Walking to Aldebaran (Adrian Tchaikovsky)

Walking to Aldebaran
Adrian Tchaikovsky
Tantor Audio
Fiction, Humor/Sci-Fi
***+ (Okay/Good)

DESCRIPTION: Gary Rendell always wanted to be an astronaut. Who wouldn't? It looked like great fun, flying in rocket ships and exploring the solar system, so much more exciting than accounting or running the train.
Nobody mentioned the downsides to the job: the political squabbling over mission directives, the tedium of long trips... the bits about being lost and alone, fighting monsters and traps concocted by unknowable intelligences that can twist universal rules like so much taffy, and eating bits of dead alien to survive.
Gary Rendell had the misfortune to become an astronaut just when Earth makes an astonishing discovery: an impossible artifact, clearly the work of some unimaginable alien intellect, out on the fringes of the solar system, one that does very strange things to space probes and defies just about every known law of physics and probably more than a few unknown laws as well. Being chosen for the manned exploration mission should've been a dream come true. Only the mission goes awry almost from the start, leaving Gary lost and alone. Now he wanders through the endless halls of a place he has dubbed the Crypts, scavenging what sustenance he can, talking to an imaginary companion to try to cling to some vestige of sanity.
Gary finds wonders beyond human comprehension. Gary finds aliens, living and dead and maybe somewhere in between. Gary finds insidious traps and places where ordinary laws take unexpected vacations. What Gary hasn't yet found is any sign of his fellow astronauts... or any sign of the way back home.

REVIEW: Another audiobook to help overtime seem mildly less tedious, Walking to Aldebaran starts sharp and fast, laced with clever, if sometimes dark, deadpan humor in the vein of Douglas Adams. In the tradition of Arthur Dent, he's a man who never asked to be caught up in great and dangerous adventures beyond Earth, and haplessly does the best he can when confronted with impossible situations. By the time we join him, his mental state is already not the greatest - hence his narration to the imaginary companion "Toto," the listener/reader - and it only deteriorates through the story as the artifact seemingly conspires to push him beyond the brink. And what is the artifact? Even after months lost in its bowels, Gary can offer no definitive answer in this cautionary tale whose moral is that just because a thing is there, that doesn't mean we should go poking it, or that it was put there for us. Tchaikovsky's delivery helps up the amusement factor on Gary's often-hilarious asides and observations, and I snickered more than once. Then I reached the ending, and the final twists that, while they did fit the overall narrative (and weren't just out of the blue) and had a certain nod to classic literature, left a sour taste in my mouth that cost it a half-star. Aside from that, though, it's a delightfully twisted little story of an astronaut's dream of space exploration gone horribly wrong.

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