Shroud

I have to interview Adrian Tchaikovsky at Finncon in July. Obviously I haven’t read all of his books, and there is no way I can make a significant dent in that lack before the convention. But I can at least read the novel that he has on this year’s Hugo shortlist. That would be Shroud.

Like What We Are Seeking, reviewed elsewhere in this issue, Shroud is a book about human colonization of alien worlds, and of first contact with said aliens. Both Reed and Tchaikovsky have created very interesting alien worlds, but whereas in Reed’s book the humans have been planet-side for some time, in Tchaikovsky’s they are freshly arrived, which is just as well, because human survival on Shroud is highly unlikely.

Tchaikovsky is well aware of how inimical the universe is to human life, and he delights in creating worlds that make that point very forcibly. Remember the world called Cricceth’s Hell from the Final Architecture series? Well Shroud is almost as nasty, but it also teems with life. Just a very different sort of life.

In the world of the book, humanity has become little more than a bunch of rival corporations, called the Concerns, presumably because they are not concerned about anything except profit. Our heroes work for one such corporation, in the small Special Projects division whose job it is to look into weird stuff, like Shroud.

They called the world Shroud because its atmosphere is so dense and dark that you can’t see more than a few metres ahead with anything but the best headlights. You absolutely cannot be out in it. Even in a spacesuit you probably wouldn’t last long. And yet it has life, which communicates by… well, you need to read the book.

For reasons of sheer bad luck, Juna Ceelander and Mai Ste Etienne end up marooned on Shroud in an escape pod. Mai is an engineer, thank goodness, and can keep their life support in some semblance of working order. Juna is an administrative assistant, which means that her job is keeping all the various tech specialists in her team from killing each other. But that means that she is good at that most important human skill: communication.

Because of the nature of Shroud (and I’m trying hard not to give too much away here), there is no chance of sending a message to their ship. Juna and Mai have to somehow survive alone until their can work out some means of signalling their presence. This involves a long journey across Shroud in which Tchaikovsky gets to show off his remarkably inventive creation. I think a lot of it is based on marine life, but I’m nowhere near good enough at biology to know for sure.

Ultimately, however, it all comes down to one of the core themes of What We Are Seeking: human colonists want to exploit a new world, and the local inhabitants would rather not be exterminated in the process, if you please.

I can totally see why Shroud ended up on the Hugo shortlist. It is a wonderful piece of science fiction, combining both jaw-dropping science with a great story about two people stranded on a deadly world. But I think the things I will remember most about the book are Tchaikovsky’s portrayal of life in corporate culture.

If corporations are lifeforms, they are at least as inimical to humans as Shroud, except that they need us to work for them. These days, of course, many of them think that they can do away with humans and use LLMs instead. What is scary about the book is that humanity appears to have accepted a future of slavery to corporations because it seems to be the only way to survive the mess we have made of our homeworld. I hope that isn’t true.

Title: Shroud
By: Adrian Tchaikovsky
Publisher: Tor
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
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