Nautical images are everywhere in “Borne,” though the setting is in fact land rather than sea. But the sea isn’t too far away — not far in memory, anyway, for Rachel is a climate refugee from a submerged archipelago, long dependent on the ocean for sustenance and learning the hard way that what feeds can also drown. She and her parents used to bring out their telescope to look for lights from neighboring islands, until one night they put the useless instrument away for good. The family fled their own island when Rachel was 6, moving from camp to camp, hoping to outrun disaster and never succeeding. Then her parents were lost as well. Rachel is now in a new city, scavenging on her own, finding shelter only when she takes up with her companion Wick in his much fortified and oddly sea-haunted Balcony Cliffs, a warren of apartments with marine objects etched into many of its secrets, including a “diagram of a fish curled inside the outer tube of a broken telescope and a metal box filled with tiny vermilion nautilus shells,” tucked away in a locked drawer.

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VanderMeer is telling us something here, for this new city is a lost island too in its own way, submerged in a medium equally encompassing — a sea of toxicity. Presiding over it is “the Company,” a biotech conglomerate that has gone defunct, but not before filling the world with its many products. Even now it’s still the source of everything that ails the city and everything that keeps it going. There’s no escape from its contamination. The polluted river glows pink and orange; yet the “memory beetles” people stick into their ears and the “diagnostic worms” they use to heal wounds do make life tolerable in nontrivial ways. Wick, for one, wouldn’t be able to survive without his nautilus pills.

Among the biotech products VanderMeer imagines, none is more spectacular than Mord the flying bear, once a man, now with superhuman powers, and a terror in the wake of the Company’s collapse. But there’s something farcical about him as well, not least when he loses his ability to fly and tries desperately to recapture the magic. Borne, mauled by one of his proxies, plots revenge by labeling Mord with some newly minted words: “Buffoon! …Foon buff! Buffalo balloon! … Buffaloon.”

VanderMeer, based in Tallahassee, Fla., knows as well as anyone that bears have a formidable precedent in American literature — but there’s nothing to fear from that quarter. Mord owes nothing to Old Ben, the bear in “Go Down, Moses,” who is mythic to be sure, but strictly earthbound. Faulkner is, in any case, too little concerned with the forms and textures of the nonhuman world to be much of an adversary. It’s Melville — preoccupied with squids and ambergris, not to mention white whales — who has been VanderMeer’s reference point all along. In one of the oddest (and seemingly gratuitous) moments in “Borne,” a “leviathan gray with age” stages an insurgence, but it turns out to be “a brief fight, for Mord swatted the thing senseless,” ripping out its brain and leaving it slumped “like something that had never been alive.”

It’s an unguarded and comically revelatory passage. Still, it’s no more than a sideshow within the larger frame of the novel, for as its title makes clear, “Borne” is most concerned not with Mord but with the gift he unwittingly bears, next in line for another showdown. This one, at the critical moment, will not match brute strength for brute strength, but will make his body weak and defenseless, opening up his aperture until he resembles “an enormous passionflower blossom. Complex and beautiful, with many levels.”