Walking to Aldebaran, by Adrian Tchaikovsky, reviewed

By @SimonCocking review of Walking to Aldebaran by Adrian Tchaikovsky

I’M LOST. I’M SCARED. AND THERE’S SOMETHING HORRIBLE IN HERE.

My name is Gary Rendell. I’m an astronaut. When they asked me as a kid what I wanted to be when I grew up, I said, “astronaut, please!” I dreamed astronaut, I worked astronaut, I studied astronaut. I got lucky; when a probe exploring the Oort Cloud found a strange alien rock and an international team of scientists was put together to go and look at it, I made the draw.

I got even luckier. When disaster hit and our team was split up, scattered through the endless cold tunnels, I somehow survived.

Now I’m lost, and alone, and scared, and there’s something horrible in here.

Lucky me.

Lucky, lucky, lucky.

A new standalone novella by the Arthur C Clarke Award-winning author of Children of Time.

Walking to Aldebaran, by Adrian Tchaikovsky, reviewed

You don’t come across many novellas these days, so it is an interesting position to even read one. The length works well for this story. In some ways you could almost say it is a shaggy dog story. In other hands it could be a horror story, but the narrator is too wry and self knowing for this to ever become horrific, even as he recounts events that actually were barbaric. The film Alien is actually referenced, so the narrator is clear about the territory he has landed himself in. Especially, from the very beginning he lets you know that the rest of his crew are already dead.

From there the book follows a wandering, literally and episodically, path. Meaning gradually unfolds, with a few surprises along the way. The story is much more about being up there, out there, potentially abandoned and to never see home or even fellow humans again.

Gary Rendell, our hero, or is he, gradually reveals more of what happened and his own, unchosen role in all of this. Global earth politics are presented as being as messy and un-united as we know them to currently be in our own times. We enjoyed reading it, and subsequently several other generations in the house also picked it up and enjoyed his laconic style.

See reviews of other books by  Adrian Tchaikovsky here, and also our interview with him here too.

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