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Released in the final moments of the teen years of this century, here's another essential of the Penultimate Decade Reading List, following Karen An-hwei Lee's Maze of Transparencies, books that push through the present into the speculative technicalities of survival in the critical periods bearing down on us and beyond.

Following the dissolving contemporary human world of the Southern Reach Trilogy, and the traumatic eking-out of existence in a world spun out of our control (because of our attempts at control) in Borne, Vandermeer's next major work dissolves the floundering anthropocene further. Here, the linear narratives humans impose on history have disintegrated into an inextricable tangle of contradictions and variations. Here, narrative and viewpoint themselves have been wrested from anthropocentric control by others. So has ideas of who, or what gets to tell the story. This is a polyphony not of storylines but of storysystems. The complexity of the world(s) demands it.

Despite the of-the-moment data-age relevance this has, it looks beyond. Vandermeer's transhumanism is, very significantly, biological rather than digital or even technological. Definitions of personhood and personal identity get very fuzzy, changeable, and permeable here, in a way that posits its own necessity for survival beyond the Anthropocene. Humans are over, but is that a loss on a global scale? We've never been alone. If we'd only accept that we are not, there's a possible deliverance from our collapsing towers in seeing beyond ourselves. The entirety of Dead Astronauts expresses this, not just as a formal structure, but as a moral position.

In this, it frustrates expectations. I've heard the novel described as interlinked stories and novellas. But it is very much a novel. The threads do not, cannot survive in sequestration and isolation, as nothing can. There's an intertextuality, within and in interaction with other recent Vandermeer, but it posits not discreet parts that communicate, but an entire thematic-conceptual ecosystem. The longest section here, The Three, seems at first to dominate: it's an almost-adventure story with recognizable central characters. We're drawn to them, seeking to relate, even as incomplete information and experience pushes us away. But it, and they, and their relatable qualities, are destined for failure, inevitable as the title. It's the rest of the pieces here that gradually shade in weight and substance and meaning, even as they pull away and reveal more importance beyond the story we cling to. The most essential section, then, is that which mocks my own complacent human narrative needs. Skewers my hope for human emotional relatability as a symptom of my killing anthropocentrism. Refutes our collective position as humans, whatever it may be, entirely. The shining success of this novel is that a vicious diatribe from a pinioned animal is the most directly devastating it has to offer, even amidst a shattered wasteland of loss. Here, again, form bolsters content. I turned a page and froze. The promise of structure-as-content, elsewhere in these pages playful or cryptic, cuts directly to the bone.

Welcome to the Penultimate Decade. Soon we will reach the Ultimate, the last. And then, if we're lucky, something else will carry on into some kind of worthy future, with or without what may remain of us.