Another one of the good ecological sci-fi stories to come out of Adrian Tchaikovsky.

The plot is easy to understand but the story is complex. Two Humans are left on a zero oxygen, zero visibility world inhabited by an unknown dominant species. It is a story of survival, grit, and things beyond human comprehension.

Thanks Netgalley for the ARC

First contact meets Aliens
—
In Tchaikovsky’s latest, if ever humanity actually gets to another planet and finds sentient life there, we will be confronted by ourselves: our assumptions, our fears, our reactions, our humanity (whatever that means). In the wake of a freak accident, jack-of-all-trades Juna and super-precise engineer Mai have to literally feel their way in a sealed vehicle around a planetoid in utter darkness, surrounded only by alien creatures that communicate by radio waves, with new and increasing threats piling on even as time runs out…

I have to hand it to Tchaikovsky: he knows how to spin a yarn. Told almost entirely by Juna in the first person, the claustrophobia of the lander and the inhospitable world beyond are brilliantly rendered, and the second voice, from one of the aliens, is sketched out in enough detail to be comprehensible but utterly strange, a difficult tightrope to navigate. Like Aliens dialled up to thirteen, you’ll be looking behind yourself in the dark, just in case that noise isn’t just the wind, but something more sinister, something a lot less familiar.

Four and a half stars.

Read a finished copy.

Another excellent book from the author, who has rapidly become one of my favourites in SFF. A future of human exploitation of the stars sees an expedition to a new system, including a 'dark' moon, no light, inhospitible. During a ship accident two crew crashland and face a test of survival, as well as unforeseen levels of native life...

A story of human endurance, also with the perspective from at first unknown, unclear alien perspective, 'light' and 'dark' sections as headed in the text. As always a fully formed and believable alien world forms a strong backdrop to the novel. Won't say more due to possible spoilers, a story of two characters from a future which seems just as alien to us as the real thing, or endurance and the will to survive.

Actual rating 2.5/5 stars.

A pitch black and inhospitable moon is discovered and those who uncovered it named it Shroud. They could not survive there and it did not seem to want them, but when two of the crew crash land on its surface they must find a way to do just that.

A bonus star for the alien as well as human perspective this contained but, unfortunately, I found this a dry story with an anticlimactic ending. A space adventure should not be this slow but I found it focused on inward thought more than outward action and it just didn't suit my reading tastes at all. I'm all for a philosophical novel but this probed no deep questions about the meaning of life, so why such a slow pace? I did find the alien perspective an interesting development and appreciated how this differed to other space novels I have read but the book as a whole failed to properly grasp my interest.

This was a very good sci-fi read. Adrian is a master of sci-fi world building, and the way this switches POV to get into the minds of the aliens was genius -- and so effective in getting us into their heads and seeing things from their POV. The aliens are certainly alien and unsettling, and I enjoyed the ending of this. It was also refreshing to see a male author writing a female main character lead and doing it so well. I'm looking forward to reading more of his books in the future.

Truly alien. This isn’t the first hive mind book I’ve read by Tchaikovsky and I doubt it will be the last. This is a first contact, corporate-dystopian, survival horror sci-fi set on a world that is so unique it should be beyond imagination.

Two humans tasked with exploiting an element-rich moon, crash land onto its hostile surface and struggle to find their way back to humanity. If you’ve ever watched those videos of deep-sea exploration pods stumbling about in the depths of darkness looking for any sign of life and wanted to be in it, this is that.

Tchaikovsky takes the concept of evolution and proves just how strange it has the possibility to become. The ending is both hopeful and ominous and the philosophy underlying the survival thriller is incredibly well done. I’m still reeling.

What a book! It takes a bit time to get into it but then it sucks you really in and you stay there for a long time. I love the change of perspectives which are very well integrated and show much more details than I expected. I really appreciate this author‘s imagination and his capability to show so different possibilities. The book is so creative but at the same time also completely plausible thus quite a masterpiece. I really loved the characters (and not only the human ones).
It‘s one of the best books I‘ver read!

Wow - this is kinda like a horror author and a sci-fi author decided to have a baby. It's has elements of both horror and sci-fi and humanity has fallen into some really bad times. Essentially it is doing what it does best and asset stripping everything it possibly can from every planet in the universe. Except the moon and some rather terrible sounding planet both which have aliens and seemingly terrible monsters.

As to what happens and if humanity can conquer all, we'll read the book and find out!

