Genre: science fiction
Published: Tor, February 2025
My Rating: 4.5/5 stars
“Let me put this in terms you can understand…”
Consider this, if you will, my annual public service announcement for any fan of science fiction to pick up Adrian Tchaikovsky’s works. With Shroud again, he proves himself a master of his craft, and in possession of an eerie knack for creating utterly alien aliens.
On first impression Shroud begins like so many first-contact stories. An alien planet, tidally locked to its sun, leaving one side in perpetual darkness. An environment utterly hostile to human life. A catastrophic accident that leaves a small group of survivors crashed and stranded in this hell-not-on-Earth. And then, the realisation that, in that darkness, they are not alone...
But Tchaikovsky wouldn't be Tchaikovsky if he didn't find a way to turn this narrative into something original. And he did.
Virtually all first-contact narratives share a single sin: oversimplifying what establishing actual first contact with an alien species would be like. It makes sense for the sake of telling a compelling “us-vs-them-narrative”. In order for us human-readers to picture our antagonist, we need our fictional aliens to be quite human-like in their thinking, actions and often even cultures/ethical norms. To speed the story along, the aliens often have some device to translate our language, to communicate and to negotiate on a human level, so that the real battle-scenes can begin.
Tchaikovsky clearly wasn’t interested in telling thát story though. Instead we get an insight into a first-contact scenario in which we have almost nothing in common with the aliens. No language, no similar senses of way of perceiving the world around us, not even an overlap in the way we form thoughts or communicate amongst ourselves. The only overlap between us and them is an ability to perceive radio-signals, and the simple three-beat-signal on a shared bandwidth repeated back and forth: ugh, ugh…ugh.
From the perspective of our human crash-survivors, intercut with small sections of the Shrouded’s viewpoint, we see their curious attempts at contact and cooperation.
This might sound less exciting than your typical space-battle, but make no mistake: Shroud was a tense ride that gripped me and didn’t let me go. Tchaikovsky nailed the balance of the different elements that I’ve come to recognize in his novels to perfection here. There’s a thrilling survival story of people enduring in a hostile environment against all odds, mixed with a creative answer to the question “what form could sentient alien life take?”. Added to that is a generous dash of humor and heart. (honestly I didn’t expect to be this moved and charmed by the awkward attempts of two alien species trying to interact in the most clumsy way thinkable). The ever-present subplot of inter-human politics, with a bit of environmentalism and capitalist-critique, is there too, but it’s toned down to a point where it doesn’t interfere with the story.
About 100 pages in, I had some worries about this being too similar to Alien Clay in structure and set up, but Tchaikovsky completely made this its own story, thanks to the focus on contact rather than survival. I can’t wait to see what this man does next, as he truly deserves the title of master of modern sci-fi in my opinion.
You can find this book here on Goodreads.
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