Flights of Fantasy discussion

The March 2020 Comedy book of the month is Walking to Aldebaran by Adrian Tchaikovsky.

Chilling story of a lost astronaut on an alien artefact from Arthur C. Clarke award-winning Adrian Tchaikovsky

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 sent out to explore 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.

This book has been in print since 2019 so there should be many different editions available. Please check your local library and/or favorite book retailer.

Please remember to use spoiler tags < spoiler > < /spoiler > when discussing.

YAY! I'm excited. I read this last year and really loved it. :D

I'm in on this one. I've never read a Tchaikovsky before, and I'm looking forward to it!

Yay! This was my first, and so far my only, but I definitely want to read more.

I'll be starting today. I've read a few books by this author and I've really liked his work, so I'm excited! :)

Welcome to the party, Twila! I've already read this so I'm going to squeeze in a couple other books before I start this one. I hope everyone likes it though!

I've read the first chapter and it was great! But I thought this was supposed to be a horror novella?? The main character is hilarious! What a nice surprise. It's giving me a little of The Martian vibes and I'm loving that.

Twila wrote: "I've read the first chapter and it was great! But I thought this was supposed to be a horror novella?? The main character is hilarious! What a nice surprise. It's giving me a little of The Martian ..."


I'm sort of the opposite. I'm sitting here thinking it was meant to be funny...

About 4 chapters in, I think.

colleen the convivial curmudgeon wrote: "Twila wrote: "I've read the first chapter and it was great! But I thought this was supposed to be a horror novella?? The main character is hilarious! What a nice surprise. It's giving me a little o..."

Contrary!

I'm in the middle of chapter 3, and am enjoying it a lot. I'm partial to underground labyrinths in fiction, and the descriptions remind me somewhat of Annihilation (the novel)--weird, absorbing, with a hint of the unsettling. There have been some chuckle-worthy bits, like our protag's imaginings about what the internal structure of the (view spoiler)[egg bots (hide spoiler)] might be like, but so far I wouldn't call it a comedy.

Yeah, I guess "comedy" isn't... quite right, but I did find a lot of it to be humorous. In the same way as The Martian was not really a "comedy" but was funny.

It's quirky, I'll definitely give it that.

I think I'm going to be starting tomorrow - or Wed. I have a meeting tonight and D&D on Tues.

Done.

I was mildly amused at parts, but never found it actually funny.

The story itself was ok? Writing was fine. I just didn't care for it.

Sigh.

I'm sorry :(

I can see the comparison to The Martian in the overall tone, but the writing never made me laugh out loud as it did in The Martian.

I'm thinking maybe the group picks just aren't my thing anymore.

Ala wrote: "I'm thinking maybe the group picks just aren't my thing anymore."

Apparently they aren't mine either. Booo!

I'm liking it! Liking it better than The Martian, truth be told.

I never read The Martian...

But, otherwise, I'm on Ala's bus.

About at the 3/4 mark. The further it goes along, it feels even more like Annihilation, with a breezier, more humorous point of view. More details are spoiler-y:

(view spoiler)[It isn't quite like Annihilation, in that there's always the feeling that the Frog God is explicable, even if science doesn't have the means to explain it at the present time. ("currently inexplicable, but explicable in the long term" may be true of Area X in the rest of the Southern Reach trilogy, which I haven't yet read)

Other than that, the main parallel for me is Mark Watney Gary Rendell becoming more and more a product of his present environment without realizing it. There's an underlying theme (imo) that language and communication with other humans is part of what makes us able to be human, and Gary is gradually losing that ability both from losing contact with other humans, and from whatever modifications (not gone into detail yet) that have been done to his body, that make him able to survive Frog God as a naked ape. (hide spoiler)]

I have a feeling I know how this ends, in very general terms, but we'll see!

I agree on the Annihilation vibe, and also on the not having continued it yet. I didn't much care for it though, whereas I liked this quite a lot.

