Walking to Aldebaran

Well then.

This is a space horror/claustrophobic/unreliable narrator/body horror/ psychoscifi.
We follow G rendell.. That's clever. Other than that, it may remind you in parts to the martian or hail mary, but weirder.

We are to believe that humanity found a structure, clearly alien made and decided to board it. And as it goes with space stories, well, it doesn't work out. But all the while we follow G rendell's perspective, and he's been wandering this thing for who knows how long, eating ‘stuff', drinking i actually don't know since he ran out of piss... So his state of mind is questionable. And the little bits we get are... Confusing. But they do hint at the end if you pay attention. Which i didn't

So in the end, this review is sort of like the book, kind of incoherent, but if you read the book you'll see it makes sense in the end hehe.

2.5. Seems like the author was trying to replicate Vonnegut's style in some way. At least to me. I am too dumb to understand the message, though. I think I finished it mostly cause it was short...

This isn't one of Tchaikovsky's best, but it doesn't feel like any of his others that I've read and that continues to impress me. It's a mix of the Martian (guy alone on a planet) mixed with Project Hail Mary (guy was part of a mission to save humanity based on a big discovery) combined with Tchaikovsky's signature imagination and has more sardonic humor than Tchaikovsky usually has.

8/10

Pretty good story, if a bit predictable by the end.

This short story got my attention right away and kept me curious as the narrator traveled through and explained how they ended up in the crypts. Some of his survival techniques ended up being a little surprising and gross. To keep this spoiler free, I'll close with just saying that I recommend this book if you enjoy science fiction.

A strange and uncomfortable novella (in all the best ways). The story follows someone who is lost in an alien artifact which gives pathways across the universe. The artifact is full of lost creatures who have wondered in and are unable to get out.

The main protagonist was part of a human investigation to look in more detail at an entrance to this world, discovered on the edge of the solar system. He gets separated from the rest of the team and ends up wandering the passageways between worlds on his own.

The ending goes in delightfully dark and twisted ways. This is uncomfortable and psychological stuff. There are some wonderful questions about time and space asked, along with questions on the meaning of humanity. For a short novella, this was impressively deep!

Euhm, dat was bizar...
Ronduit grappig met momenten, luchtig in toon en met een sarcasme waar ik van hou. De verteller die constant de vierde wand doorbreekt om ons (Toto) zijn verhaal te vertellen en dan die twist: schitterend!
Maar zo zo zo bizar...

Because it's like Dungeons and Dragons in here, and you ever know a crypt without monsters?

En dan lees ik een recensie die nog een extra dimensie aan dit verhaal geeft: Gary Rendell versus Grendel uit Beowulf. Machtig!

Walking to Aldebaran, Adrian Tchaikovsky's deeply disturbing novella that hearkens back to Phillip K. Dick's mind-bending science fiction, Lovecraftian cosmic horror, and the comedy of Andy Weir's The Martian. While each of these genre types: psychological horror/science fiction, cosmic horror, or comedic horror/science fiction, would work in the setting of this story, a space artifact of massive proportions named the Frog God after its amphibians features, the combination of all three types allows the story to hit all the buttons. 

As a reader, you are mesmerized and transported by the intense attention to detail Tchaikovsky displays in his worldbuilding. You are made to laugh at Gary Randall, possibly the only survivor of his crew, as he quips and makes jokes about the aliens he meets, Star Trek, and having to eat the random creatures he finds amongst the tombs. This humor lulls the reader into a false sense of normalcy, all is right in Gary's head, or so we think. Finally, Tchaikovsky brings out the existential Lovecraft-type terror of Cthulu monsters of unknowable cosmic origins that are hunting and being hunted by Gary. This combination of pacing and types makes Walking to Aldebaran both hilarious, unsettling, and horrifying in equal measures.

“Captain Kirk would have thought of something by now, I'm sure, but I have no red-shirted confederates to feed to it.”

Walking to Aldebaran's premiss is thus, Gary is an astronaut and in combination with many national space agencies who put together a crew to investigate an object that was found in deep space. This is a decade's long voyage to the thing deemed The Frog God, as Rocky McRockface had already been taken. It has a large orifice, about the size of the moon sitting in its “face.” It also had smaller orifices, some conveniently man-sized. All very enticing for a world desperate to see something alien. 

Gary and his crew set off on the long journey, sleeping in shifts. Gary is one of four pilots. All hail government redundancy. Three pilots will rest while one of the other pilots looks around nervously and touches nothing. 

“I was also one of the pilots, although space piloting is one of those situations where they should really equip you with a dog, so your job is to feed the dog and the dog's job is to bite you if you touch any of the expensive equipment.”

Finally, after a long space flight equalling years, the crew arrives at the Frog God. After sending in most of the probes and had them immediately disappear or stop working entirely, it is decided a human team is necessary. They drive a vehicle aptly named Quixote through one of the many odd-shaped orifices. Once the team drives Quixote into the oddly human-sized-shaped hole, they discover and are either delighted or are suspicious tinged with terror. This particular hole has an excellent combination of blended oxygen, a nitrogen atmosphere with a comfortable .91G, and slightly under one pressure atmosphere. Almost as if it had been designed for them. That is a chilling thought; if there is a human-shaped hole, what goes in all these other holes?

“We weren't prepared,” Gary extols. They had no idea what was ahead of them once they went into the oddly shaped human-sized hole. “We labored off into the dark, the beams of our lamps seeming more and more inadequate as the shadows gathered in front of us.” The team found in those first few long moments of discovery in the crypts' bowels were pain and destruction. Astronaut Gary Randall, the creme of the top of human ingenuity and education, did the only thing he could do.

