ADRIAN TCHAIKOVSKY Shroud. Reviewed by Robert Goodman

Adrian Tchaikovsky imagines a planet inhabited by intelligent life yet toxic to the humans who urgently need to understand it.

Hot on the heels of the third book in his incredible Tyrant Philosophers fantasy series, prolific and multi-award-winning British science fiction author Adrian Tchaikovsky delivers a stunning standalone novel of first contact and survival in Shroud. Shroud is an alien first-contact story in which the aliens feel truly alien. It charts a quest to survive on a planet where everything is anathema to human life and provides a pretty good reason why Star Trek’s prime directive is not to reveal spacefaring technologies to non-spacefaring civilisations. However, the milieu here is far from the utopian ideals of Star Trek. 

Tchaikovsky makes it clear from the beginning that the universe of Shroud stands in contrast to that imagined by Gene Rodenberry in Star Trek. Humanity’s mission in Star Trek is to discover new worlds and seek out new life and bring them into a united Federation. That franchise imagines a utopian future in which a universal translator allows for simplified first contact and most encounters with aliens boil down to human-like misunderstandings. The mission of the crew of the Garveneer in Shroud is much more commercial and pragmatic:

Our mission: to hunt out opportunities. To harvest resources. To create self-sufficient, resource-generating way stations that would serve to resupply the next wave of human exploration.

This is because Tchaikovsky has imagined a future in which humanity is in the thrall of giant corporations, or Concerns, and the value of any individual is based on their ability to deliver for the corporation. As Juna Ceelander, the narrator, explains, Concerns are:

… what they used to call corporations, except that was back when the presence of other ways of being gave the term some meaning … The people who survived did so with the blessing of the Concerns, and only with that blessing bestowed in return for a pledge of service …

When Shroud opens, the Garveneer has come to a new planetary system, Prospector413:

… [a] system of cold dead worlds and mineral wealth was about to form part of the Third Stage Commercial Expansion out of Earth. The net that humans were throwing out into the universe, to find somewhere to harvest and build and live. If you could call it living.

But not long before they start exploring the new system, the Special Projects team discover something strange. A moon, which they call Shroud due to its thick atmosphere, is pumping out electromagnetic waves. The team start to investigate further and after 14 failed attempts are finally able to get a signal back from the  surface. In that signal, they discover signs of life in an environment where no life should exist:

Shroud’s atmosphere, the source of that informal name, was a turbulent yellow-brown fug, with levels of methane and other opaque impurities ensuring that below … was nothing but darkness. Those twelve seconds of life that we’d glimpsed existed in an abyss as profound as the bottom of the deepest sea trench.

The team is given a short leash to investigate, but their drone technology does not survive long in the harsh environment. So they come up with a plan to build a vehicle that could take people to the surface. Before they can finalise those plans, a disaster forces three of the crew into two vehicles to launch and crash onto the surface of Shroud, where they encounter the wide array of local inhabitants.

From there Shroud becomes a survival tale as Juna, along with her pod-mate Mai Ste Etienne and the pilot of the second vehicle, their boss Oswerry Bartokh, try to do the impossible and find a way to navigate to the pole which is the only place there they may be able to contact their ship. At the same time, they are constantly trying (and failing) to engage with and understand the bizarre local beings who communicate in the deep, crushing dark using electromagnetic waves:

It was magical thinking. Helpful aliens recognising the star-travellers in need. How utopian would that be.

Where Shroud shines is the way in which Tchaikovsky shows this interaction from an alien perspective. For at least one clearly intelligent alien is also trying (and failing) to understand the thing that has dropped among its kind:

I build my idea of its full shape by way of the ear. By brush of limb. By spreading my mind so that the Stranger becomes a construct in the midst of my understanding, and I can learn from the gap it makes in the world …

When it starts to move, a variety of theories concerning its physical form are confirmed. Namely, that it does not move like any living thing.

Neither the humans, nor the aliens, ever really understand the other while this journey is taking place. But the alien life on Shroud has the capacity to learn. And the humans soon find that the creatures, who can construct their bodies like machines, can create new technologies by analysing human technology. This in turn has a very real impact on some evolutionary limits that had been set by the planet’s conditions.

Shroud is hard science fiction. Tchaikovsky plays a complex what-if game, creating a diverse ecosystem in what to humans would be an inhospitable landscape. But most importantly he does not himself engage in magical thinking. There is no universal translator that would allow the two species to suddenly understand each other. And even if there were, their thinking is shaped in such different ways that they probably would not be able to communicate anyway. Yet, somehow, the humans and aliens do kind-of manage to work together, although to very different ends.

But at no time does Tchaikovsky forget his critique of corporate culture. Of the value that is placed by it on both on human and alien life. As already noted, this is a corporatist future in which everything is part of a transaction in the service of the continued expansion of humanity. A message that is rammed home throughout the novel’s satisfying finale.

Shroud works on a number of levels. It is a great novel of human ingenuity and survival. It is a take-down of the role of corporate culture driving human development. But more than that, it is a fascinating (if stressful) descent into a completely new and hostile world and an exploration of the diverse ecosystems that have evolved to live in it. It is also about communication and the consequences of failing to try and understand the other.

This is another great novel from Tchaikovsky, who continues to be one of the most innovative and intriguing authors in science fiction and fantasy.

 Adrian Tchaikovsky Shroud St Martin’s/Tor 2025 PB 448pp $34.99

Robert Goodman is an institutionalised public servant and obsessive reader, who won a science fiction short-story competition very early in his career but has found reviewing a better outlet for his skills. He is a judge of the Ned Kelly Awards and reviews for a number of other publications – see his website: www.pilebythebed.com

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Tags: Adrian | Tchaikovsky, British writers, distant planets, extraterrestrial life, interspecies communication, science fiction