They looked into darkness. The darkness looked back . . .
An utterly gripping story of survival and first contact on a hostile planet from Adrian Tchaikovsky, author of the Arthur C. Clarke Award-winning Children of Time.
A commercial expedition to a distant star system 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. They named it Shroud.
Under no circumstances can a human survive Shroud’s inhospitable surface – but a catastrophic accident forces Juna Ceelander and Mai Ste Etienne to make an emergency landing in a barely adequate escape vehicle. Alone, and fighting for survival, the two women embark on a gruelling journey across land, sea and air in search of salvation.
But as they travel, Juna and Mai begin to understand Shroud’s unnerving alien species. It also begins to understand them. If they escape Shroud, they’ll somehow have to explain the impossible and translate the incredible. That is, if they make it back at all . . .
Preface
I finished listening to this book a week ago, but I’ve been too tired to write anything much. Yesterday I managed to type up some of the Maria and Lah-Shah chapters I’ve written this year. I’ll upload it eventually. I’m struggling with exhaustion a lot at the moment. I’m having a rest day today instead of going swimming. I’m trying to decide whether or not to go swimming tomorrow since I have a long day at work on Thursday.
Yesterday, I went into work for writing group (no one else turned up) and then I had to go to the Jobcentre for my UC migration identity and housing costs appointment. I was lucky my manager came with me as support but it still exhausted me. I went to bed at 9 p.m. last night and slept until almost 8 a.m. this morning.
I’m a lot behind with my literary work, writing mostly, but I’ve also been struggling to read as well. It’s not good when I start struggling to read or write. I’ve been struggling with housework too. My sister is trying to work out when she can fit in a blitzing day to do the house for me. I’ll need to be out of the house when she does, because I really can’t cope with people in the house, moving my stuff and making noise.
I constantly feel like I’ve got a cold and my ears are producing a nasty fluorescent yellow gunk. I want to sleep all the time.
And that is my excuse for not writing anything much this year.
My Review
Juna is assistant to the team leader of the special projects, understudy to everyone else on the team and translator between them all since they’re all prickly, mardy gits who can’t get on with each other. They’re in orbit around Shroud, a moon of a gas giant exoplanet, and under pressure from their corporate masters to make as much money as possible for as little cost as possible. If they don’t, they’ll be put back into stasis and don’t necessarily know if they’ll ever be awakened again.
Then one day there’s a massive explosion and Juna ends up on Shroud with Mai, the team engineer. They make their way across the moon to the cable they’d dropped to start the process of making a space elevator, to get back in touch with the ship and get off the moon. While travelling across Shroud, they meet several species, and are escorted by different ‘Shrouded’ – species indigenous to the moon. They appear to be sentient and intelligent. These chapters are narrated by Juna.
Alternating with Juna and Mai’s chapters are chapters written from the view point of a being on the planet. It is a hive species, or possibly a single organism in multiple bodies? It misunderstands the nature of the pod that arrives on Shroud, thinking it’s the ambassador of a new species with an exoskeleton. The Shrouded helps the stranger across the moon, using parts of itself to show the way and protect the ‘ambassador’, as well as learning new things from them.
Back on their ship, Juna and Mai find their discovery of intelligent life is inconvenient for The Concern who wants to strip the moon of resources. They’re put back into stasis.
But not for long.
The Shrouded are up to something and the experts are needed.
I am a serial enjoyer of Adrian Tchaikovsky’s books and I love Sophie Aldred as a narrator. This book is on a smaller scale than some of his other work. I read Alien Clay and Service Model recently, which are both stand alone novels rather than parts of a series.
Tchaikovsky writes so well I forget that he often writes in first person, as he does in Shroud, or close third person as he does in the Tyrant Philosophers trilogy, switching between point of view characters. Most people don’t manage to write first person POV well, it’s intrusive and limiting most of the time. Not so with this novel. I don’t think third person would have worked for this novel; the impact of events is stronger by being told from the point of view of Juna and the Shrouded. It’s a conversation between the pair, and neither of them can understand each other. The conversation is mediated by ‘interludes’ in which a translator explains the Shrouded to humans. This provides the twist at the end.
The madness inducing tension in this novel is built as Juna and Mai travel across the moon, almost dying several times and confined in a small space. Their hope is balanced by the terrible situation they’re in. The relief of rescue is leavened by the response of others on their ship. The tension is then increased again to a crescendo of emotion from the usually calm Mai.
The aliens of Shroud are creepy but inventive. Most are clearly based on insects or sea creatures, but adapted to a high gravity and high metal, limited light environment. The narrating Shrouded is either a hive mind species or something more alien. Adrian talked about his fascination with insects from an early age in an interview with New Scientist.
As I’ve come to expect from a Tchaikovsky novel, politics is an important part of the plot. Shroud subtly takes aim at capitalism, unconstrained growth, and corporate control; I would expect no less. The ‘Concern’ controls the lives of workers, including birth and death, and strip mines planetary systems for no reason other than growth and profit, ignoring the needs of the living beings working for them and on the planets and moons they’re destroying. It produces ridiculous behaviour from those in middle management, as they need to justify their existence. The corporate entities in Shroud take to the logical extreme the behaviour of corporations now extant and the idealised societies of certain tech bros in California.
Of course those prats would probably think it’s perfectly reasonable…
A most enjoyable addition to my collection, highly recommended
Everything Is Better With Dragons 