I'm not usually a fan of this type of science fiction but I enjoyed reading this book and recommend it to any science fiction fan

This is written in a present tense monologue, detailing the experiences of a man lost in a place on Mars he calls The Crypts. His goal is to survive and hopefully to find other humans.

I have to admit that the writing style didn't engage me. There were humorous moments and one liners, but it wasn't enough to make me want to follow the main character through endless tunnels with nothing really happening much of the time.

Other reviewers seem to love it, so I'm glad it's not the first thing I've read by this author.

‘I think I used to talk to you because it kept me sane, but we’ve rather moved past that stage in the relationship, don’t you think?’

Walking to Aldebaran was a novella I simply could not put down – I devoured it in one sitting! I think part of what makes this such a compelling read is the narrative voice of our main character Gary Rendell. As he roams the desolate and scary passageways of the mysterious crypt you are utterly drawn in by his dry sarcasm, stream of conscious story telling and cultural references. He is such a rounded and interesting character that it made the story a joy to read. I liked how the plot is told in alternating chapters between the past (still being described by Gary) and present. I enjoyed that there was some backstory given to give you a snippet of what caused the mission to be started and the civil unrest back home. I loved the progression of the plot which built slight unease before knocking you dead with a twist I didn’t see coming.

It’s always hard to write 5 star reviews because I just want you to stop reading what I have to say and go read Walking to Aldebaran – you wont regret it! Thank you to NetGalley & Rebellion – Solaris for a copy of the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

This review is part of a larger post about all books I read in the month

I decided to switch it up and read some science fiction after a glut of fantasy and urban fantasy. I turned to the short story Walking to Aldebaran by Adrian Tchaikovsky. The story is told by astronaut Gary Rendell. Gary has gone on a mission across the stars to investigate an alien structure. Disaster strikes not long after landing and Gary is alone and lost inside the structure with something or somethings lurking around every corner.

I enjoyed this short story mainly for the witty way in which Tchaikovsky tells the story through Gary's POV. The story switches between the present and the past as Gary recounts how he has ended up in his unique predicament while he wanders through the endless dark tunnels trying to survive. The story is rather light hearted because of Gary's witty story telling until the very end when it gets rather much darker. If you are a science fiction fan and want something that doesn't take ages to read then give Walking to Aldebaran a go.

Scientists were baffled when the Kaveney probe, sent to investigate a new planet in the Kuiper belt, turned up nothing. The math checked out. There was definitely something out there yanking gravity’s chain, and the prime candidate was one of those elusive far-out planets, yet the probe’s instruments showed nothing, nada, zilch. A project years in the making for nothing more than a little comet dust and a cosmic whiff of disappointment. But then the probe began to send back pictures all on its own, and what they revealed was even more baffling than all that nothingness. They appeared to show some kind of alien artefact. Further testing was inconclusive—the results were maddeningly odd and confusing, but the dye had been cast. Human curiosity is insatiable, so there was little doubt someone would assemble a team to go and check things out first-hand. The only question was could we get our collective shit together long enough to make it a coordinated, multinational effort?

Gary Rendell was one of the lucky few chosen for the mission. But then Gary had always been lucky in life. Lucky to be born in this new Age of Discovery; lucky to be able to pursue his dreams; lucky to be part of the advanced mission team that breached the artefact; lucky to have his name etched in the history books for achieving first contact; lucky to survive the disaster that ambushed his team; lucky to stumble across the Mother Machine (spoiler alert!); lucky to be lost and alone and starving, wandering the nightmarish halls of a crypt, where terrifying monsters lurk in the dark and the laws of physics took a vacation. Lucky. So very lucky.

Heh, books like this are what keep me returning to the science fiction section of my library time and time again. Gary’s snarky first-person account was an excellent, highly immersive, escapist adventure. With chapters that alternated between the discovery of the artefact and subsequent mission to his hilariously horrifying misadventures through the Crypt—we’re not in Kansas anymore, Toto! The story was short enough to be read in a single sitting but I forced myself to set it aside a few times to prolong the experience and savor that delicious twist which brought to mind the old adage: be careful what you wish for because you just might get it!

