pyrae

A post-Earth society ruled by giant corporations called Concerns whose only goal is to spread vat-grown wage slaves out across the galaxy to exploit resources for profit.

A frozen moon shrouded in eternal darkness and heavy gravity populated by sightless creatures who evolved to live in both.

Like many of Tchaikovsky's novels, this is a story told from two perspectives: the humans whose pod has crashed on a hostile alien planet they can barely make sense of, and the locals who encounter a seemingly idiotic Stranger (a "savant clown beast") that bumbles around, communicates in grunts, and doesn't know enough to come out of the ammonia-methane rain.

The world building and the alien design are, of course, meticulous. The interaction and cobbled together understanding between the humans and the aliens was my favorite part because only the reader knows the full story. Unfortunately the humans, in their duress, aren't all that interesting. The middle sections that focus on them in their pod feel the weakest and, because of that, overlong, but the story picks up again in the last third.

I spent most of the middle in mild agony, thinking there was only one way this story could end, but then I remembered this is Adrian Tchaikovsky, and he doesn't write those kind of stories.

Contains: blood, violence, threat of genocide; no work-life balance.