Being an astronaut – it isn’t all tiny balls of ice cream and zero gravity bouncing.
Plot: Gary has wanted to be an astronaut all his life. And not only did he become an astronaut, his first trip was to be part of a team investigating potential evidence of alien life. This is the stuff dreams are made of. Only that dream turned into a nightmare as they arrived and disaster starts taking them out. Gary is now alone, with no provision, and no sense of how to get back to Earth. Time to find out of aliens taste like chicken. Shenanigans ensue.
If you are sci-fi or Tchaikovsky curious but aren’t emotionally ready to commit to a big novel (or as it tends to be, a series of big novels), I’d say this is where you should start. This novella (wonderfully narrated by the author if you’re an audiobook fan) is like a condensed version of everything Tchaikovsky excels at and a distillation of his style. If you don’t like this, I don’t know that you’d like his other work, but if you do, boy have you found yourself a new treasure trove to dig into.
Gary is not what I think of when I think of an astronaut. I imagine this is in part due to the fact that the story takes place a minute in the future, and maybe it’s just easier for a regular person to become an astronaut. Gary is also unlike your typical science fiction hero, because he’s from here, and so he knows all the same science fiction you do. So every situation he encounters, even as you’re thinking “oh this is some Alien type bullshit” he’s saying the same thing, and more often than not trying something that either would have been my first or second go to. It makes for a surprisingly grounded entry in science-fiction horror, which this definitely qualifies as. It also has the requisite Tchaikovsky twists, and no, I don’t think you’ll see it coming (but it’ll seem obvious in retrospect).