A new hit by Tchaikovsky!!
This is one of those that I think its best to just go in blind with, but just know that it's a touching but exciting tale of survival, with some great anticapitalist commentary. About community, and the different ways it can appear.
Great worldbuilding too - it's set on a planet that's in complete darkness, but with a very interesting type of intelligent life. Great fun and I wholly enjoyed the whole book!

For the most part I tend to have more luck with reading Tchaikovsky when it comes to science-fiction. So I was quite looking forward to this book. Unfortunately it didn't quite work for me as a whole but it still had some interesting things.

In Shroud we meet our main character Juna as she awakes from a cryo chamber. Their ship has arrived at a new planet that her and a small crew are meant to explore and discover, to see if it can be used for the organizations plans.

The book is divided in a few parts and especially the first part was not at all captivating. It was very focused on the science of things and very little on the characters. Because of that it failed to grab me. It isn't that the science wasn't interesting or what they were discovering, but the wrapping wasn't captivating.

That kind of continues on throughout the book. I don't think I ever really got to know Juna as a character despite some of the traumatic experiences she went through. It got slightly better once they were off the ship but not enough to feel anyway about this character.

On the planet it became a lot more interesting as we got a much better idea what the planet looked like and who the habitants were. But as the story continued we got a lot of the same and not a whole lot was discovered. Of course they had a lot of stress and were trying to surive. But they were still scientists and I think it would have done a whole lot of good to the story if they had discovered a little more about how to communicate with the habitants at least.

If you don't nessecarily need a lot of characterization and love scifi for the science and surivival, this one could be very much be of interest to you.

“Let me put it into words you can understand. Life begins in darkness, where it belongs. There is only darkness, the natural state of all that is, so why should a word even be needed for it?“

So, two women crashland on an inhospitable moon. No oxygen, high gravity, total darkness. And things that go bump in the everlasting night. To have any chance of rescue, they have to limp halfway around this moon in their little, cramped and damaged pod. No big deal, right?

Rich in sarcasm. The POV from the alien(s) is nicely done. I rooted for them. I thought it would all be running very slow limping from the creepy aliens and much screaming, but there is a lot more.

You need patience! Well, I did anyway. This is slow. So slow. And so much dense text and information. But this world is so cool and I just love Tchaikovsky‘s wicked imagination and humour. It took me two weeks to get through this and towards the end I was at first disappointed at the direction the plot took and then it got really good again.

Loved the ending! I doubt that there will be a sequel, but I would love to read it. Great stuff. After finishing the book, I had to go back and read all the interludes again. The headspace and progression of the aliens was fascinating.

Tchaikovsky is showing yet again a very repressive dystopian, corporate society, without personal freedom or choices. It reminded me in parts of Cage of Souls and quite strongly of Alien Clay. If you liked that one, this should be right down your alley.

One of the things I like about Tchaikovsky‘s writing: It doesn‘t matter what gender the characters are and physical descriptions are just that. It took me half the book to figure out if the main character is female or male. It could have gone either way. Very refreshing.

Because of the slow pacing I figured for most of this that I would give it 4 stars, but considering how excited I am about this book, 5 stars it is! 🌚🌚🌚🌚🌚

P.S.: „… the slowest and most obvious heist in history.“
Good one! 😆

I received an advanced copy of this book from the publisher or author through NetGalley. All opinions are my own and I was not required to give a positive review.

Thank you Netgalley for allowing me to read this.
As I come to expect from Adrian Tchaikovsky, it was absolutely brilliant in worldbuilding and atmosphere. He created a world with varying species. I would love to look into his mind. There is so much creativity in making up a completely unknown world and how it was a little bit "humanized" over time.
Both women in their peril were great to follow and their pain and angst at times never knowing if they might make it or not. Also I loved following of the Shroud creature and their thoughts.
Another wonderful book by Adrian Tchaikovsky. I would recommend this author anyone who wants to read someting unique in world and creatures as well as the undertone of humanization of said world.

As a fan of Adrian Tchaikovsky I know what I'm in for, vivid scenes painted with wonderful writing and a real imagination of what is possible. Shroud is perfect for me but I also think it makes for a fantastic entry point if you've never read his work before.

The story and concepts are gripping and had the almost pace of a thriller as much as it does a Sci-fi. The female characters are well written, as ever and you're always on edge for them all the way through this clever, twisting story.