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<i>This novella was a welcome addition to my Goldilocks Zone shelf, so thank you NetGalley for providing me an ARC in exchange for an honest review.</i>

Yet another unusual take on sci-fi from Tchaikovsky, and we’ll up to his usual standard. The slow reveal of the protagonist’s transformation was quite shocking and truly alien in feel. Excellent!

Space horror novella. When humanity finds an alien artifact beyond Pluto, the expedition to explore it goes very badly indeed; a surviving astronaut is deeply altered both physically and mentally. Appropriately creepy and much more horror-focused than Pohl’s Gateway to which it has some bare bones plot similarities.

(A much shorter review than usual, since I have broken my left elbow and am typing with one hand in a cast.)

Not a particularly original story or even mash-up of tropes. Walking to Aldebaran piggy-backs on that time-honoured sub-genre of Big Dumb Object stories. Lots of cool ideas and set pieces from Adrian Tchaikovsky, but very little that is surprising or truly interesting above and beyond the skill of the writing style itself. Thanks to NetGalley and Rebellion for the eARC.

Gary Rendell is your average everyman sci-fi protagonist: British, presumably white, with just the required amount of snark for a stranded astronaut. (Comparisons to The Martian are inevitable, I suppose; I see the similarities, especially in the characterization of the protagonists, but the stories themselves diverge markedly in plot.) This is one of my major points of criticism: I’m just bored of stories about smart, snarky white guys abandoned on alien worlds/alien devices/whatever. I liked it in Farscape (and at least he had companions). But we’ve seen this story so many times before. What, exactly, is new here?

The setting is … fine. Arguably this is a science-fiction horror novella, because the setting and plot are both creepy and existentially threatening. I do enjoy mind-twisty reminders that aliens and their designs would probably be so different from ours—so alien—as to be unfathomable. This is where I point out that I’m not criticizing Tchaikovsky’s skill as a writer or even his imagination.

Similarly, the twist is executed fine but not all that surprising and, again, not all that original. Seen it before.

It just seems like Walking to Aldebaran is one of those stories that got written because the author had the story in his head. That’s fine. Just because a story is worth writing, however, doesn’t automatically imply that it’s worth reading though. You can enjoy this story for its execution, but overall I just didn’t find it very stimulating.

Creative Commons BY-NC License

In our not too-distant future, astronaut Gary Rendell is part of an international team sent to explore the mysterious object discovered at the edge of our solar system. Instrument readings show it should be the size of a planet; probes send back images of something far smaller but which always presents the same face to the camera even as it tries to orbit.

Gary considered himself lucky. Lucky to be living his childhood dream to be an astronaut, lucky to make the selection for the first mission that might prove alien life. Lucky indeed to survive the cluster-f that said mission turns in to. Lucky… yeah.

There is something quite familiar about a lot of the story: Gary walks the mysterious Crypts, encountering dangers and fellow travellers. I loved that there’s an alien encounter that never manages proper communication, but ends up being co-operative anyway – we don’t see enough of that in fiction, where it’s usual ray-guns blazing.

I could have read this short novella in one sitting, quite frankly. It’s dark and twisty, and a mix of sci-fi and horror. There’s also a huge ‘gotcha!’ that I didn’t quite see coming… I mean, I thought something towards the three-quarters mark, but then… Heh.

Very, very well written. I really should read more of Adrian Tchaikovsky’s work! Recommended.

This fast-read book is a good science-fiction book that I had a great pleasure exploring. The only thing that messed up a little bit my reading is the end of the book that I did not expected to be this way. Still, a good book from Tchaikovsky!

