Fiction Reviews
Shroud
(2025) Adrian Tchaikovsky, Tor, £14.99, trdpbk, 437pp, ISBN 978-1-035-01380-7
Humanity has been through some tough centuries – been through Prof. Sir John Beddington's 'Perfect Storm' of population excess, resource depletion, climate change, biodiversity loss etc – and, having gone through two 'bottlenecks', had come out the other side just able to make it to space and the stars. Humanity's game plan is to migrate through the Galaxy, asset-stripping as it goes, establishing hubs in star systems as colonies and staging posts for further expansion. The starship The Garveneer is part of the leading edge of this expansion wave.
Onboard, Juna Ceelander awakens from hibernation. She is a 'Special Projects administrator who actually is an aide to the Special Projects director which in fact means that she is in interface between him and his team and the one to ensure that the team functions smoothly. But, and here's the but, crew are only brought out of hibernation if they have the skills to contribute to humanity's bottom line: Juna and her team mates have to justify their waking existence.
The ship had entered the system Prospect 413 that is already seeing outer system dwarf planet and asteroid asset-stripping begin, but a large, detachable module had been sent further in to the system to investigate the cold, dark moon of a super-Jupiter-sized gas giant that is the equivalent distance of the (Mars-Jupiter) asteroid belt in our Solar System. The moon itself was 30% larger than Earth with a gravity not quite double that of Earth's. Its atmosphere was devoid of free oxygen and 20 times thicker than Earth's with hydrogen, ammonia and methane in the mix. It was also cold at minus 30°C, with puzzling issues such as why the hydrogen had not bled off into space (though why this is a puzzle given our own Solar system's gas giants' atmospheric hydrogen have a lower gravity is not said). But the moon was covered by dark clouds (most likely tholins but that is not mentioned). The most puzzling thing about this moon – which they unofficially decided to call Shroud – was that it emitted, actually shouted, radio waves on many frequencies and that's what caught the human star travellers from the edge of this planetary system.
A probe was duly despatched to the moon's surface beneath the dark clouds… In fact, many probes were dispatched as the surface was hostile and many were 'lost'. Nonetheless, they finally managed to get pictures, glimpses, from the surface of life, large life…! Shroud was worth investigating…
This book is in three acts, and the above summarises the first act. Now with book reviews (which are different from book critiques that have spoilers), the job of the reviewer is to give putative readers just enough information for them to decide whether or not to seek out and buy it. Sadly, for me (and possibly for you depending on what makes the back-cover blurb), the promotional blurb for this novel teases the novel's second act. This meant that all through the first act – which was very engaging – I was decidedly distracted by what I knew was coming and this really undermined my enjoyment. Fortunately, publishers do not do this often but, when they do, it is a real right pain… So avoid reading the back-cover if you can. (Good luck with that.)
However, given that we find out that there is life on Shroud really early on in the book, it is not a spoiler to say that this is a first contact novel. Strip the plot right down to its most basic elements, it is almost akin to the film Phase IV (1974, trailer here) but in reverse: with Shorud it is humans arriving on an alien world, not the other way around. The important thing it is a gripping read despite a somewhat plodding (literally) second act, but things speed up in the book's final section with a fantastical conclusion.
Though this SF offering is not as scientific an approach to an alien life-form (such as in the Hugo short-listed Peter Watts book Blindsight (2006)), Adrian Tchaikovsky makes a fair fist of the exobilogy (though I found the fats and oxygen bit a little hard to swallow) and we even get a hint in all but name of Edicarans in the world's past.
Having said that, Shroud probably would not look out of place on a bookshelf next to other major 'first contact' books such as the aforementioned Blindsight, Midwich Cuckoos and The War of the Worlds. Yes, it is that good.
Apart from the novel's second act – which really drags on and on – this is a solid SFnal read with some neat concepts, interesting world-building of the moon and a solid backstory as to humanity's history prompting it out into the stars in a very mercenary way… And there's a great final act that ramps thing up (again, into an almost Phase IV in-reverse type conclusion).
If, like me, you have a bit of a thing for first-contact then this is one of the better ones in recent years and I can easily see this being short-listed for a number of awards, despite the dragging middle act: I have only read three Tchaikovsky books including this one, and another of these also had a pacing issue (in my mind being way too long). Why the author could not have put this one aside and then returned to it after a few months with fresh eyes to re-structure the second act (allowing time to pass with a change of point-of-view to that of other humans) but Tchaikovsky seems bent on having a high output with a number of novels a year! This does not do him any favours, and while this is a decidedly good, if not a positively superior, offering, I could sense an even better one lurking underneath. But, hey, what do I know. Nonetheless, this gets a recommendation from myself.
This is the second of Tchaikovsky's books in a row to deal with exobiology: the previous one being Alien Clay which, I see, both Mark Yon and Mark Bilsborough liked. So the author seems to be on something of a roll. (My own take on Alien Clay is here.)
This is also the second Tchaikovsky book in row that has on off-stage home Earth with something of a society that has to manage resources efficiently. I remember the interstellar Empires of 1960s SF well – such as Asimov's Trantor series – which saw our expansion into the stars as an almost inevitable result of the then West's post-WWII socio-economic development: living standards rose, the space race was on and the main wars seemed to be largely confined to Vietnam and the Middle East, nothing like the military tensions we have today on all our world's continents (save perhaps Antarctica). Environmental concerns were there and present in past SF, especially in the 1970s, but today, in real life, we have to deal with them up front and in our faces: for example, climate change is in our face with: super-charged hurricanes, flooding from exceptionally heavy rainbursts, extensive dry periods and heatwaves leading to wild fires and so forth. So it is not really surprising that environmental concerns are reflected so much in contemporary SF. And what with the rise of tin-pot dictators, fake news, and the decline of good governance – from Russia, the US, down to corporate fraud and even grassroots voluntary bodies (even adherence to World SF Society rules has fallen by the wayside) – it is not too surprising that Tchaikovsky's past two visions of the future societies are ones in which governments ensure that everyone knows their place…
However, it the novel's exploration of 'exobiology', with such societies supplying the stage on which the protagonists act, that provides the sensawunda and which will push many of this novel's SF readers' buttons. Dare you take a peak beneath Shroud's clouds?
Jonathan Cowie
See also Mark's take on Shroud.
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