Review: Shroud

Shroud by Adrian Tchaikovsky
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Adrian Tchaikovsky has written some of my favorite books in the past few years (particularly the Final Architecture trilogy), but this one is one of his best in terms of sheer alien weirdness. Most of this takes place on Shroud, a newly discovered, pitch-black, tidally locked moon with killer gravity and pressure and an atmosphere with no oxygen. But it, and the life inhabiting it, is screaming its electromagnetic head off into the void, and that is how the crew of the Concern (corporate) mining and exploitation ship the Garveneer find this inhabited moon and prepare to strip it of its resources. (This future post-bottleneck humanity, after leaving a poisoned Earth behind and expanding into the stars, is not a nice species, to say the least. They labor under extreme predatory capitalism, among other things.)

But Shroud and its native life, which is eventually revealed to be a single interlocking world-mind organism, is more than a match for the humans on board the Garveneer. The moon itself, even without its sapient species, is deadly and inimical to human life. Of course, after an accident on board the Garveneer, our two protagonists, Juna Ceelander and Mai St Etienne, are dropped onto the moon in an exploration pod, and have to survive a trek across the surface of Shroud, fighting the inhospitable environment and the supremely weird life and ecosystem every step of the way. This trek takes up most of the book. As this tale unfolds, even though Juna's first-person viewpoint starts the story, we begin to get chapters from the POV of the alien world-mind. As an alien being without eyes that senses the world through electromagnetism and echolocation, it does not at first even have a concept of human beings. It thinks the pod is a being, calling it the "Stranger." The Shroud-organism is very curious and wishes to study and learn, and it attaches itself to the pod (sometimes literally) and follows it as Juna and Mai steer it across Shroud, picking up different ways of thinking from what it is observing. This enables the Shroud world-mind to expand its own horizons and eventually win its fight with the resource-stripping humans (even though it does not comprehend that humans actually exist until the very end of the book). But it is not a vindictive being, and after Juna jury-rigs an electromagnetic brain scanner to broadcast her brain activity and returns to the surface of Shroud (since the moon and its life are shouting across the EM spectrum so loudly she cannot be heard otherwise), the world-mind realizes she is a separate being and communication begins.

I'm not a scientist or biologist, and the sheer breadth of hard SF concepts on display here is breathtaking. I cannot imagine the amount of research that went into this. It also requires a careful reading to understand what is going on, although I can tell the author tried to make it as accessible as possible. This of necessity slows down the pace, and I'm sure some people might complain about Juna and Mai creeping in a painfully slow fashion across the surface of Shroud through most of the book. But if you want to dive into an alien world that is unlike anything I've ever read before, pick this up. This book is not an easy read, but stick with it. You will be rewarded.

View all my reviews