The final pages of Jeff VanderMeer’s “Dead Astronauts” tie everything together, making sense of what came before. And the astronauts of the title, although when we meet them they are not dead yet. AdvertisementIn that, “Dead Astronauts” serves as a kind of backstory to “Borne,” explaining how this world came to be. Maybe it’s best to think of it as a multiverse, folded; there are multiple versions of what the astronauts find. 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.

Source: Los Angeles Times November 29, 2019 15:00 UTC