After NASA went bankrupt in the forties, they had to break up the second International Space Station and drop its pieces in the Pacific Ocean. After that, commercial spaceflight seemed like the only game in town. [loc. 301]
Sally Jansen is the eponymous last astronaut. In 2034, on a mission to Mars, she dealt with a critical failure but caused the death of a fellow astronaut. That was pretty much the end for NASA in terms of crewed missions: but now, years later, a mysterious object has entered the solar system and is slowing down. NASA needs an astronaut, and McAllister nominates Jensen, who's fifty-six and publicity-averse. NASA's misison isn't the only one heading for the object, which is known as 2I: there's also a mission run by a private company, KSpace. (Nothing at all like SpaceX, honest.) When Jansen, with her small crew -- military pilot Hawkins, zenobiologist Parminder Rao, and astrophysicist Sunny Stevens, late of KSpace, who first spotted 2I -- reaches the incomer, it's to find that the KSpace team have already entered the huge cylinder. (Echoes here of Rendezvous with Rama.) Hansen is determined to save them, but neither she nor any of her crew are prepared for what lies within 2I.
The premise is that 2I is an object of the same kind as 'Oumuamua, though rather larger. It's a massive cylinder with an interior that brings to mind films such as Alien: the second half of The Last Astronaut is very much horror-coded. They travel a long way, in the dark, in an utterly alien environment. Only the bright orange ropes, flags and memory sticks of the KSpace crew guide them. (The memory sticks are a handy way of telling a different side of the story, but they felt rather clunky, in plot terms.)
This was fast-paced and yet overlong. Wellington's prose is readable and flows well (he's also capable of great lyricism, as evidenced by one passage near the end of the novel) and he focusses on the two female crew members. There's some humour, too, in the juvenile antics of the KSpace mission. Despite that, I didn't really engage with any of the characters or their predicament. Good solid hard SF, with mention of Ann Leckie as well as Clarke and Asimov; an interesting premise; a woman in her fifties as protagonist; an unexpectedly upbeat ending: but maybe I am just not as much of a hard SF reader as once I was.
Still not sure why it was shortlisted for the Arthur C Clarke Award in 2020 ...
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