Put this with Alien Clay and Service Model as some excellent Sci-fi stand alones from A.T you should 100% try out if you like any form of science fiction.

Stars I gave just for the last 10 percent of story... Let me put this into words you can understand... well... sorry I can't...

The crew of the Garveneerr Composite Mission Vessel, a Special Projects team, is on Shroud, a zero-oxygen, high-radiation planet. After an unexpected accident, Juna Ceelander and Mai Ste Etienne find themselves in a small, makeshift vehicle, separated from their ship and lacking communication. As they travel through Shroud, they find species...

And now this, you should know, this is how a science fiction horror story should go on, this is how alien and space planet develop and you freak out and pull your hairs out...

My huge thanks to Pan Macmillan via NetGalley for DRC. I have given my honest review.

I am in awe of Adrian Tchaicovsky’s imagination. His world-building is excellent. He has taken common Sci-Fi themes- humanity expanding through our galaxy, our rapacious ‘asset-stripping’ of everything we come across, and First Contact- and woven them into a rich, complex and somehow believable, survival-against-all-the-odds story. Two members of an exploration team, trapped on a world that is totally inhospitable to human life, try to make their way to safety, encountering the many and varied ‘monsters’ which inhabit Shroud. Persistently trying, and failing, to understand the mind and motivations of an ‘alien’ is a theme Tchaikovsky uses elsewhere, and I find it fascinating.
There’s adventure, humour, pathos, aliens(yay!) and even some soul-searching and moral dilemma. It’s maybe a teeny bit over-long in the middle, but later I didn’t want it to end. Always a sign of a good book.

It's fun, well-paced and well-written. Longer review to come soon, when I have more time to sit and write it.

The thing about staring into the abyss is that it's really dark in there, and whilst it might be staring back at you, there is a really good chance that it probably isn't using eyes at all - why would you develop sight if you lived in an abyss. Echo-location perhaps, or some other form of manipulation of the electromagnetic spectrum to use as your sense medium. That is one of the core concepts at the heart of Shroud, another of Tchaikovsky's examination of possible lifeforms in the universe, and how first contact might go.

Tchiakovsky's other preoccupation in this stream of writing is to also make the humanity doing the first contact singularly unsuitable for the task. In Alien Clay there was a fascistic, anti-science totalitarianism. Tidbits dropped in Shroud suggest that what is left in humanity is a neo-conservative capitalist wet dream, people and resources exist solely to produce profit and shareholder value, and if you cannot do that, you are put back into the freezer. Initially, this seems like a bit of interesting colour to a book which is largely about exploration and survival, but it comes through in the last section to show how it is unsuitable for scientific thought and problem-solving.

Shroud is the name given to the high gravity, high toxic gas planet that this wing of the company has been sent to, to exploit for its precious metals and whatever else can be mined, However it appears that there is life on the planet, unlikely though it seems, and the first non-human life found there is enough of a profit interest to start to explore, despite the planet being thoroughly inhospitable. And an accident leads to a crash landing in the experimental probe craft, and our leads: Engineer Mai Ste Etienne and Project Supervisor Juna Ceelander have to find some way to get rescued on a planet that is screaming with electromagnetic and radio noise, because that is how the creatures sense.

There is a real joy in the Vernian imagination on display about the planet itself, and Tchaikovsky lives up to his usual high standards of speculation followed by explanation. He is very interested in forms of intelligence, and this again follows a novel idea (and one that yet again finds an evolutionary niche for humanity in it). Shroud is an adventure novel first and foremost, but there is no stinging on the science, or the politics, or indeed the schadenfreude if you are looking for it. Another great addition to his canon.

To me, it seems that Adrian Tchaikovsky has been developing a reputation of late. He has in the last few years produced an enormous amount of genre material, year on year. Last year (2024) I think there were three alone.

What impresses me even more is that these books are usually different from each other (unless they’re in a series) and they do not decline in quality. There has been science fiction and fantasy, serious and humorous SF, for example. I was very impressed with his last science fiction effort, Alien Clay, which I reviewed (but not at SFFWorld) and said “it is familiar enough and yet strange enough to build on science-fictional tropes and take them to new and unusual places. It has clever plotting and imaginative world-building, whilst at the same time allowing the discussion of big and complex ideas in science and politics. It is seriously impressive.”.

With Shroud Adrian returns to SF – I was intrigued to see if he could keep up his current high hit-rate.

