The Strange Bird: A Borne Story

I listened to this on audio, and the narrator's voice added to the deliciousness of this book. I have not read Borne, and I enjoyed figuring out how the world the strange bird flew into worked. I identified with the bird and its need to travel, its joy in some experiences (like flying) and the suffering and transformation of other experiences, its puzzlement at its dreams.

For those of you who haven't read a synopsis, the strange bird escapes from a lab at the beginning of the book and is compelled to travel, learning and experiencing as it goes. AuntMarge64's use of the word harrowing in her review below is a good one. The mercy & healing given to the strange bird by Wick & Rachel were a welcome relief towards the end of the show more novella.

I've also been thinking of the bird's journey in terms of Ursula LeGuin's comments on home embedded in her address/essay "The Operating Instructions," reprinted in Words are my matter. To paraphrase, that home is not a place but something we create with others.

I used the phrase "hope on a thread" in my Litsy comments: the world will survive, whether or not humans do. Overall a five-star read for me, full of longing and beauty in addition to suffering. show less

****.5

As with the first book, the bioengineered creature is much more of a person than any of the human characters. Most of the book is one harrowing adventure after another, most of which are horrific and heartbreaking. There are just enough glimmers of beauty, hopefulness, and kindness to keep it from being a one-dimensional sad depressing tragedy, but it still feels like being punched in the gut. The writing manages to be both lush and sparse (it's a rather short book, but feels well fleshed out), well paced and lyrical.

Audiobook: Bahni Turpin did a good job with the first book, but Emily Woo Zeller brings a depth of empathy to this one that really makes it resonate on an emotional level, something that was a bit lacking with Borne.

In a beautifully written novella, Jeff VanderMeer has given us the story of the Strange Bird, a minor character from his novel, "Borne". The bird is a construct: part bird, part human, part other things. Told by the bird itself, its story from life to death is both wonderfully uplifting and ultimately tragic and yet…

This is how the story begins:

"The Strange Bird’s first thought was of a sky over an ocean she had never seen, in a place far from the fire-washed laboratory from which she emerged, cage smashed open but her wings, miraculous, unbroken. For a long time the Strange Bird did not know what sky really was as she flew down underground corridors in the dark, evading figures that shot at one another, did not even know that she show more sought a way out. There was just a door in a ceiling that opened and a scrabbling and scrambling with something ratlike after her, and in the end, she escaped, rose from the smoking remnants below. And even then she did not know that the sky was blue or what the sun was, because she had flown out into the cool night air and all her wonder resided in the points of light that blazed through the darkness above. But then the joy of flying overtook her and she went higher and higher and higher, and she did not care who saw or what awaited her in the bliss of the free fall and the glide and the limitless expanse.
Oh, for if this was life, then she had not yet been alive!"

I may have enjoyed this novella even more than the novel, but it is perhaps not fair to compare the two as if they were like things. [The Strange Bird] is a seductive and transportive tale that can, more or less, be read without having read the novel first. show less

I think I actually enjoyed this more than I enjoyed Borne. I love that there are a few moments that answer questions we're left with when Borne ends. Nothing huge, but little curiosities, just like this book in general.

Favorite quote: "That if they could not have a fierce joy in their struggle, then they were not truly free but governed by fear and doubt." (p. 82)

From one environmental disaster (Ice Anna Kavan) to another, this post-apocalyptical world has humans engineering other life-forms mashed together including using electronic and human parts. The creator of the Strange Bird put herself into this creature in a lab, where she intended it to reseed the planet with life as it flew, but when the lab she worked in was struck with disaster, the engineer managed to leave an air duct open from which this bird escaped and saw the sky for the first time. Beautiful descriptions of flying. This is the story of the Strange Bird, its escape, capture by The Old Man, being taken to a market in the city to be sold (where it sees Mord, the flying bear), escape and final capture by The Magician who is show more intent on fighting for control of the city. Everywhere is waste-land, piles of discarded electronics, abandoned buildings, ruined laboratories. The book ties in with the first in the series at the sighting of Mord, and then the finale is where Rachael and Wick repair the Strange Bird who can no longer fly, recognising the bird as being part-human, complex modification with neurons redistributed not just in its head, but in the feathers too, built as a dispersal system for genetic material, and unusually adding more human functionality and decision-making from one source to make it convey personality traits - whoever did this shortened their own lifespan (Sanji, the engineer). Rachael and Wick repair the Strange Bird, but made it into four strange birds, and released them into freedom.. show less

Strange Bird is a short novel set in the world of Borne. It is a dispatch from that broken world. Strange Bird sits very comfortably on its own and could be read first in the Borne (series) (cycle) the three Borne books can be read in interchangeable order. The Strange Bird at the end of it all is a love story wrapped up in a tale of abused biotech trying to make sense of a world that it knows but does not know. It is about the process of self discovery and becoming something new while already being something else. Themes of change and transformation and love abound hardcore.

This tale is so beautifully written. It is lyrical and poetic and just devastatingly beautiful to read a wholly original take on life that is thoroughly nonhuman show more but also is a person. Just totally stunning and a must read. Its all at once tragic and uplifting. show less

I found this to be a bit of a slow start, but once you really start to love and empathize with the Strange Bird? Fasten your seat belts.

Strange Bird's story is beautiful and weird and terrible and wondrous. And the writing is gorgeous and transparent.

It certainly helps to have read 'Borne', but I don't think it's necessary.