What does it mean to be a person? What does personhood mean? What about humanity? You might think you know, but Jeff VanderMeer’s novel Borne and its titular character are here to test what you think you believe. After finding a small pulsating blob on the side of a tremendous sleeping bear, scavenger Rachel brings it home in hopes that her partner Wick will be able to make use of it. But when the blob begins to grow, take shape and ultimately talk, Wick realizes that Rachel is in for more than she bargained for, but Rachel protects her charge as best she can. How Rachel does so and the decisions she makes for herself, for Borne and for Wick, all in the shadows of a giant bear, a half-destroyed Company and a mostly destroyed City run by a drug dealer named the Magician, will change her life forever.

As we discussed in our episode on The Left Hand of Darkness, science fiction’s goal is to push a situation to its logical limit, then let the story fully unfold from there. In Borne, VanderMeer has created a world not so far from our own, both in terms of modern society and in terms of Spartanburg; lean too close to the Company and you might catch the whiff of the crumbling abandoned textile mills that dot the Upstate. The City is all the more chilling and relatable due to its rough references that put it somewhere in the American south, kind of far from the ocean, but not too far from the mountains. In addition to discussing the relationship between Borne and the upstate (be it real or imagined), we’re talking about the way we relate to the non-human beings in our lives and who should read Borne in the first place—and much more importantly, why it should be read.