On the face of it, Shroud is a story of human/alien – really alien – first contact. The story is narrated by Juna Ceelander, one of a group of humans working for The Concerns, a commercial exploitation fleet. Their spaceship, the Garvaneer, discovers a pitch-black moon alive with radio activity. Its high-gravity, high-pressure, zero-oxygen environment is deadly to human life, but ripe for exploitation.

When an accident forces Juna and her colleague Mai Ste Etienne to land on the moon, they find themselves in a barely adequate escape vehicle, embarking on a gruelling journey across land, sea and air in search of salvation. This also means that they are at considerable risk from the alien creatures on the moon’s surface.

It could therefore be said that at its basic core Shroud is an updating of the old Analog staple story – how humans meet strange aliens and battle treacherous landscapes to survive through human ingenuity. What Adrian also does is tell a story of communication, and how two very different species attempt to understand each other. Because they are so different, this seems impossible, and yet over the course of the book both are sufficiently intelligent enough to work out a means of doing this, albeit initially limited. Shroud is an attempt to understand very different minds, as well as highlight the consequences of a rigid economic and social structure and its inability to change. I couldn’t help feeling that this was an updating of the sort of story beloved by John W. Campbell in vintage Analog magazine, where much of the plot is about solving one problem at a time, in order to survive.

Of course, this takes considerable skill for a writer. It’s not easy to write a 400-page novel that for much of it only involves two drugged-up humans, filled full of pharmaceuticals in order to survive on a world where you cannot see around you, and keep it interesting. (I was reminded of the challenges Sandra Bullock faced in Gravity, for example, although that was pretty much a solo performance.)

Admittedly, there is considerable tension built up over the pages by using limited and finite resources to try and reach a point where they can contact the spacecraft still orbiting the planet. Furthermore, a place where one of your main senses is redundant and where light is a relative unknown can only ratchet-up the tension. It also doesn’t help that the extremes of pressure on the moon’s surface means that getting off their padded couches is near impossible.

Perhaps most importantly, and something which I suspect Campbell would most definitely not have liked, is the fact that the framing story tells us that the human world away from Shroud is not particularly nice.

As told by Ceelander’s cynical and snarky monologue, humans survive by being a commodity – “eating up food and breathing air”, one character points out. They are nothing more than part of the societal machinery created by corporations, based on economic targets, efficiency ratings and spreadsheets, designed to optimise the exploration of new planets, the extraction of resources, the development of colonies and survival. Being prepared to perform more than one function and thinking outside the box is not something that is widely encouraged, although Juna’s role seems to be that of a go-between who smooths things over and get things working.

It doesn’t help that in this future society has worn the workforce down. This is no place where people are working for the greater good, but instead they are submissive to the corporations, who want people to accept the way it has to be, concerned with exploration for profits and survival. As Earth has collapsed it seems that the workers have little/no choice to accept the awful conditions they work in. For example, once a person has completed a task they are often put back into hibernation, with no knowing whether they will be resurrected at a future date.

With this in mind, I found that like in Children of Time, the aliens are also often more likeable than the majority of humans. You may find yourself, like me, rooting more for the aliens than the humans at some points, because, after all, in such a human society the aliens are seen as a mere nuisance, in the way of profit.

It doesn’t help that the last part of the book seems somewhat cynical and bleak, although it is a logical consequence of the species’ previous interactions. To lighten it a little, the enigmatic ending gives an intriguing glimmer of hope for the future, although it could also be seen as a tad creepy!

In short, Adrian has done it again. He’s taken some traditional science-fictional ideas and given them his own unique spin to create an arresting story that raises questions, introduces some unusual exobiology and holds your attention until the end. Another success, that I can see being on the Awards lists of 2025. How does he keep doing it?

"It is unfortunate that, sometimes, the only way to find out how something fits together is to take it apart"
I found the start of this book to be pretty slow going, it took me a while to get into it and it hasn't been my favourite Tchaikovsky book but saying that it IS chock full of everything you expect from this author and the added chapters of sentience from the 'alien' makes it an interesting read as it develops.

Tchaikovsky has this amazing talent for writing very visceral and dense descriptive narrative. You feel very involved in the story through this and it's the one thing that I usually very enjoy about his books. Maybe it was the slow start that just dinted my enjoyment of this one but like I said, it does pick up and I flew through the last third quite quickly.

How Adrian Tchaikovsky continues to write masterpiece after masterpiece is astonishing, yet he does not fail to disappoint yet again!