Fiction Reviews
Shroud
(2025) Adrian Tchaikovsky, Tor, £14.99, trdpbk, 437pp, ISBN 978-1-035-01380-7
I’m not entirely sure how Adrian Tchaikovsky manages to churn out so many novels (he’s on at least two a year at the moment) but long may it continue. Hs books are very varied, ranging from heroic fantasy to hard SF and everything in between, and sometimes they don’t resonate (at least with me). I found Bear Head, for instance, unengaging and although I loved the humour in Service Model, others weren’t so sure. But Shroud? On top form.
It’s hard science fiction and takes one of Tchaikovsky’s common themes – alien life – and runs with it. Along the way he gets to make a few pertinent observations about us humans, too, as all good novels should do.
We’re at some unspecified point in the not too distant future and we’ve begun our expansion phase through the galaxy, but this is exploitation, not exploration. A commercial vessel seeks planets to strip and locations for colonies, but finds strange activity on the moon of an expoplanet gas giant. It’s called Shroud because it’s covered in dense atmosphere and it soon becomes apparent it harbours life. Mankind hasn’t encountered other intelligent species before, and dismisses whatever’s on Shroud, but the potential resource bonanza there draws the crew to investigate. An accident sends an escape pod to the surface pairing an administrator (Juna) whose main skillset seems to be empathy with an irascible engineer (Ste Etienne) in an unlikely pairing. Shroud is noisy on an electromagnetic level so signals from the surface can’t get to space – and extreme cloud cover means no visual sightings are possible. So Juna and Ste Etienne are trapped – and on the wrong side of the planet from the space elevator that could get them back to their ship. And they soon realise they are surrounded by plenty of clever aliens who seem intent on dismembering their pod. There’s no way they can survive, and yet…
Empathy is a key theme here. There’s an almost wilful misunderstanding by the people running the operation of the potential for intelligent alien contact, buried by a driven desire to maximise profit and comprehensively exploit Shroud for its resources. Shroud’s aliens are seen as an obstacle, not an opportunity. The human workers are treated with little humanity either, though. When they’re not immediately assigned to a mission they’re held in stasis until needed to save resources. So awake only when useful and exploited to the point of collapse.
I guess it shouldn’t be too much of a surprise that the aliens and the humans turn out to be more alike than they realise, though these are proper aliens – different in thought and physiology – and extremely well drawn.
This is a stand alone novel that has for most of its length a narrow focus on two characters in a contained environment. That it doesn’t get claustrophobic or desperate for a broader canvas is testament to some great writing.
Mark Billsborough
See also Jonathan's take on Shroud.
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