Dead Astronauts

"[A] darkly transcendent novel filled with phantasmagoric visions, body horror and tortured beings traversing a blasted desert hellscape . . . terrifying and so compelling."—Chelsea Leu, The New York Times Book Review

"With Dead Astronauts, VanderMeer has expanded to a multiverse with a poisoned past, engineered monsters and a possibly redeemable future, all from something that was merely decoration. There’s no limit to where it might go next."—Los Angeles Times

"A Mobius strip of a novel, with each chapter containing worlds upon nested worlds, all of them dreamlike and dark. In this shattered landscape, VanderMeer explores urgent ideas about capitalism, greed, and natural destruction."—Adrienne Westenfeld, Esquire

"Like nearly everything else Vandermeer has created in Dead Astronauts, they are allegories, figments, fables for a dissolving world where narrative and language are as subject to corruption as modified flesh . . . Dead Astronauts moves in shutterclicks, shifting points of view and moments in time. The experience of reading it is a compulsively absorbing confusion. Straightforward answers are not forthcoming. The reader assembles what remains of the history of Vandermeer's world by gestalt, layering snatches of imagery one on top of another. Yet the book is profoundly emotional. Each character voice is compelling, brutal, rooted in emotional experience."—Arkady Martine, NPR

"For any adventurous fan of sci-fi, fantasy, and/or horror, this book offers not only a rewarding read but, like, a thing to possess."—Robin Sloan, author of Sourdough

"VanderMeer is a master of literary science fiction, and this may be his best book yet."—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)