Astronaut Gary Rendell has hit the jackpot: he’s one of the select few chosen to explore the most incredible discovery in human history. Near Pluto’s orbit, a massive object has suddenly appeared and it’s clearly been created by an intelligent life form. Probes are sent out to investigate but they send back bizarre results so its decided that a manned expedition needs to be sent out.

Yeah… things do not go well.

Despite being about a pretty bleak situation, the subject matter was approached in a light and easy to read way. It was seriously funny. It was also quite harrowing and gruesome, but I was still chuckling aloud through most of it. Adrian Tchaikovsky is an author I have been meaning to read for awhile so this standalone novella seemed like a great introduction to his works. If Walking to Aldebaran is anything to go by, Tchaikovsky is not only a talented writer but he’s a humourous one to boot. Even when horrendous things were happening, the author could find a way to thoroughly describe it all whilst still being amusing. Take this for example:

“I remember us turning to each other, clumsy in our suits like a pair of comedy puppets waving our arms and panicking at each other. We had not been trained for this, nobody had.”

Or this:

“And sometimes an outlet for your frustration comes along and sometimes that outlet is a gigantic worm monster, and you just go for it.”

Whilst reading, I was reminded of one of my favorite books of all time, Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke. Soon though, this turned into At the Mountains of Madness by H.P. Lovecraft with a dose of The Martian thrown in. Gary Rendell made me laugh almost as much as Mark Watney did. Other comparisons can be made, but to do so would give away the twist at the end and it’s one killer of a twist.

Speaking of the end, I would have liked to find out what was going on with the rest of the crew back on the spaceship from their point of view. Or to know more about the mysteries of the mysterious artifact that were left unexplained. However, this was a short book and what it did have was done well. Plus, much like Gary pointed out, to really think about everything he was doing and experiencing would probably break even the strongest of minds: “But that way madness lies.”

^ btw that quote is definitely going on my tombstone.

I’m so glad I was given a chance to read this. The world building and humor in this novella are what really set it apart. Considering its length, it’s actually really impressive how fully fleshed out the book was. You could read it in a day but still feel like you read a full length novel. I suppose sometimes less really is more.

Side note: Aldebaran is a red giant star in the constellation Taurus. From the other reviews I’ve seen, I’m not the only nerd who kept reading it as Alderaan (as in the home planet of Princess Leia). Just to clarify- Gary Rendell did not cross over into the Star Wars universe. I think.

This was a very original novella with a fantastic narrator. The twist was great and overall enjoyed it a lot!

This is my third book by Tachikovky and I'm going to be reading much more for sure!

Walking to Aldebaran is a sci-fi novella from Adrian Tchaikovsky, whose other sci-fi works, including the seminal Children of Time have a very strong reputation. This one is an intriguing blend of stone cold horror, a well-voiced, convincingly characterised protagonist, and some Big Ideas which I’d like to see looked into a little more.

So, lets talk about the world. It’s a rock. An inhospitable rock, floating in a less-than salubrious neighbourhood of the solar system. A rock without much going for it at all. Except that once you’ve walked into the hoes in this rock, once you’ve left behind the world you know – there are rooms. Some of them are lethal. Some of them are decrepit. Some are filled with treasures. It’s like a lucky dip, where half the prizes are bear traps. And why would you want to go in there? Because some of these chambers empty out into somewhere else. You can walk a day or two through a rock that wasn’t two days across when you entered it, dodging horrifying creatures and environmental hazards – and come out in Alpha Centauri. Or…somewhere else, anyway. But the place is a maze, and a puzzle, and it’s not at all unlikely to stick something sharp in your ribcage. It also has a penchant for darkness, for tunnels you want to creep along very carefully, in case you run into something with more teeth and tentacles than thumbs. And for darkness, because if what you’re likely to see is teeth and tentacles, why would you want to.

