Shroud

I was initially leery of picking up Adrian Tchaikovsky’s latest book Shroud. It seemed to have a space horror vibe, and while I’ve enjoyed a lot of Tchaikovsky’s work, I’m not a horror fan. I don’t mind if a story has elements of it, but usually don’t enjoy straight horror. Thankfully, Shroud isn’t horror, but more a demonstration of how hard it could be to communicate with an alien intelligence living in a radically different environment.

Humanity has reached the stars, but only after struggling through a couple of “bottlenecks”, one of which involved the effects of what we’d done to Earth’s environment. Somehow this has resulted in a society ruled by corporations under an extreme form of capitalism, corporations driven to exploit resources in new solar systems and spread out under a manifest destiny type ideology.

When the Garveneer enters a new system to exploit, they discover a moon in orbit around a gas giant that is blasting out over the electromagnetic spectrum. Juna Ceelander is the executive assistant of the leader of the special projects team which is pulled out of hibernation to investigate. The team’s goal is to study the moon to see how it might be exploitable. They are motivated to be as useful as possible since they only earn money when they’re out of hibernation.

The moon is quickly named “Shroud” because it’s shrouded in an impenetrable atmosphere. It turns out to be larger and heavier than Earth, with a much higher gravity, leading to surface pressure over twenty times that of Earth. The atmosphere has no oxygen and has temperatures around minus thirty-five centigrade. It’s not an environment humans can survive in even for an instant. And yet their remote drones quickly discover life.

As they study the moon, the question of whether there should be a crewed mission on Shroud arises. The team engineer, Mai Ste Etienne, under orders from leadership, constructs mobile pods. Ceelander protests the danger but is overruled. She’s happy that she never has to go down into that environment.

Of course, there is a disaster, resulting in exactly that happening. When an accident makes the destruction of their work environment imminent, some of the team realize their only shot at survival is to get into the pods, which end up being ejected from the ship and landing on the surface.

Much of what follows reminds me of Stanley G. Weinbaum’s classic story “A Martian Odyssey”, a story of an astronaut who crash lands hundreds of miles from his team and has to journey back across the surface of Mars.

Ceelander and Ste Etienne end up in a pod together and find themselves in a desperate odyssey across the dark surface of Shroud to reach safety. Along the way they end up in a partnership of sorts with a group of aliens that at times seem threatening, at others seem like their guardians, but whose intentions and motivations are opaque.

But we as the reader get to see things from the alien’s perspective. They are puzzled by this new animal-like thing, which might show aspects of intelligence, but seems so ill-suited for survival. Yet something about it seems important, so after opening up another pod and not finding anything interesting in it (not understanding that it just killed a human), it devotes resources to following the pod with Ceelander and Ste Etienne in it, protecting, guiding, and learning from it as it can.

I enjoyed this book. And Tchaikovsky once again demonstrates his knack for coming up with innovative aliens. But there are some aspects of the story I’m not entirely wild about. The corporate dystopia trope is starting to wear a bit thin with me. And there’s an aspect of the aliens which I feel may be a well Tchaikovsky is going to a bit too often. However that aspect is crucial to the later parts of the plot which I’ll admit give the story a lot more punch.

But these are nits for what is otherwise a thrilling story. I’m learning to trust Tchaikovsky, even when the initial description of the book isn’t necessarily compelling. Highly recommended if it’s your type of tale.