In space, no one can hear you hypothesize
Synopsis
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 . . .
If they escape Shroud, they’ll face a crew only interested in profiteering from this extraordinary world. They’ll somehow have to explain the impossible and translate the incredible. That is, if they make it back at all.
Review
Shroud, Adrian Tchaikovsky’s latest sci-fi wunderkind, covers themes familiar to his readers—aliens that have undergone branches of evolution we can barely understand, and the humans chaotically trying to understand them. But Shroud shows evidence that the author is not resting on his thematic laurels but continually honing and refining both his storytelling and his prose, a writer evolving to better depict evolution. Evolution Inception, if you will. Or to put it in a less convolutedly smug way, this is one of the most satisfying sci-reads you’ll get your naturally adapted limbs on this year, a sci-fi visionary at the peak of his powers.
The plot concerns first contact gone wrong as human corporate colonisers attempt to understand a new planet, with the result that two of them end up trapped in a pod on the planet’s surface in a battle for survival and understanding against the bizarre life forms down there. Unlike his recent effort into humans faced with impossible alien life, Alien Clay, these are not people under the thumb of an Orwellian science-fascist regime but rather humdrum subjects of an exploitative corporate behemoth looking for new systems to colonise, like a future Musk-scape but stripped of the ‘break things’ ketamine energy and replaced by officious corporate-speak. As usual it’s a depressing but compelling potential future from the author.
The planet they have found and that two of them are trapped on in short order is, even by Tchaikovsky’s standards, compellingly alien; a murky inhospitable landscape that sees no light and is fuelled by noxious substances such as methane and ammonia. No, not a teenager’s bedroom, but the scene for one of the great alien-building evolutionary triumphs of recent spec fiction. Obviously I’ll say nothing of their nature here, but it’s not just a compellingly brilliant idea of what kind of life could come from such seemingly inhospitable origins antithetical to the idea of life, but, when their true nature is revealed beyond what we initially learn, we are presented with a concept of consciousness so utterly creative—simplistic in its essential nature yet wildly complex too—that I had a Joker-style grin plastered on my face for most of the ensuing pages.
But this isn’t a TED talk on the wild boundaries of what we consider life, it’s a thrill-a-minute ride, and the way that Tchaikovsky blends the ruminations on these alien forms with the frantic survival action is genuinely impressive. The prose is clinical, vivid, lucid and jumps between Jurassic Park-style survival frolics and deep alien theorising with remarkable ease. I had whiplash of the best kind switching from a certain stream of consciousness narrative perspective that Tchaikovsky fans will be familiar with to the thrill-a-minute perils awaiting the plucky scientists in their sturdy yet oh so vulnerable exploration pod. It’s the most intellectually stimulating white knuckle adrenaline ride you’ll read for a while in sci-fi.
As for the characters themselves, I was drawn towards the simple dynamic of the two scientists trapped in the pod: the one who’s good with people and the one with the gifts who is not. It’s a well-worn but dynamic relationship that helps to power this journey of survival and alien discovery. This isn’t meant to be a deep character study though; the real treasure is comparing their reactions and supposed theories to the real nature of the aliens and realising how deeply limited, even in a hypothetical future of such advanced science, our perspective will always be to the wild potential of life in the universe.
Overall, it cannot be emphasised how hard it must be for a writer to marry such wild, evolutionary hypotheses with such a clean, lucidly described non-stop thrill-ride. Tchaikovsky is evolving his writing like one of the wild alien consciousnesses he writes about, and the result is a likely candidate for the most fun you’ll have in space this year.
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