Ch. 11: (view spoiler)[I didn't x-ray the names Gary saw on the spacesuits of the "goblins," but it can safely be assumed that he ate a couple of his previous Quixote crewmates. (hide spoiler)]

Still, I chuckled. Maybe I'm a bad person.

If you are, then so am I.

Done! I thought it was great. I'm a fairly vocal reader (which I'm sure drives my partner bonkers, sorry J!) and there was a lot of chuckling and "argh!" in the last few chapters of this book.

I wasn't especially fond of The Machine, which came across as a (view spoiler)[Mama ex Machina (hide spoiler)]. But if you're working from the stance of everything being on some level explicable in a SF story, it fits, explaining how in the long term (view spoiler)[Gary became a ravening monster who could survive anything the Frog God threw at him, if not necessarily what humans could (hide spoiler)].

Novella-length was just about perfect for this story. I enjoyed it for its whole length and it ended at just the right place.

Beth: (view spoiler)[Did you get the classical references? (hide spoiler)]

I'm an ignoramus, so probably not. :D Unless you're talking about explicit references like (view spoiler)[the minotaur (hide spoiler)].

Beth wrote: "I'm an ignoramus, so probably not. :D Unless you're talking about explicit references like [spoilers removed]."

(view spoiler)[ Well that's definitely part of it. But mainly it's a sort of retelling of Grendel from Beowulf. (G. Rendell). (hide spoiler)]

Blarrrrrrrgh!! Thanks for letting me know... I think.

LOL Don't worry, I wasn't entirely sure when I read it either. I had the feeling of SOMETHING familiar, but couldn't quite get there until a friend was like "Did you notice...?" And I had a very similar reaction to yours.

So, you know those fantasy books that are sort of like novelizations of D&D campaigns, and they feel like they're more, just, watching the characters do random encounters and less an actual story?

That's how I felt about this. But in space. Without magic.

Like, it was more a show piece for "how weird can Tchaikovsky make the aliens" than anything else.

colleen the convivial curmudgeon wrote: "Like, it was more a show piece for "how weird can Tchaikovsky make the aliens" than anything else."

Hmm... See, to me, I actually thought of it more as Gary's perspective changing than the aliens being "weird".

(view spoiler)[When he encounters the "monster" alien, he's still relatively the same, unchanged, human. But with the passage of time and his changes, both in appetite adaptation and from the Mother Machine, he becomes the monster, and the "aliens" are his fellow crew members that he now sees as annoying little scritchy snacks that he must find and destroy. (hide spoiler)]

I loved this. I did find it pretty funny and while I didn’t get the similarities to (view spoiler)[ Beowulf which I only read in high school and which was forced down my throat by a particularly squat old cow (hide spoiler)] I liked it nevertheless.

I audioed it and it was read by the author whose tone and inflection is a dead ringer for Neal Gaiman which may explain why I loved it so.

Plus, a short read was good for my soul.

Becky wrote: "Hmm... See, to me, I actually thought of it more as Gary's perspective changing than the aliens being "weird"."


Well, yeah, I get that that's probably what it was meant to be... but it was still, like, how "different" could Tchaikovsky make things to show off his imagination, and it didn't really matter, from a writing perspective, what the ultimate cause of the weirdness was so much as "hey, look at the cool things I thought of".

Which made me think of China Miéville. *shudders*

colleen the convivial curmudgeon wrote: "Which made me think of China Miéville. *shudders*"

Well that's just hurtful. O_O

Jokes aside, I get what you're saying... I just didn't feel that way. I really enjoyed it and the writing worked for me. I cannot say the same for Mieville. LOL

Both this and Annihilation were fairly short, and I enjoyed them. I've kind of been avoiding Mieville's "the weird" books for no reason except that the first New Crobuzon book is a huge chonker.

Becky wrote: "Jokes aside, I get what you're saying... I just didn't feel that way. I really enjoyed it and the writing worked for me. I cannot say the same for Mieville. LOL"


But we all love Mieville. Especially Chris.