Excellent, both a tightly written science fiction thriller and a parable of "mastery of the universe"

I love a story about intrepid spacefaring humans exploring an alien planet and Shroud delivers just that (although it’s actually a moon!). The sheer level of detail that Adrian Tchaikovsky goes into in creating the darkness and overwhelming noise of Shroud is incredible. I loved seeing the layers of this utterly alien environment being peeled back.

I do wish the characters had been a little more developed. I really enjoyed our two main characters, but felt there could have been more moments of bonding and stronger personal arcs for both of them. But having said that, this novel is really more about Shroud than the people exploring it and the adventure-packed story definitely delivers on that front!

Weirder, more compelling, and a lot more fun than it has any right to be, Shroud picks up scraps and threads from other Tchaikovsky novels — just-so evolutionary sagas, pitch-black hydrocarbon exoplanets, very human awfulness — and reweaves them into a surprisingly taut and fresh adventure. One of his better one offs, which is a high bar to clear when you’re in a deep-sea bathysphere and crushing gravity.

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On the surface Shroud is arguably a bit of a throwback, following two castaways struggling to survive treacherous landscapes, freezing oceans, and alien monsters as they struggle back to (our) civilisation. It’s a plot that could have come straight out of 1950s sci fi and the American-pioneers-in-space canon, but one of Shroud’s great pleasures is how gleefully Tchaikovsky inverts the elements of his premise; instead of Heinleinian freemen, our space pioneers are two women stuck in corporate peonage, their ingenuity is largely bumbling about while the locals do the actual surviving, and all the derring-do happens while our heroes are prone in acceleration couches cranked up on improbably large doses of pharmaceuticals.

And somehow, despite the obvious potential for a fatal tonal clash, Shroud feels incredibly natural. A lot of the credit here has to go to Tchaikovsky’s mastery of incident and adventure-story plotting, which keeps things moving at a brisk clip with fresh perils while still tipping the hat to the drudgery of trying to cross half a planet inside a jazzed-up diving bell. It certainly helps that Tchaikovsky has outdone himself in imagining a truly alien ecosystem, logically drawing out how a lightless, crushing world might plausibly produce life very that is much not as we know it (and yet somehow also yielding excellent critters for driving a survival story forward).

The action off of Shroud is a bit less seamless, with the other human corporates being (usually) a bit too moustache-twirling and their local opposition a smidgen too all-capable for my taste, even if there is some nuance. But as the final twist of the plot makes clear, the actual heart of the story is firmly back on the ground, with inventive alien life rubbing shoulders with humans putting one robotic leg in front of another, again and again and again.

I honestly don't know how Adrian Tchaikovsky does it. Book after book, one better than another, and not a single one that I didn't like. This one is probably my favourite out of all his works after the whole Children of Time series, because it's also concept-driven rather than character or plot-driven, and this is my jam as far as sci fi goes.

It's hard to describe the plot of the book without going into spoilers, so let's keep things vague here. A group of explorers is tasked to research a strange moon with intensely dense atmosphere that is also entirely saturated by radio waves produces by strange forms of lives there; things don't go according to plan (obviously). The rest is best left unknown until the reader actually gets through the book but I absolutely guarantee that anyone who loved Children of Time and its sequels would love this book as well.

It's simply not possible to read Mr Tchaikovsky's stories quickly! His work is always so rich with details and descriptions that you can create a 'movie' in your mind of the words you're reading. Shroud is superb. There's the Special Projects team as they try to decipher Shroud's secrets from their little space station, the sinister aspect of Shroud itself, the unfortunate accident that strands members of the team on Shroud's surface, and how they felt when they realised just how little they actually knew about Shroud's 'inhabitants' from their observations from space. The story is simply mind-boggling! And the ending ... just wow!
Thanks to Netgalley, Pan Macmillan, and Adrian Tchaikovsky for a free ARC in exchange for an honest review

I really enjoyed this book. It was entertaining and it kept you guessing. There was enough peril to keep it interesting without it being too much to make it so you didn't want to go on. I liked the characters of Mai and Juna. I liked that they both had mental breaks because who wouldn't in their position? I found the science believable but not too complex even if I did have to look up quite a few words. I liked that the aliens weren't even remotely like humans. I believe that the exploitation of worlds is exactly what would happen if we ever got that technology. I give it 4.5 stars.

I would probably read anything Adrian wrote including his latest shopping list because I’m pretty sure it would be better than most books in the current top 10!
I’m not going to bore people who can be bothered to even read my review by recanting the story, it’s very good! Read it !!

In the far flung future, humanity lives among the stars and exploits any planet it comes into contact with. On the moon of Shroud, a survey team comes into contact with a primitive society, but one with the capacity to learn. When they become stranded, will peace or science win the day?

Well, neither actually. Hard SF fans will lap this up quicker than a second-hand copy of New Scientist, but it’s not dynamic enough to sustain attention. The writing is heavily factual. And, yes I’ll admit that is a trope of the genre. But despite the odd flourish (humanity is genetically engineered for deep space) the crew are the hard-boiled narks that have inhabited SF since the Nostromo in 1979.

The plot picks up a little in the middle eight of the book, but this is what Whovians will know as ‘base under siege’. The prose style here is choppy, episodic and resolved far too quickly. The alien race (worm-like, using endoskeletons and sacrificing the injured to their god) is a fascinating concept, but they are seen first as bloodthirsty Lovecraftian beasties and then noble angels at the ends of the novel.

It’ll have its fans, but it found it too cold and worthy to keep my interest. It’s published by Pan Macmillan on February 27th, 2025 and I thank them for a copy. #shroud

Fantastic worldbuilding and alien biology as always from Tchaikovsky, but while the beginning and end grabbed my attention, the middle was a bit of a slog at times. Still an excellent read but I think it could have been even better at novella length. Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC