Shroud by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Adrian Tchaikovsky’s gripping novel Shroud reworks one of the oldest stories in the world of a hero lost in a hostile world and trying to get home. Facing the unknown, those who are cast adrift have to use every resource at their disposal and their own wits and training to survive. Of course, in Tchaikovsky’s work, like Alien Clay, that strange world is more likely to absorb the human than be overcome by them. In Shroud, a pair of humans, locked in an escape pod, try to make contact with a terrifying race of giant latticework beings that are blind in a dark world. Desperate efforts to communicate with an entity that may either be trying to kill or save them become the central focus of the story.

The setting is a future universe where humans have left a scorched Earth behind and built orbital stations as stepping stones out into the galaxy. Everything is under the control of “Megasocial Opportunity-Exploitation Concerns” once known as corporations. All children raised in the habitats learned from an early age that only the Concerns could have saved humanity. In return, they expected unquestioning service and loyalty, and the ranks of workers on the exploration ships reflected the surviving social system. You worked hard for your survival and took part in the systematic stripping of resources from every star system that could be reached. “But the driving ambition of the Concerns was always expansion and growth. The avoidance of stagnation.”

Such was the mission of the Garveneer Special Projects module, a vessel detached from the mother ship to orbit a moon of the gas giant planet, Prospector413b. Juna Ceelander is a member of a Special Projects team under the guidance of the bosses in Opportunities. They have been awakened from hibernation to carry out surveys and analysis of the commercial potential of the tidally locked moon of 413b which the crew calls Shroud, because of its impenetrable darkness. Mai Ste Etienne is an engineer who can build and fix just about anything needed to explore the surface below. At the start of the story, she focuses on robotic survey drones that can record the sounds and sights of Shroud.

Since the moon is dark, that means mostly sound, and Shroud is loud, screaming at every band of the electromagnetic spectrum. It’s so loud that it’s almost impossible for signals to be transmitted across any distance. The lights of the drones permit its cameras to capture a few confusing images, but these gradually make it clear that there are life forms around the drones, and some of them are enormous.

“A sinuous shifting of plates as one of the hosts approached the drone. … That blind spiral face opening out like a fractal, always with more and smaller arms unfolding from its heart. … the blindness of them, the weird asymmetry of their bodies, the bizarre intricacies of their construction, like mechanisms, like toys, all spoke of a queasy wrongness.”

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The characters of the Special Projects team come to life in a way that highlights what life is like under corporate fascism. Everything is measured by contribution to production goals. The amount you get to eat depends on your standing in the hierarchy. There are constant increases in goals to be met, and every success gets the team more resources to use to get closer to full exploitation of the planet or moon the team is gearing up to strip bare. In this all-work-all-the-time atmosphere, Juna is the one person charged with being a liaison between team boss and everyone else. She’s the factotum, knowing a bit of everyone’s job, the one who smooths over disagreements, makes presentations to higher ups and has the closest working relationship with the team leader, Bartokh.

As the team gathers and interprets more and more data and catches a few more glimpses of strange creatures that seem to be examining the drones, they prepare for further exploration, including the seemingly impossible use of a manned vessel to go down to the surface. Then disaster strikes as a collision tears apart the Special Projects vessel and hurls Juna and Mai, who just have time to get inside one of the new vehicles, down to the surface of Shroud.

There are three voices in the novel. First is Light, referring to Juna Ceelander and her human perspective. In these chapters, we confront with Juna and Mai every seemingly impossible step they force their vehicle to make through the moon’s many dangers and pitfalls. It’s a constant test of ingenuity to salvage their vulnerable pod from destruction. Third are the sections called Dark, that give the perspective of the complex Shroud being that takes an interest in the strange entity that seems to manifest a degree of intelligence. To begin with, this entity, which can feel and hear but not see, can only respond to occasional crude signals sent out by this baffling being that has fallen into its midst. These sections brilliantly capture a truly alien voice that has learned a great deal from the incredibly hostile conditions of its world and slowly tries to comprehend the Other.

The third voice is that of the Interludes that all begin with “Let me put this into words you can understand …” “This last is the most intriguing and unexplained voice that is able to combine the experience of the Shroud being with the language of the humans. This interlude voice explains over several sections throughout the novel, the step-by-step evolution of life on Shroud, starting with the basic life forms that take shape around warm vents in the bottom of the seas on this moon.

This is a brilliant novel of the struggle to communicate between human and alien that captures what must always be mutual first contact. Tchaikovsky always balances the scale of perception and understanding between the two species, making several of his novels especially effective at conveying the complexity of encountering unknown species. My only reservation is that the ending section seems, if anything, rushed and reveals something at the end that I would like to see more fully explored. Perhaps Tchaikovsky intends another book to follow this, but my impression is that this is a stand-alone. The ending of Alien Clay is quite explicit about the merging of human and alien, because it has been happening throughout the book. But in Shroud we are only led up to a hinted revelation that I definitely wanted spelled out in further sections. Nevertheless, this is another great novel from an amazingly productive writer.

My thanks to Orbit and NetGalley for an advance review copy of Shroud for this review, which reflects solely my own opinions.