Review – Shroud by Adrian Tchaikovsky (3/5 stars)
Reading Level: Adult
Genre: Science Fiction
Length: 453 pages
Publisher: Orbit
Release Date: June 3, 2025
ASIN: B0DJLT8GYV
Stand Alone or Series: Stand Alone
Source: Borrowed ebook from Library
Rating: 3/5 stars
“They looked into the darkness and the darkness looked back . . .
New planets are fair game to asset strippers and interplanetary opportunists – and a commercial mission to a distant star system discovers a moon that is pitch black, but alive with radio activity. Its high-gravity, high-pressure, zero-oxygen environment is anathema to human life, but ripe for exploitation. They named it Shroud.
Under no circumstances should a human end up on Shroud’s inhospitable surface. Except a catastrophic accident sees Juna Ceelander and Mai Ste Etienne doing just that. Forced to stage an emergency landing, in a small, barely adequate vehicle, they are unable to contact their ship and are running out of time. What follows is a gruelling journey across land, sea and air. During this time, Juna and Mai begin to understand Shroud’s dominant species. It also begins to understand them . . .”
Series Info/Source: This is a stand alone book. I borrowed this on ebook from the library.
Thoughts: This was okay, but reminded me a lot of Alien Clay. There are so many similar themes between the two, and I thought Alien Clay was the better book. Prior to reading this I read Tchaikovsky’s “Children of Time”, “Service Model” and “Alien Clay”. Out of all of those, I enjoyed “Service Model” the most. Sadly, I think Service Model was much different from what Tchaikovsky generally writes.
This story follows two Special Project members (Juna Ceelander an admin, and Mai Ste Etienne an engineer) who are involved in an accident in orbit and end up on the surface of the inhabitable planet Shroud. As they try to figure out a way to get their pod rescued from Shroud’s surface, they discover that life on Shroud may be intelligent and get some strange help from the local life there.
This book had so many similarities to Alien Clay. The background is that humanity has destroyed life on Earth and taken to external planets for resources, stripping them. Then there is the encounter with life so alien that humanity can’t begin to understand how the alien life communicates. Also, there is the theme of alien life working as a collective rather than individuals. Even the way things play out is eerily similar between the two books.
I appreciated the unique take on an alien life form presented here. It was original and intriguing. Unfortunately, at times it was so alien that it is hard to picture and follow what is going on. This made the book hard to read at points and I found myself going back to re-read portions to try to figure out what was going on.
I never really felt like I knew the characters well. Even though we spend the majority of time with Juna and Mai trapped in a small pod, we never really get to know them. I felt more engagement with the alien mind than with our human characters. It made it hard for me to really care what was happening in the story.
In the end, I almost stopped reading this completely a couple of times. There were many instances where my eyes would just glaze over at all of Juna’s internal dialogue, and I would realize I had been staring at the page without actually processing anything I was reading. However, the alien that Juna and Mai interacted with on the planet was intriguing enough to keep me reading.
My Summary (3/5): Overall, I didn’t love this one. I think if you really loved Alien Clay (I liked it but didn’t love it) you might enjoy this. If you read Alien Clay and didn’t find it engaging or accessible, I would skip this book since it is very similar but, in my opinion, even less accessible than Alien Clay was. The alien life here is almost too alien to comprehend, and the humans are too inhuman to pull you into their story. I prefer Tchaikovsky’s more ironic and humorous sci-fi like “Service Model” to his odd deep dives into alien planets. I will continue to follow Tchaikovsky as an author because he is so prolific, but will be more discerning about which books of his I pick up to read in the future.
