THE LAST ASTRONAUT / AUTHOR: DAVID WELLINGTON / PUBLISHER: ORBIT / RELEASE DATE: 23RD JULY
David Wellington’s deep space opus will appeal to readers who fancy a bit of Event Horizon-style body horror laced into a story which broadly dances around the style of recent popular space adventure/first contact films like The Martian, Arrival and Nolan’s pompous Interstellar.
In 2035, the NASA space program is brought to a disastrous conclusion when a crewed mission to Mars ends in disaster. Mission Commander Sally Jensen is held responsible for the death of fellow astronaut Blaine Wilson. Space travel becomes largely the domain of profit-making commercial organisations, and interplanetary exploration is no longer on anyone’s radar. Jensen herself slinks into obscurity.
Decades later, eager-beaver private sector scientist Sunny Stevens defects to NASA, bringing with him his discovery of a strange object out in space moving towards Earth, and clearly moving under its own power as it’s starting to slow down. NASA quickly scrambles to de-mothball its half-forgotten space technology and enlists a crew to explore the silent, unresponsive object, to uncover its secrets and, if possible, to make contact with any alien life-forms which may be aboard.
The only astronaut experienced enough to command such a mission is the grizzled Sally Jensen who is press-ganged into joining an expedition which will force her to confront her own demons and which might just offer her a chance at redemption years after the disaster that ended her career. But NASA’s Orion mission isn’t the only one en route to the mysterious phenomenon named ‘21’; a private sector spaceship has been sent on a similar mission and, when Jensen and her crew arrive, it becomes clear that they’ve been beaten to the prize. But the rival ship is unresponsive, and Jensen and her team discover that its crew has taken a trip deep inside the bowels of the intruder, leading Jensen to seize the opportunity to put right the wrongs that have haunted her for two decades.
The Last Astronaut is a refreshingly accessible space opera which barrels along, and Wellington layers on the tension and drama as the tiny Orion capsule approaches the great vaguely cigar-shaped hulk of the alien artefact which stubbornly refuses any and all attempts at establishing communication. Determined to rescue the missing rival team, Jensen, accompanied by Stevens, gains access to the leviathan by means of what appears to be an airlock. What they find inside has disturbing and often terrifying repercussions not only for the expedition but also, potentially, the entire human race. 21 isn’t a machine; it’s far more… and far worse.
The pitch-black environment deep inside 21 is truly alien – no little green men in silver spacesuits brandishing deadly ray-guns here, thankfully – and Wellington’s taut, evocative writing creates a real sense of uneasy unearthliness as the team encounter a form of life way beyond human comprehension in a stifling environment they can’t begin to understand.
It’s gripping, immersive stuff, and if we’ve any quibbles then we could have done without one particular narrative device that tends to diffuse some of the story’s tension, and the final few chapters, as the situation starts to deteriorate significantly, are particularly dense stuff conceptually and tend to slow the story’s pace down before a breakneck rush to the climax. Minor concerns, though, in an epic story of first contact which is as inventive, meticulously-researched and compellingly-written as it is haunting and occasionally disturbing.
