Novel: Dead Astronauts

Overview
Dead Astronauts follows three revenant figures, Moss, Grayson, and Chen, who roam a fractured, biotech-ravaged world to resist a monolithic corporate power known as Biotope Control. The narrative moves through alternate realities and repeat attempts, as the trio seeks to undo or halt the company's experiments that have reshaped landscapes, bodies, and species. Scenes alternate between mission fragments, poetic interior moments, and dispatches that reveal the scale of devastation and the subtle, insidious workings of corporate science.
The book does not present a conventional linear quest. Instead the central arc is cyclical: these agents return again and again to confront new permutations of the Company's creations, trying to save what remains of the living and to bear witness to what has been lost. Encounters with monstrous biotech, cities gone feral, and everyday survivors ground the speculative elements in human grief and stubborn care.

Narrative Structure and Style
VanderMeer fragments time and viewpoint, arranging the book into jagged sequences that loop, revise, and refract one another. Sections read like field notes, lyric fragments, detective logs, and scripted dialogues; motifs and images recur with slight alterations, so episodes feel like echoes rather than strict repeats. This collage technique produces both disorientation and a strange, accumulating clarity about what the world has become.
The prose moves between sharp, spare description and lush, hallucinatory passages. VanderMeer deploys metaphor and cadence to render altered ecologies and hybrid beings vividly, while the book's formal play reinforces its thematic concern with loops of exploitation and attempted repair. The reader is invited to assemble meaning from pieces that refuse simple closure.

Main Characters and Conflict
Moss, Grayson, and Chen function as archetypal resistors and as intimates bound by shared loss. Moss often comes across as a fierce, emboldened presence, Grayson as an observant chronicler, and Chen as a more pragmatic, grounded force. Together they perform targeted strikes against Biotope Control's installations, attempt rescues, and try to extract knowledge that might undermine the company's hold on life itself.
Their adversary, Biotope Control, is less a single antagonist than a pervasive system: corporate managers, proprietary organisms, contaminated landscapes, and policies that commodify life. The conflict plays out on multiple registers, physical confrontations with engineered beasts, moral reckonings about intervention, and metaphysical struggles against a reality that keeps folding back on itself. Secondary characters and vignettes reveal how ordinary people, scientists, and complicit officials are entangled in the Company's schemes.

Themes and Atmosphere
At its core, Dead Astronauts interrogates control, commodification, and the ethics of repair. It asks what responsibility looks like when technology can rewrite ecosystems and how memory and testimony might be weapons against erasure. Grief and love operate as motivating forces; acts of care, small resistances, and storytelling are presented as forms of defiance against corporate erasure.
The atmosphere is eerie, elegiac, and often claustrophobic, punctuated by surreal beauty. Scenes of mutated flora and fauna and ruined urban spaces conjure a world both alien and intimately recognizable, where quotidian life persists beneath an overlay of corporate manipulation. The book ends less with tidy resolution than with a lingering sense of endurance: resistance is messy and recurrent, but it continues, carried forward by those who refuse to let the living be subsumed.