Weird and fascinating and on many occasions, both terrifying and awe-inspiring. These labs made some truly weird shit, let me just say that right now. Never to understand, never to welcome home.ĭiscussion: The Strange Bird is similar to both Borne (the intelligent blob-like creature in the original book) and Mord, the giant flying bear from Borne, in that it was created in a lab.
But of the many creatures she encounters with whom she bears some kind of kinship, it is the humans - all of them now simply scrambling to survive - who are the most insidious, who still see her as simply something to possess, to capture, to trade, to exploit. And the farther she flies, the deeper she finds herself in the orbit of the Company, a collapsed biotech firm that has populated the world with experiments both failed and successful that have outlived the corporation itself: a pack of networked foxes, a giant predatory bear. The sky itself is full of wildlife that rejects her as one of their own, and also full of technology - satellites and drones and other detritus of the human civilization below that has all but destroyed itself. Flying through tunnels, dodging bullets, and changing her colors and patterning to avoid capture, the Strange Bird manages to escape.īut she cannot just soar in peace above the earth.
But now the lab in which she was created is under siege and the scientists have turned on their animal creations. The Strange Bird is a new kind of creature, built in a laboratory - she is part bird, part human, part many other things. Though different, it still had the same feel as Borne and made me miss this universe all over again. When I had a little downtime, I picked it up from the library and pretty much breezed through it. Eventually, I learned of this short story set in the same universe. When I finished reading Borne, I was pretty smitten with the world and characters that Jeff VanderMeer had created (I’m still smitten, to be honest, and it’s on my list of books to buy for when I have room on my shelves again).
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