Jeff VanderMeer’s novels are constantly in dialogue with the changing face of the Anthropocene and his city novels, City of Saints and Madmen, Borne and Dead Astronauts, explore how cities might develop into supernatural entities through colonisation and extreme developments in technology, bioengineering, and ecology. The hostile bioengineering corporation, ‘The Company’, in Borne and Dead Astronauts, mirrors the current corporate endeavour towards ‘Smart Cities’, spearheaded by Amazon’s search for a city to host their second headquarters. Amazon promise the ‘ultimate upgrade’ to the public sector through their Smart City approach in return for seemingly unlimited access to people’s lives. Between Amazon’s proposed Smart Cities and VanderMeer’s supernatural cities, this paper will explore when and how the city starts to be reconfigured as a supernatural space through aggressive corporate colonisation and technological augmentation.

Read Stranger Than Fiction: Jeff VanderMeer’s Supernatural Cities and Amazon’s Smart Cities