Heaven's Shadow

By David Goyer and Michael Cassutt
There's an awful lot of Arthur C. Clarke to this book, coupled perhaps with Steven Baxter's NASA series.
Ten years into a what might already be an alternate future, in which the US space agency has been kicked back into a space race with an Indian-Russian-Brazilian coalition and missions to the Moore once again a going concern, an asteroid is detected making a close approach to Earth and the latest moonshot is diverted to visit it.
Not the only ones mind you, since a suspiciously well prepared coalition craft is also trying to be the first men on Keanu. Two spaceships land, as the asteroid starts to behave very oddly, revealing itself not to be a passing rock, but a star craft from who knows where.
Exploring the object reveals a cavernous interior able to create alien creatures and raise the dead, much to the discomfort of astronauts confronted by their dead wives, friends or children. There is evidence to suggest the mysterious Architects, creators of this world, whatever their motives might be, strange things in the body of the object, further in, further in.
Very Rendezvous With Rama. More immediate, more now, but very similar concepts.
I half liked it. I enjoyed the bulk of the stuff on Earth, with mission control scurrying about trying to form a sensible response to what might be an attack from the stars. Rather a sense of the whole Apollo-13 scrubbers episode, very clever men suddenly out of their comfort zones. The central astronaut was a bit dull, but well formed. In fact pretty much all the characters are well presented, rounded people, even if the American called Tea left me wondering if she had a sister called Coffee. Yes. I know Te-a.
So what was it I didn't like.
It occurs to be that there is in fact an entire Big Dumb Object sub-genre of science fiction that I don't care for. I was never that excited by Rama. Of all the Known Space books, Ringworld is the one I care least for. I know people who rhapsodise about Greg Bear's Eon, but it left me very cold. This is the same.
So you get these books and in them you haver some space explorers find a thing. What kind of thing? A big thing. An alien thing. Often involving a tunnel. So they dock/land/crash their spaceship at one end of the tunnel and weird shit starts to happen. And the further in they go the weirder the shit is. And eventually the shit gets so weird that they run back to the mothership and escape, often leaving one or two people behind.
It all becomes about exploring the unknowable. Instead of being driven, as the first half of the book is, but people and their interactions and competitions it just devolves into pushing further in and seeing how much weirdness the author can come up with. Which is generally lot when not constrained by much need for it all to make sense.
Essentially you get something formulated as a mystery, but without any ability to solve it. That lovely understanding that comes when the writer's presented their clues just right, so you grasp the plot a page or two before the hero? Impossible.
Obviously some people like this style of book. They're welcome to it.
There's a sequel, indeed I think there may even be an unpublished third volume. Unless I hear lots of people praising it to the high heavens, I think I'll give them a miss.