All of this is realised in the protagonist’s monologue, a person who’s been trapped in this somewhat-deadly environment for a while. Their chatty, colloquial style overlays the bedrock tunnels, the sinuous tentacles, the bloodied claws, the necessary blood and murder and isolation and death with a folksy charm that manages to both lighten and accentuate the mood of creeping horror.

This is not a place for people. It’s a wilderness, with a razor under every rock, and a rattlesnake under every razor. The quiet, uncaring lethality is evoked with precision, and you can’t deny the emotional impact – the creeping horror, the disgust and terror that moves inexorably from the page to the reader.
Speaking of disgust and terror – the protagonist is our voice, our eyes in an absolute darkness. He is Gary, a human astronaut, from a mission dragged halfway across the solar system to investigate this rock that leads to elsewhere. And he is alone. As the text progresses, we discover more of the context around his isolation, about how Gary ended up wandering the halls. In the meantime, his voice is relentlessly, worryingly calm. It digs at the past with forensic razors, and it approaches the present with concern and a blend of enthusiasm and fatigue which is worryingly familiar. Gary is tired. Gary has been walking for a long time. Gary wants to see other people again, to see something other than the rock again. And we see some of the past with Gary, in his memory – in the mission to the rock, in the way that people interact with him then, in the stories he tells of friends and antagonists. At the same time, there’s a slow, crawling sense that Gary is telling a story, in a place where any mis-step can be monstrous, in order to stay sane. There are changes, movements in the dark. The reader is following their narrator down a rabbit-hole of terror and transition. Gary in the world is a person, a person you’d be more than happy to take out to dinner -a hero. Gary in the rock is, perhaps, something else. There’s a sublime artistry to the prose, making Gary at once sympathetic and troubling; the reader can feel his pain and loneliness and despair, and the madness creeping along at the edge of vision. We can see the golden idol, and we can see the feet of clay. This is Gary’s story, and we’re along for the ride – and for that, it feels real – often horrifyingly so.

The plot? Well, it’s the story of Gary trying to find his way home. Of walking through fire and water to find his people. Of defeating death-traps, and making friends (or making enemies). It’s the tory of how the walk changes Gary, how it takes what he wants and what he expects, and who he is, and gets inside him, changes his perspective. It’s a story of change, of the horrors and wonders of exploration and the horrors and wonders of humanity. There’s a lot there – the normal, the cold coffee and banter between astronauts on a mission, the strange - the crushing rocks and strange entities beneath the earth – and the liminal barrier between the two, as Gary tries to find his way home.

Is it any good? Oh my yes. It’s sharp, thoughtful and tightly plotted. The dialogue is pitch-perfect and the story will have you hanging on every word. It’s a clever story, too, with some high-concept ideas to play with which will reward curiosity. And it’s a multi-layered character-piece, in a story which demands character from both those in the story and those reading it. It’s a great story, and one I thoroughly recommend picking up.

Maybe this book was lost in translation for me personally. I was really looking forward to it, and I was really disappointed. It just felt disjointed, confusing, all a bit random, and then it just ended.

I didn't get it. Sorry, my thanks for the copy though.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

This is SF horror of a very popular kind. You know all the movies about someone who goes very far out into the solar system and finds something horrible and in fact partly it’s them that’s horrible? And there are incomprehensible alien things and lots of blood and sometimes blood spraying out into vacuum? I wouldn’t be surprised if someone made a movie of this novella, because it is exactly like that, and it is a quite well-done and nasty thing in that direction and they tend to want to look for things like that.

Me personally? I hated it. It is not at all the sort of thing I like, and if it had been longer than a novella I would have stopped reading because my sense of the sunk cost fallacy usually kicks in past novella length. But there’s a difference between hating something and thinking it’s badly done. This is not badly done. Nobody does multilimbed critters like Adrian Tchaikovsky. It’s just…someone else’s cup of tea, I feel quite sure. It’s definitely tea and not sludge! It’s just not for me.

