Sci Phi Journal

by Giulia Suzzi

1. Borne and the Problem

Rachel finds Borne stuck to the fur of a sleeping bear, in the ruined city where she scavenges for parts, food, and anything else the Company left behind when it destroyed itself. He is small. He looks, at first, like a discarded piece of biotech, a sea anemone, maybe, or a lump of something that used to be alive and is now merely strange. She takes him home anyway. This is the decision the entire novel hinges on, and it is made almost too quickly to notice: before Rachel knows what Borne is, she has already decided to keep him.

That order of operations matters more than it might seem. In most stories about encountering the non-human, the alien, the artificial mind, the genetically engineered creature, the plot waits for classification before it allows care. First we learn what the thing is, whether it can suffer, whether it can want anything, whether it qualifies. Only then does the story let its human characters treat it well or badly, and only then do readers know how to feel about that treatment. Jeff VanderMeer’s Borne refuses this sequence. Rachel cares for Borne long before she can say what he is, and the novel never quite lets her, or us, arrive at a stable answer. He shifts shape, eats things he shouldn’t be able to eat, learns language with unsettling speed, and eventually reveals a capacity for violence that no domestic pet should have. By the time the question of what Borne is becomes urgent, Rachel is already entangled with him in ways that can’t simply be undone by reclassification.

Borne is not primarily a book about biotechnology gone wrong, though it is that too, and it is not simply a parable about ecological collapse, though the ruined city argues for that reading as well. Yet both readings leave another question largely unexplored, one the novel is quietly betting everything on. The deeper question is narrower and stranger: what do we owe to something before we know what it is? Most of our ethical vocabulary assumes we can answer the identity question first. Borne makes that assumption impossible to sustain, and in doing so, it exposes something uncomfortable about how fragile our usual categories of personhood turn out to be, the moment something refuses to sit still inside them.

2. Why Non-Human Agency Breaks the Concept of Person

The philosophical category of “person” has always done more work than it can comfortably bear. We use it to sort beings into those who count morally and those who don’t, those whose interests generate obligations in us, and those whose interests, if they have any, can be safely ignored. The criteria shift depending on who’s arguing: rationality, self-awareness, the capacity to suffer, the ability to have a concept of one’s own future. But underneath the disagreement is a shared assumption that personhood is something we can, in principle, verify. We check for the relevant capacities, and the answer comes back yes or no.

Borne makes verification impossible, and not accidentally. He learns to speak, which would ordinarily count heavily in favor of some kind of interiority worth respecting. But his speech develops in ways that scramble the usual inference from language to mind, he mimics, echoes, absorbs vocabulary the way he absorbs everything else he touches, and it’s never clear how much of what he says reflects something like understanding versus something closer to a very sophisticated form of digestion. He asks questions that sound like curiosity. He also, later, does things that look less like curiosity and more like appetite operating without any moral brake at all. Neither behavior settles the question. Each new piece of evidence about Borne’s inner life arrives already contaminated by the possibility that it’s evidence of nothing at all, that what looks like a person is simply a very convincing shape that personhood can take without personhood being there.

The usual response to this kind of uncertainty is caution: withhold moral consideration until the facts are in, because extending personhood too widely risks moral confusion, and withholding it too narrowly risks moral catastrophe. Rachel doesn’t do this. She doesn’t wait. Her refusal to wait can look like naivety, a mistake. But it can also look like an older kind of knowledge, one that doesn’t route through verification at all. She treats Borne as someone before she can justify treating him as someone, and the justification, when it comes, is always retrospective, and always haunted by the possibility that she got it wrong.

The novel refuses, consistently, to resolve the ambiguity in either direction. Borne is never confirmed as a person, in a way that would make Rachel’s care simply correct; he is never confirmed as a non-person, in a way that would make it simply naive. The uncertainty doesn’t lift. It becomes the permanent condition under which the relationship has to be lived, and this, I think, is the novel’s sharpest claim: that our concept of personhood was never built to handle permanent uncertainty. It assumes, somewhere underneath all its distinctions, that the facts will eventually arrive. Borne is what happens when they don’t.

3. Care as Recognition of the Other, Even When the Other Resists Our Categories

There’s a familiar philosophical move that tries to rescue ethics from exactly this kind of uncertainty, and it’s worth naming because Borne seems to be arguing against it. The move says: when we can’t verify personhood directly, we should extend moral consideration on the basis of relevant similarity, the more a being resembles us in the capacities we already know how to recognize, the more caution we should exercise in denying it moral status. This is a reasonable strategy for many hard cases. It is also, quietly, a strategy that keeps the human at the center of the calculation. Even an expanded circle of concern remains organized around resemblance to us.

Borne resists this measure structurally: he doesn’t approximate a human closely enough for the similarity argument to do much work, and he doesn’t approximate any other creature we already know how to care about, not quite animal, not quite machine, not quite anything with a name. If Rachel’s care depended on finding herself reflected back, it would have nowhere to land. Yet the care persists. It looks less like resemblance-based recognition than like a sustained willingness to keep noticing Borne, to keep responding to him, without that noticing being underwritten by a prior judgment about what kind of thing deserves to be noticed.

