I got an advance reading copy of this, lucky me, so I'm backdating this review to when I did read it.

Hard science fiction is not always my favourite type of science fiction - unless it has a strong biological component. Stories about weird biology will always excite me, and this works really well when the main character is a biologist/xeno-linguist who is monitoring giant zeppelin-like aliens in an attempt to understand and communicate with them. One of the consistent appeals of scifi, for me, is how well it can exploit that sense of wonder that we feel when discovering new things, and Wayfaring Stranger really does this for me. There's a lot of wonder and exploration packed into this novella, and the ending (which I won't spoil) is fantastic, though it does cry out for a sequel, I think. I want to know what happens next!