A claustrophobic, spine tingling, little novella of science fiction horror, Walking to Aldebaran was a delightful slice of fiction to pick up and read in an evening. It follows the merging narratives of our lonely protagonist Gary Randall as he wanders lost through a crypt-labyrinth hanging in space out past Pluto and connecting our galaxy to numberless others, showing us the steps that brought him to the present and where they carried him after. For my complete thoughts, check out my video review!

ARC received in exchange for an honest review.

I enjoyed this book.

It took a while to figure out what was going on and as soon as the penny dropped I enjoyed watching the story unfold.

This was quite a blokey book and the main character was a lovely time capsule of a 40 year old British man. The funny parts balanced the icky bits.

Don't read if you like happy endings - do read if you love an inevitable slide into chaos and madness.

Adrian Tchaikovsky – Walking to Aldebaran
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Parent Category: Reviews
Published: 28 May 2019
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Adrian Tchaikovsky – Walking to AldebaranAdrian Tchaikovsky (or, as his mother knows him Adrian Czajkovski – apparently that's not a name to expose UK and US audiences to) is a BFA and Arthur C. Clarke Award-winning author, with the science/magic Shadows of the Apt series to his name (with action and battles scenes LARP tested apparently!) as well as a number of stand-alone novels and shorts, tackling SF with the same gusto as fantasy/entomology. Apparently all this does not make a living, though, and so he's a Legal Executive during the day.

Walking to Aldebaran is a Novella, and the length feels about right for the content and treatment. It follows Gary Rendell, an Astronaut (from Stevenage, he keeps reminding us. Or maybe himself...) lost in 'The Crypts', aka the thing we found out past Neptune. But it's not just there, but a bit everywhere – it seems to connect loads of solar systems, including a substantial number (all?) of inhabited ones. A nice little shortcut, or a trap? Or a bit of both? Either way, he's got separated from his crew mates (we know that some/most of his expedition are dead), and is roaming an endless labyrinth of tunnels, occasionally coming across live or dead aliens, monsters inhabiting these tunnels, and the odd entrance/exit to other worlds. And, of course, the thing at the centre of it all.

Gary tells us that he always wanted to be an Astronaut, but “I just didn't think there would be so much getting lost and eating corpses” he muses, whilst being “huddled in front of a fire that's dying for lack of O2, gnawing on the dessicated chunks of long-dead alien explorer”. Nice. And he indicates that he might have had second thoughts concerning his calling should they have told him what it entails...
Now, if the above sounds rather horrific and dark then this is of course on the one hand correct, given the setting of the story. But there's also a lot of lighter, entertaining bits when he encounters aliens or has his own funny turns, and its all told in a sarcastic tone with Mark Watney-level snarkyness.

This doubly is the case when he weaves in contemporary references including Brexit, contemporary US politics and a short run-down of the history of where these things lead. Not edifying, to no-one's surprise I reckon.
Still, the expedition he came here with was a multinational one, and we get to appreciate the realpolitik of such an endeavour – it's on the one hand realistically complex and beset by politics and continuous change; but on the other it's also hopelessly (I think) overdrawn in the speed of resolution, creation of hardware etc, and entirely under-drawn in term of complexity of such a task. Hard SF it ain't, as you might have figured by now.
But we get a good amount of realistic-sounding astronomy with the background info dumps, explaining Pluto, planet 9, or 10 etc, and of what humanity found out there and how. And of course what it did to the probe we sent, which in turn ensured the international cooperation to send a crewed expedition there – there's nothing like glimpses of non-human-origin space-ships, or random shots of other planets to galvanise at least some political will (and a fair amount of money, I daresay).