This changes what care is doing, philosophically speaking. Care, in this reading, stops being a reward handed out once personhood is confirmed. It starts looking like a mode of perception, a way of staying open to the possibility that something matters, prior to and independent of being able to say why. Rachel’s relationship with Borne asks what happens when we let that kind of attention lead, instead of waiting for it to be authorized by a settled metaphysics. The novel doesn’t pretend this is safe. Borne’s later violence is, among other things, a consequence of Rachel having extended trust that turned out, in some sense, to be misplaced, or at least dangerously incomplete. But the novel treats this as evidence that waiting was never actually available as an option, not for a being this unclassifiable, not in a world this depleted of the institutions and taxonomies that normally do the classifying for us.

The same logic extends to environmental ethics, where moral concern has long been organized around a hierarchy of resemblance to the human, mammals before insects, insects before ecosystems. If care must wait for confirmed similarity, most of the non-human world never qualifies. What the novel proposes, in its place, tentatively, without claiming to have solved anything, is a form of moral attention that can be extended toward what remains genuinely unlike us, precisely because it remains unlike us, rather than despite it.

4. Borne as a Philosophical Experiment

Read this way, Borne starts to look less like a novel that happens to contain philosophical questions and more like a deliberately constructed thought experiment, the kind moral philosophers build to isolate a single variable and see what happens when everything else is stripped away. Strip away the institutions that usually mediate our relationship to the non-human: no zoos or laboratories, and no legal frameworks or scientific consensus left to appeal to. Strip away the comforting fiction that we’ll eventually have enough information to decide. And strip away the safety of distance: Rachel doesn’t observe Borne from outside, she lives with him, feeds him, is changed by him, in ways that make disinterested judgment impossible even in principle. What’s left is something close to a controlled experiment in what care looks like when none of its usual supports are available.

It removes, one by one, the institutional shortcuts that would let a fictional human avoid deciding for themselves what a strange creature deserves: no committee to consult and no established science of biotech personhood to draw on, only the wreckage of a science that didn’t ask the right questions before it built things like Borne. Rachel is left with nothing but her own attention, and the novel is interested in exactly what that attention, unsupported, is capable of.

Here, speculative fiction does the work only speculative fiction can do. VanderMeer didn’t need a strange creature for its own sake; he needed an experiment, and the creature is how he ran it. We can’t, in the actual world, remove our classificatory scaffolding and observe what care looks like underneath it; too much of our moral life is embedded in institutions we can’t simply switch off. Fiction can: it can construct a world where a single relationship carries the whole ethical weight, and then watch what happens to it. What happens, in Borne, doesn’t vindicate extending personhood generously, and it doesn’t warn against doing so either, it does something messier than both, and, I’d argue, more honest: care extended under irreducible uncertainty, producing real goods and real harms simultaneously, with no available position from which to say in advance which one you’re going to get.

This messiness is itself a philosophical claim, even if the novel never states it as one. Moral philosophy is organized around producing verdicts, this being counts, that one doesn’t. Borne declines to produce a verdict, and pointedly so, as though a clean answer would falsify what it’s describing: that some cases of moral uncertainty don’t resolve, and that our theories need to be able to say something useful about how to act inside that non-resolution, not just about how to act once it’s over.

5. What It Means to Care for What We Cannot Classify

It would be a mistake to read all this as a story confined to biotechnology and ruined cities, useful mainly for thinking about some future in which we might, plausibly, build creatures like Borne. The uncertainty the novel stages has very little to do with the future. It describes a condition we’re already living in, more often than our moral vocabulary tends to admit. We extend care, all the time, toward beings and systems whose inner lives we cannot verify: toward animals whose experience we can only partly infer, toward people whose minds illness or injury have altered beyond the usual markers, and toward ecosystems and future generations who cannot speak for themselves at all. In each case, waiting for certainty carries costs of its own; it just disguises them as caution, a choice that quietly favors inaction.

What Borne offers has less to do with solving moral uncertainty than with learning to stand inside it differently: the novel treats sustained attention itself as a kind of answer, provisional and revisable, but not worthless for being incomplete. Rachel’s relationship with Borne demonstrates something narrower than proof: what it looks like to act as though unclassifiable beings might deserve care, and to keep acting that way even as the evidence remains permanently mixed. That may be a smaller claim than a philosophical argument usually wants to make. It might also be the only honest one we can make, for all the beings, biological, artificial, or something we don’t yet have a word for, that our categories were never built to hold.

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Bio:

Giulia Suzzi is a final-year medical student and independent researcher working at the intersection of speculative fiction, bioethics, and posthumanism. Her philosophical work includes two preprints on Mur Lafferty’s Six Wakes, while her essays have explored authors including H.P. Lovecraft and Peter Watts. A full record of her scientific and philosophical work is available via ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0002-6388-4328. She can be found online at giuliasuzzi.github.io and https://bsky.app/profile/gsuzzi.bsky.social.

Philosophy Note:

My interest in questions like the one Borne raises has its roots in my medical training. Several scientific preprints of mine deal with psychiatric and neurological questions of identity and responsibility, and that background is what first drew me toward fiction that stages the same problems more directly than realist fiction tends to allow. On the philosophical side, I’ve also written two preprints on Six Wakes, working through related questions of moral responsibility and personal identity from a different angle. VanderMeer doesn’t need to resolve whether Borne qualifies as a person, and that refusal is what let me think through care as something operating under permanent, not temporary, uncertainty, rather than a judgment suspended until the facts come in. For anyone interested in extending the thread: Eva Kittay’s work on dependency and the ethics of care, and Sara Ruddick’s Maternal Thinking, both sit close to what I’m arguing here, though from angles the essay doesn’t have room to develop.