2019/46: Walking to Aldebaran -- Adrian Tchaikovsky

I’ve met aliens, sentient aliens. I’ve seen spaceships. I’ve breathed the venomous air of a planet on the other side of the universe. I’m probably the most travelled human being in the history of human beings travelling, if indeed that category is still the appropriate one with which to conjure me. I just didn’t think there would be so much getting lost and eating corpses. [loc. 64]

Gary Rendell is lost and alone, wandering the lightless passages of an alien artefact known as the Crypts. He was part of an expedition from Earth, but -- stupidly -- they split up. Now he knows much more about the Crypts than anyone else: but he's not the man he was when the Quixote, with its international crew, landed in one eyesocket of the Crypts (which happen to look remarkably like the face of a giant frog).

Gary is desperate to rejoin his companions, to find a way out, to find food and light (the novella opens with him finding an alien corpse that provides both of the latter). However, some pretty unpleasant things have happened to him since he lost contact with the others, and perhaps he won't be able to go home after all.

This was great fun, darkly humorous and poignant and occasionally very disturbing. There's more than a 'whiff of the monstrous', and I quickly learnt not to trust Gary's narrative. Walking to Aldebaran has a Golden Age feel to it, though back then it'd have been a short story: I think novella-length does work, though, for ramping up the tension, the pathos and the universe-building.

I received Walking to Aldebaran from NetGalley in exchange for this honest review.