Yes, I am Toto and I adore this book.
Is it weird that I found this cozy?

One of my favorite scenes set that is weirdly wholesome:

The stranded astronaut stumbles into a somewhat oxygen rich fold inside this dark crypt he's been hopelessly lost in. The glass flowers- beautiful. The massive whatever the hell that was creature that strode past him - strangely comforting. The mechanical little eggs on legs which may or may not contain little humanoid aliens but we'll never know because it would be rude to open them up you know - utterly adorable. And then they set off in a direction predestined and our Astronaut Rendell and by default, Toto (us, the readers) follow along but not curiously, for companionship on that desolate place. I loved this.

Just picture this lone astronaut walking at the center of these little moving Egg-Men machines and their shiny lights. He is a huge bipedal monster but he is their bipedal monster.

"They Bring the light and I, Gary Rendell of Earth, bring the muscle. Two-fisted space action!"

Geez Tchaikovsky, give others a chance to be great writers too. What the hell man.
Hit after hit after hit. ( )

Lol, okay, I (1) did not see that coming, (2) thought, "Oh, wow, okay, I see," and then (3) did not see that "joke" until the last 5%.

Mother. "Gary Rendell."

Well played, sir. Well played. ( )

Darkly engaging and bitingly hilarious. ( )

This was almost five stars for me.

I absolutely love Tchaikovsky's writing, in general and in this one.

The voice of the main character was excellent, I enjoyed the humor, and the main character's descent into madness (or monstrosity) was revealed with great pacing.

The main thing that kept me from loving this completely is an unfair criticism: had this been a full length novel with fully fleshed out characters, it would have been amazing. However, this is a novella, or a long short story, and should be read as such.

Alas, my expectations were geared toward something this wasn't even trying to be, and the story didn't quite reach. ( )

Somewhere around Neptune, in the not too distant future, an anomaly is discovered. It's dubbed 'frog face,' because it looks like a circle with two eyes and a circle below that, for a mouth.
After much squabbling, russia, the European union, and the United States put their resources together and send out two flyers to explore it. One after another, they go inside the anomaly, and disappear, never to be seen again. what they do see, though, before the flyers go inside, is that no matter how they fly around the object, the same face always faces forward. In other words it obeys no laws of known physics.
So now these three groups send a manned flyer. After parking near the object, and observing it for many days, a crew is sent inside. One of the first things they discover is that there's no law of up and down, left and right. When you turn a corner, the floor can suddenly turn into a wall, leaving you to tumble down into a hole.
Well, our narrator becomes separated from the rest of his crewmen. The story switches back and forth in time, leaving us to try to figure out what happened.

I like the author's explanation of what a conspiracy theory is:

P.33:
"most conspiracies, after all, seem weird on the surface but are really an attempt to drag things down to a human scale: a flat Earth instead of the immensity of the cosmos, shadowy Illuminati instead of a chaotic mess of chance, incompetence, and greed."

(Mara and Kaveney are the explorer spacecraft.)
2019 Hardcover, Solaris Books
P.33-4:
"as noted, the main body of the artifact was that huge bowl, which contained only a darkness that would yield to no instruments Kaveney or Mara had at their disposal, a void that seemed shallow at first glance, but might well have gone on into utter nothingness forever. either side were the 'eyes,' but as Mara closed in, the images showed something quite different from just a huge floating frog face in space. below the 'left' eye was another eye, and another and another, smaller and smaller, spiraling down to where Mara's image resolution failed. a similar, symmetrical sequence of openings mirrored them on the far side. The artefact, it seemed, was fractal in nature."

P.75-6:
"...I imagine the barrel-bodied thing crouching over dying humans, interrogating them, seeing how their bodies fit together by taking them apart. I imagine it ravaging their minds, tearing out their languages and thoughts just as it's drilling into mine. Abruptly I know with a burning certainty that this is what happened. This thing has the hunchbacked cant of a murderer, sinister in its iron suit. my teammates came here seeking peaceful contact with other stars, but creatures like this metal ape have been here for years, praying on the unwary, killing them and taking their things. It's no better than the worm creatures.
'What are you?' I demand of the thing. 'What did you do to my friends?'
'aber,' it pronounces contemptuously. Apes; monkeys. It's not just recalling my earlier words, it's dismissing my entire species: primitives, animals."

P.106:
"...the little drone bobbed and wove about, unable to orient itself as Karen tried to sit it on the very boundary. Then it's lamp beam strafed over the ceiling and I cried out. Everyone else had their eyes on the remote, but I saw what was beyond it.
'Eyes!' I shouted unhelpfully - and inaccurately, as it turned out.
Karen was quick off the Mark and had the drone up above / below the boundary layer, scanning down / up at the ceiling / floor beyond, still unsteadily because she was having to drive the thing with half the controls reversed. we had a shaky glimpse of a great yellow - Brown leathery mask clumped in whorls and tangles, just about coating the entire ceiling. Here and there were clenched - fist nodules that I'd taken as eyes.
They opened.
this was all maybe 30 m up, and 5 m past the dust layer. We saw them unfurl and then flick at us, Slender lances darting down like rain.
what happened was this: the thing was thrusting it's pseudopods up, of course, not down, but once they cleared the dust then it was downhill all the way, a free lunch as it's tentacle Speared towards us. one of them struck Joe through the helmet, piercing the industrial - toughness plastic like a bullet and going most of the way towards his boots. there was an explosion of blood and cartilage from his knee where the tip came out. he wasn't screaming. He was too surprised for that, though not as surprised as when the thing retracted it's limb and whipped him up 20 m up into the air."

P.112-13:
"..you rattled my cage, little goblin men. You hissed and whispered your glottals into my cerebellum and now I'm going to going to going to --
no. No, I will not. Not yet. Give them a chance. Let them explain. and so I asked again even as they cling together. I spit out interrogatives in English and danish past the jut of my teeth I see their pasty little faces go white and their mouths open and shut, but no sound comes out of their stupid helmets and the scritchy just gets louder and louder, a shrilling chorus in my brain.
'just shut up!' I say to them. 'Just stop, just, just, I'm not going to be able to stop myself, just stop doing it to me and I'll go, I will! Just - stop! What's that?' That slack circle of a mouth opening and shutting meaninglessly, a goldfish in the bowl. I grab one of the goblins. I shake the other one off and then I take the one I've got and dash it against the wall to break that helmet and let the words out, only when I've done that, there aren't any more words, just a lot of blood and shards of skull and greasy greasy grey that coats my hands. and although this one's dead and no longer broadcasting its cicada song, the buzzing chitter from the other two grows louder and louder until I feel they've got a sawblade against my skull and are trying to do to my brain what I just did to their friend's."

This was scary, and crazy good. I've only hit on a little bit of the story here, just enough to try to remember what it's about. ( )