Published February 2025 by Tor
Shroud is an incredibly frustrating book to read.
Not because of the writing style, the plot, or anything negative, but because it acknowledges and challenges the implicit biases that so often happen when creating a unique alien world and species. This is Adrian Tchaikovsky’s comfortable niche in writing, and I couldn’t help but think back to his book Children of Time. There are a lot of similarities here.
Juna Ceelander and Mai Ste Etienne are part of an interstellar human race focused on worth. How many resources you consume in relation to what you contribute towards the ever-expanding Humanosphere. Mai is an engineer and a good one, Juna is more of a politician, an assistant who exists to facilitate relationships between the boss and the special projects team assigned to investigate the moon informally called Shroud, a dark, inhospitable planet full of life that exists outside the realm of human understanding.
Through events, they crash on Shroud and must find their way to somewhere they hope they can be rescued from.
Simple enough premise. We’ve read this before, the humans overcome great odds and make sacrifices to survive, whilst learning something about themselves along the way. Give Tom Hanks an Oscar nomination and let’s be on our way.
What sets this apart, however, is that the characters are invariably wrong about more or less everything, and I’m not sure they actually did the introspection part properly. At least the humans certainly didn’t. Yes, they clear up some misunderstandings about resourcing and buffing (read the book and it’ll become clear) but they don’t seem to be irrevocably changed by their experiences on Shroud.
The book uses alternating chapters, one from the human’s perspective and one from the point of view of an alien mind which is both split into several different… minds…and also very singular. I was left a bit unclear what exactly the mind was but there was certainly enough material to form my own theories and perhaps a clear explanation is there, I just missed it. At the end of the day, it’s not necessary for every question raised to have an answer, and we get interludes throughout that try to explain the evolution of life on Shroud. The book is full of the science talk that is almost ubiquitous in Tchaikovsky’s work.
This is hard sci-fi.
Let me give you an example of the way the two POV’s assume incorrectly about each other. Whilst crossing a mountain, the alien creatures, each containing parts of the mind start gesticulating towards a cave entrance. The humans think the aliens are indicating a shortcut, whereas the aliens are rather emphatically warning them to stay away from the cave. They enter the cave and (as a friend of mine would say) shenanigans ensue.
The flora and fauna of Shroud are incredibly alien. Those controlled (or part of) by the alien mind have evolved a unique set of ways of surviving and thriving on Shroud. By building exoskeletons that can incorporate things like air bladders for floatation or even organic spanner hands.
There were shades of Stephen King (and Frank Darabont’s interpretation of) The Mist. There is no light on Shroud, nothing except the humans in their little exploration pod have eyes. So occasionally we have fleeting visions of monsters in the heavy, soupy atmosphere and limited torchlight, and sudden, invisible death.
Like Ted Lasso, the alien mind is curious. Curious about the stranger in their midst and use their curiosity well, following the humans and protecting them throughout. During a perilous event, it does feel like the humans are saved by the deus-ex machina of the alien minds a little too much, but the story moves on too briskly for me to remember to be bothered about it and look! A new science shiny thing!
This curiosity leads to a third act that stretches my malleable sense of disbelief, and which was harrowing to say the least. It had me rooting against the humans after a while, again harking back to other Tchaikovsky works. Like those other books I get the sense for me of many places where it would have been a good place to end, but the narrative carries on.
Where it does end is not entirely satisfying for me, but I can see how it would and could be. A sense of hope, similar to how the Final Architecture series ended, but without answering everything, and like I said, we don’t need all the answers.
Shroud was what I imagined the Jennifer Lopez movie Atlas should have been like, and what I imagined it would be from the first trailer. A hero, travelling in a mech, surviving on an alien planet. Thank you, Adrian Tchaikovsky, for giving me what J-Lo failed to.
If you like Adrian Tchaikovsky, you’ll love this, and these days who doesn’t like Adrian Tchaikovsky?
Many thanks to Pan Macmillan/ Tor for the advance review copy via NetGalley.