun I wouldn’t want to only read books that are written like this but I’m VERY much not (<- guy who is almost finished with dead astronauts) so it doesn’t matter

[swallowedabug]

what's the last book you read that you loved? 👀

Dead Astronauts by Jeff VanderMeer!!! I only loaned it from the library because I loved the cover and then it turned out to be one of the best things I've ever read.

[usercannibal]

- Dead Astronauts by Jeff VanderMeer

[crunchity-munchity]

The way that dead astronauts is obviously a book that jeff vandermeer was very passionate about but nobody really seems to understand that because so many people think that it's too confusing is killing me

He has a playlist with over 900 songs that he listened to almost every day while writing dead astronauts, even while he was doing stuff like going to the store, and the fact that he spent so long meticulously planning the book and making sure that the music he associates with it had a certain feel. He wanted the book and his playlist to have specific messages but nobody talks about them aggggggg

I love dead astronauts so muchhhhhh

[storekn1fe]

read dead astronauts by jeff vandermeer

[riemmetric]

“Chen could see bits and pieces of the future, “but only in equations.” A frequent lament. Numbers could attack the flesh, the will, but rarely built it up. Morale for them never lay in the numbers. He made poetry out of his premonitions, his equations, because they’d proven useless to him as fact, because he was never sure whether he was actually seeing the past. A past. [...] Chen dealt in probabilities on one side of his brain and impossibilities on the other. Because the probability was always that he would disintegrate into his constituent parts sooner rather than later. He had come to think of himself as a complex equation and a symphony both, and, really, what was the difference? [...] The equation of the Company eluded Chen, perhaps because he had been lost within it once upon a time. Or as he said sometimes, the system abhors source, makes its mapping into a maze, a mockery, and the more you think you understand it, the more you are colonized by it. And lost. [...] Charlie X was on some part of the blackboard that had been smudged and no one could solve the equation now. Just knew the original answer had been incorrect. [...] Chen’s equation was a wall of circles with plus signs between them, and then some basic geometry that proved he was more than the sum of his parts. Held together by math. [...] For Chen, Moss was a wall of circles or zeros tumbling over one another, and from each a different Moss peered out. That kept being divided by themselves until there was no room for the rest of the equation and the parentheses grew into vines and cracked the blackboard and made math into something that could never be solved. While Moss escaped through one of the circles. For Moss could bud another Moss off her big toe if she liked—as she was fond of saying. [...] By contrast, Grayson was a single circle from which radiated calculations like the sun’s rays and a latticework of numbers between each ray. She liked to be as direct as a fist to the face. She had survived that way out in space for so many years that there was no other solution for her. She knew the stakes of their mission because she’d had so few choices before Chen, before Moss. Chen tried not to diagram her or turn her into poetry, even though it was in his nature. Did not want to solve her, for fear she’d tumble like Moss’s zeros, but, not used to it, shudder apart, disintegrate. No matter the grim set of her jaw.”

Beautiful math based metaphors in Dead Astronauts by Jeff Vandermeer

[doctorslippery]

[themaxbeard]

I’ve been reading dead astronauts by Jeff vandermeer, and it is a challenge, but I love it.

The pickle I’m in is that I take my edibles and try to read and I only get about an hour deep before I read what feels like an ambien fever dream.

Someday I’ll finish it.

[atomicniire]

Moss remained stubbornly uncommitted- to origin, to gender, to genes, went by "she" this time but not others

Dead Astronauts by Jeff Vandermeer

[barbsart]

Started reading a new jeff vandermeer story (a strange bird!!) on my train ride earlier today and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it.. I’m like 20 pages in and I can already feel it altering my brain chemistry

[dandelion-network]

I finished Dead Astronaut and at some point will put my thoughts into words but I will say this. For a story full of violence and death, it strangely made the reality of death that less scary. Not in a desensitized way. More like a comforting reality. A reminder that being dead isn't so different from being alive but so very, very different. Doesn't make much sense probably.

[planet4546b]

i tried to read dead astronauts earlier this year and was mostly meh on it and now every time i listen to tin (the manhole) and choice mountain everything everything i just think that these two songs are doing successfully what that book was trying to do and wasn't successful at

[bitterpngs]

ur angel devil art altered my brain chemistry… ur brain is huge

ASCHANJDKA THANK YOU IM SO HONORED….. honestly it was all thanks to you and everyone else who does redesigns. you guys are so right like! it’s so fun.

tbh i think this is my fav art piece i’ve ever done hehe. i’m very happy with how it turned out :D

[growlithe]

my boorks arrived!!

[riemmetric]

Currently reading: Dead Astronauts by Jeff Vandermeer

A book like a piece of art. A heartbeat. A collection of emotions that could only be voiced in literary form. This is why I love literature.

I had this book in my hands last year and I let it go. I saw it in a local bookshop and the name seemed familiar, so I picked it up. I didn't understand anything, I thought the empty pages highlighting a single sentence and the pages filled with repeating paragraphs were gimmicky, and I feared this novel was a waste of money. It is also advertised as the second book in a series, so I put it back on the shelf and went to read Borne first.

I loved Borne and I fell in love with Jeff Vandermeer's writing style, but Dead Astronauts was gone from the bookshop by that time.

This year, I longed for it again. I downloaded the Kindle preview, thinking if I am to waste money, it might be cheaper to buy the e-book. But the preview blew my mind. A novel perfectly tailored for me, for my brain, for my heart, for my taste in literature. Gorgeous prose, tragic and heartwarming, and the math metaphors! The math metaphors for a baby mathematician! This is a book I want to hold in my hands, to caress and underline and take pictures of. It was no longer available in store, but they had it on the website, so although I was robbed of the joy of picking it up myself (and of the prettiness of that first hardcover edition), I have it now.

And I have an upcoming overnight train tip, and I can't wait to get lost inside this fever dream of a story.

(it's ok to delete the caption if you only want to reblog the picture)