The Last Astronaut

Our author makes competent use of some familiar SF tropes (the “big dumb object”, impoverished NASA, aggressive private spaceflight rival) and some very familiar character types (nerdy geek with his discovery, washed up astronaut, crazed military man).

We have an interstellar object decelerating into the solar system and some competing missions to investigate it and unravel the mystery. It is all a bit familiar to start with and a couple of early questionable statements jar slightly (the author seems to be confused whether his character is in Houston or at JPL in Pasadena and at one point the competing spacecraft is 40km away stationary relative to our own craft and then a few sentences later it is 10km).

But once things get going it moves along at a reasonable pace, possibly a bit slow in places (the long slog through the object was a slog for the reader too) but the author makes good use of this familiar material to tell an interesting story with a nice neat ending.

Not ground-breaking science fiction, and I’m unlikely to want to re-read it but it was entertaining enough for a while.