VanderMeer lists Moebius, Jodorowsky, and Miyazaki as three strong influences on the book. The colorful feeling of Borne's world comes from both the natural world and from visual media. Life on this planet is an endless source of ingenuity and wonder.'

'The life might be nocturnal or sometimes underground, or pick its spots to bloom and then fade away for a time, but it's always there. 'Sometimes we have misconceptions about kinds of habitat, like deserts, and since the city in Borne is semi-arid, that's one myth I wanted to dispel: that such places are lifeless. You know the ones: A plague kills everyone, or maybe turns them into zombies, and the last remaining people must murder one another in a desolate wasteland or rape, death, and decay.īorne is set after an apocalypse, yes, but there is still life both inside and out. She lives in it, and its wonders and horrors are all in a day's work.'īoth the imaginative elements and the intimate story of Rachel's odd family make the novel stand in contrast to the dour, post-apocalyptic novels that fill up the bookstore shelves each year. 'She foregrounds what's important to her, and because she's an old hand in the City, she doesn't spend overlong dwelling on the biotech and the other weirdnesses of this world. 'It's all down to Rachel, and I don't think the novel would work without it being from her point of view,' VanderMeer explains. A lesser writer would make that the story a kind of Godzilla meets Game of Thrones (not that I wouldn't have been thrilled to read that, too), but VanderMeer grounds the novel in the personal story of Rachel and Borne, allowing him to move us with emotion and introspection between bouts of flying-bear fireworks. Both are products of biotech tests by a shadowy organization called the Company, which discarded experiments that now populate the land.

In the background, a struggle ensues between the terrifying flying bear Mord and the Magician's army of mutated children. I'm not sure I've ever read a novel that so perfectly balances the intimate-the lives of Rachel, her partner Wick, and their quasi-child Borne-with the bizarre.

Borne by Jeff VanderMeer