He ran like his ass was on fire, and eventually got lost. 

The crypts are very outside of the human understanding of physics and nature, those will be understood through a human lens. We humans, and Gary specifically, cannot fathom the purpose of what he was exposed to inside the crypt. Rooms with different pressure and atmosphere, and rooms that had no gravity. Pits, traps, creatures made of glass, ones made of intestines, all who want to kill Gary. No light, mostly no sound. Just Gary alone in the most foreign lands, in the blackest dark, with no hope, mentally dealing with things no human should or probably can. Gary's proverbial cheese slowly slides off its cracker. He knows he is losing it. He doesn't care; he is embracing the crazy. He is internalizing it and using it as a weapon. If he is crazy, maybe nothing crazy will upset him anymore. Gary finally cracks. 

Walking to Aldebaran's chapters swing back and forth between the beginning and middle of the story and show the changes in Gary's mental state. His altered state is funny, he cracks jokes constantly, and it is calming. You might think that his situation is funny. Until you remember the context of what he is living through. I liked how Tchaikovsky handled this. Instead of powering through Walking to Aldebaran from beginning to end, offsetting the chapters adds to the narrative's wobbliness. Gary is off his damn rocker, and so is the way the story is being told. 

The ending of the story is terrifying. It is in line with how Gary progresses mentally, but the way that Tchaikovsky wrote it made it all the scarier. 

Walking to Aldebaran is a fine example of Adrian Tchaikovsky and why he is becoming such a force in Science Fiction/Horror/Fantasy writing. It is examples like this and how he can pack so much terror into such a short story that shows his skill—the story clocks in around 130 pages. Also, I recommend listening to this on audio. I had the fortune of listening to this and reading it simultaneously, and Tchaikovsky does the voice for it and does it well. I recommend it, and I know many readers looking for a little horror flavored science fiction would enjoy it. 

4.5 stars, Metaphorosis Reviews

Summary:
One member of an team assigned to explore an anomalous portal on the fringes of the solar system finds himself walking an endless labyrinth. He's surviving, but changed in ways he didn't anticipate or welcome.

Review:
I miss the days of ubiquitous bookstores – where you could walk the aisles and spot good books by author, publisher, and cover, and the only filter was the bookstore's purchasing manager, who decided what to buy. (Some such stores do still exist, of course, largely deserted by patrons like me who want e-books, but that's a different story.) The point is that, for those of us who distrust popularity and 5 star reviews, browsing is difficult these days. NetGalley, surprisingly, helps me fill the gap. That's where I picked up Walking to Aldebaran.

I'd heard Adrian Tchaikovsky's name, but had disregarded it as the latest fan favorite. That may be true, but I was pleased to find there's a good reason behind it. The piece had a bit of a rough start – the idea (alien labyrinth) is a familiar one; the tone (slightly sardonic, with asides) didn't really work for me – and a couple of chapters in, I found myself pessimistic about enjoying the book. By chapter three, however, that had already started to turn around.

The book is intelligently written – the character (as he himself notes) doesn't do the stupid things we all hate – and the humor (once you get past the asides) is sardonic and nicely balanced. The book overall is carefully constructed, though Tchaikovsky could have found a better balance of hints, foreshadowing, etc. Still, at the end, he doesn't take the easy way out, and while the resolution doesn't feel quite complete, it's intriguing and fair. Plus, he introduced me to a word (anagnorisis) that I really should have known, but didn't.

Overall, after a somewhat rocky start, this was a pleasant surprise – not just for the book itself, but because Tchaikovsky is clearly an author I'll need to investigate more.

I received a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Gary Rendell,astronaut,stuck in a strange object with a vast network of tunnels in space, trying to find his other crew members after being separated. This book flips back and forth to Gary exploring these tunnels to Gary pre-tunnel experience. The humor in this book is excellent! Gary's experiences eating the local “cuisine” is not to be missed. As he's going along in the cold, dark tunnels, he becomes lonely and starts talking to an imaginary friend “Toto” or as I felt, he was talking directly to me-the reader. Along his journeys he meets several different type of alien species, some of them are nice and some not. This is my first book by Tchaikovsky and won't be the last. Excellent writing that kept you interested in what was around the next corner for Gary. And oh, that twisty ending-loved it!

This was pretty much designed to hit all my buttons - a horror/SF mash up, with a giant mysterious and ancient alien artifact at its core? Oh yes please. It's not hard to extract strands of it's DNA - think Rendezvous With Rama, Cube, Diamond Dogs (Alastair Reynolds, not David Bowie), Alien, Rogue Moon - but then again, some of those works are my very favourites, and this can stand with them. Fats paced and just the right length, this is one to enjoy and then to savour on rereading.

“Most of the Crypts are dark as midnight; a horror of endless cold corridors cut in the stone where every step could see you into a trap, a drop, some peculiarity of physics, a reversal of gravity, a sudden drop in pressure or a toxic aerome.”

Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC!

I've heard nothing but good things about Tchaikovsky. It was a good book, couldn't really put it down after the first third of it. It's really easy to read, the pace is great, it's also funny and chilling. I had a really good time reading it so I ended up rounding to 4 stars.

An astronaut, Gary Rendell, is part of the team in charge of exploring the Crypts, a.k.a the Artefact, a.k.a. the Frog God, a planet-size alien structure found past Pluto. The story is told from Gary's point of view using two different timelines which loosely converge at some point. It's a story about hope and human nature, but it's also a story about losing what makes us human. Mind blown!