Review | The Last Astronaut

Title: The Last Astronaut by David Wellington

Date Published: July 23, 2019

Dates Read: March 13-28, 2021

Current Goodreads Rating: 3.6/5

Thanks to my husband I have a new appreciation for space and the sci-fi genre as a whole. We've watched a lot of near future space travel during the last year of the pandemic (you might say that we're trying to escape our current reality stuck on planet Earth, but I'm not a therapist so I'm not even going to open that can of worms). We've recently started watching For All Mankind which tells the story of the space race if Russia had won originally in the 1960s. When I found this book on the shelves of my library I thought I would give it a chance because in the antithesis of For All Mankind this book looks to the future of space travel and what would happen after a tragedy.

Ok, so what happens? Astronaut Sally Jansen was NASA's leading astronaut until the mission to Mars she was leading ended in disaster. Now she's struggling to make amends. Several decades after the disaster and the end of NASA's manned flights a mass is identified coming ever closer to our planet and it can control its acceleration and deceleration. As the NASA's only remaining trained astronaut, Sally is called upon to investigate this new entity and see if they really do come in peace. However, as Sally and her team learn more about the entity it becomes incredibly clear that this isn't a spaceship full of little green men. It's much, much worse.

Ok, so what did I think? I couldn't help but think of another book I had read last year; Rendezvous with Rama. Both stories are similar in that an unidentified flying object enters our solar system and a team of astronauts are sent into space to meet it halfway. Throughout the course of both books both teams are able to enter into the approaching ships and learn a little bit more about the aliens inside. However, Last Astronaut had a distinctly more horrific feeling to it. While Rendezvous ended with no casualties and a general feeling of being a small fish in the ocean of the galaxy, Last Astronaut almost immediately launches you into the action. The team NASA gathers is quickly thrown into space and into the belly of the beast. In a scene straight out of Cloverfield, one of the scientists on board is immediately injured while exploring the ship and, for lack of a better word, literally explodes while the doctor on board attempts to patch him up. It's a traumatic scene that is repeatedly returned to as Sally and her remaining astronauts continue to explore the hostile landscape of the approaching alien ship.

For a book that is named after Sally Jansen, I was a little disappointed that Sally didn't have a more important role in the book. Yes, she was one of the astronauts that explore the approaching ship (2I as NASA calls it or the Object as NASA competitor, KSpace, has named it), but instead of the narrative sticking with Sally, it jumps from person to person including Roy McAllister, the man watching from the command desk back at NASA headquarters. Some slight spoilers ahead so be mindful. Sally goes up into space as the mission commander, but is quickly deposed and replaced with military meathead Hawkins. We rarely get to see much into Sally's mind except for the occasional angsty 'I must save my people to make up for my previous losses' and that more than anything was the most disappointing thing for me.

Another issue I had was just the description of 2I. Perhaps this is just a pitfall of writing about something that is literally out of this world, but I had trouble tracking what exactly the astronauts were looking at or where they were walking. I will admit I had the same problem when I read Rendezvous, but it seemed more difficult to wrap my brain around the descriptions in Last Astronaut. For example, during their second trip into he alien spacecraft Sally, Hawkins, and astrobiologist Parminder Rao traverse through what is described as a kind of forest where the arms of the trees are pretty much literally arms with hand-like appendages at the end of them. You see where I'm coming from now? Those hands would reach out for others kind of like how our brain sends electrical charges through a neuropathway (look at me ma, sounding all scientific with only an English degree to my name!), but my brain just kept coming up with the image of literal trees with comical Mickey Mouse gloves at the end of the branches.

Finally, I will say I enjoyed the layout of this book. There's just something about a book that pretends like it was created in the timeframe of the story that I just love. In the beginning there is a pseudo author's note from actual author David Wellington discussing how he has included interviews from "actual" characters like Rao and Sally to add some context to what was going on while within 2I. Even the end of the book includes an extra little interview from Rao where she explains to the audience that it was her insistence that Wellington re-write his novel to include these insights in order to show how the team that went up into space, Sally Jansen included, were heroes. As someone who still thinks about the Illuminae Files (catch the review I did for the series here) I love the idea of putting together a collection of fictional interviews, articles, and video transcripts into one cohesive story. I just wish the rest of the book had been just as good.

Long Story Short:

• This is a horror space novel so if you don't like blood, guts, and fear maybe skip this one

• We need more lady astronauts

• Give me more books that are just collections of various pieces of media. My lizard brain loves it.

My Rating: 2/5