The story is told by Gary, as a rambling first-person confessional to an imaginary companion. He calls us Toto. It comes in two distinct threads: present, and history. In the present one we walk with him through the Crypts (remember – dark, monsters, other races, remains of other lost souls/expeditions), in the history part he considers how he, sorry, we! came to be there, why he is alone, and what he encountered in the crypts which changed him and allows him to survive his ordeal.
Adrian's style is a strange and quite fascinating mix of foreshadowing and spilling the beans early, mixed with hedging his bets to have his readers hang on, never mind to occasionally misdirect them – the entire story could be one of Fredric Brown's little tricks.
Also – it's all very Rama, of course, with race-collecting artefact making itself known to developed races with the means to get to it. Except there's more to it, and the unnaturally quick adaptation which Gary undergoes would not gel well with race collection. Nor would the wandering, mixing, dying. And, to spoil that part (hah!) – we never find out what the artefact is for. Because – where's the fun in that?
But if you look past the current/near-future political references and the Martian-grade sarcasm and snark you find yourself looking at a piece of cracking writing which could just as well be a Golden-Era SF story. Or a mirror-image of one, Peter-Watts-does-The-Thing style?

Either way, great stuff, and well worth your time and money!


More Adrian Tchaikovsky

Title: Walking to Aldebaran
Author: Adrian Tchaikovsky
Reviewer: Markus
Reviewer URL: http://thierstein.net
Publisher: Solaris
Publisher URL: http://www.solarisbooks.com
Publication Date: May 2019
Review Date: 190520
ISBN: 9781786181961
Pages: 104
Format: ePub
Topic: Exploration Adventure
Topic: Modification

Thanks to the publisher for the review copy.

Walking to Aldebaran is a short, snappy novella of barely 100 pages which manages to really pack a punch and be all-powerful in such a small space of time. Once again Tchaikovsky shows his masterful storytelling prowess and of course writing an engaging short story is very different from penning full-length speculative fiction. Frequently shorts are severely lacking in characterisation but not here; Tchaikovsky knows exactly how to construct and craft a cast of three-dimensional, interesting characters, an exciting plot with lots of danger and high octane thrills and spills, and a detailed story which travels at a rapid-fire pace. Everything just works so well together.

As always the author knows how to produce epic hard science fiction with lots of intriguing science and technological talk throughout but still remains accessible to those with no knowledge of those topics. Main character, Gary Rendell, provides some sardonic humour which at times is much-needed light relief, especially when towards the end of the book it takes a turn into the horror genre rather unexpectedly and very cleverly. The worldbuilding, suspense and characterisation are incredible for a tiny novella and it's clear Tchaikovsky is one of the best science fiction writers of all time. Many thanks to Solaris for an ARC.

My thanks to Solaris/Rebellion Publishing for an eARC via NetGalley of Adrian Tchaikovsky’s stand-alone SF novella, ‘Walking to Aldebaran’, in exchange for an honest review.

This is a gem of a story that packs so much into its modest length that I was left stunned by Tchaikovsky’s storytelling skills and craftsmanship.

Gary Rendell tells us that he had always dreamt of becoming an astronaut and that dream had come true after what appears to be an alien artefact is discovered beyond Pluto. Gary is part of an international team sent to investigate. Shades of 2001: a Space Odyssey’!

The tale opens with Gary wandering around the tunnels of the artefact dubbed as the Crypts. He is lost, alone and something horrible is in the tunnels with him. Gary engages in an ongoing inner dialogue with himself (he dubs his inner audience Toto). While having various adventures he reveals the details of the mission and how he came to be separated from his crew mates.

This is only the second book that I have read by Tchaikovsky and I find myself deeply impressed by his ability to create a sense of real alienness as well as to write hard science fiction that emphasises the science and yet remains accessible.

There was some quite visceral horror and yet also a great deal of humour in Gary’s quips and snarky comments. He even gives us spoiler alerts.

I laughed out loud so many times including when he advises that he and his fellow astronauts were prepared and not stupid: “We weren’t like those dumbass astronauts you see in films, who take their helmets off or bend obligingly low to investigate the killer monster alien eggs.”

I loved it! Very highly recommended.