Shroud

Adrian Tchaikovsky
Completed 5/6/2026, Reviewed 5/6/2026
4 stars

This is another excellent book by Tchaikovsky.  Like Children of Time, it’s dense, perhaps denser.  The first few days, I could only read about twenty pages at a time before it felt too heavy.  It’s another tale of an encounter with aliens, this time on the moon of a gas giant in a distant solar system.  The moon is named Shroud because it has a densely clouded, toxic atmosphere, much like our Venus.  The pressure of its atmosphere is many times that of Earth and the gravity is twice Earth’s.  One would think it wouldn’t sustain life.  But when two people from a mining exploration ship are stranded on there, they must survive not only the 2g and high atmospheric pressure, but the creatures they discover living there.  This book was nominated for a 2026 Hugo for Best Novel.  

Juna is the assistant to the project director on board the ship.  Her task is basically to be the calm intermediary between the disparate personalities on the ship.  While the others write her off as little more than a secretary, she does most of the hard work the director takes credit for.  Also on board is Mai, a brilliant and confrontative engineer who doesn’t play well with others, like most of the rest of the crew.  When an accident occurs ripping open the project’s part of the ship, the two end up on a pod together and plummet to the moon’s surface.  They can’t communicate with their ship because of the dense atmosphere and the high amount of electromagnetic interference.  They can’t see much more than ten to fifteen feet because of the thick and obscuring atmosphere.  To survive, they realize they need to go halfway around the moon to get to the anchor that reaches up to the ship.  Monsters of various types are in their way.  The dominant monster is a strange slug-like thing encased in what appears to be a constructed exoskeleton.  Nicknamed the Shrouded, they continually try to take apart the pod, the only thing separating Juna and Mai from a certain crushing and toxic death.  The two must find a way to reach the anchor through these monsters if they are to survive.

This book is similar to “Children” in that after about a hundred pages, when Juna and Mai are stranded on Shroud, the chapters alternate between them and the monstrous aliens.  It’s a bit derivative, but the circumstances are very different.  In this case, the aliens’ main source of input and output is echolocation and electromagnetic waves.  None of the creatures, including the Shrouded, have eyes, since the atmosphere is obscured by clouds.  So communication between the humans and the Shrouded is non-existent, as neither understands how the other exists, let alone communicates.  

The human perspective chapters are narrated by Juna.  She’s quite the brilliant person for being relatively non-technical.  At first, she and Mai butt heads, but as time crawls, they learn to communicate with each other and figure out how to survive.  It took me quite a while to get inside Juna’s head due to the denseness of the prose.  I think I finally broke through once she and Mai were on better terms.  I actually related more to the Shrouded.  I think that was because of my general distaste for the humans in the beginning.  They were belligerent towards each other and quite xenophobic towards the Shrouded.  

The themes running in this book were xenophobia (naturally) and corporate greed.  Humans are in stasis on the spaceship until they’re needed, much like tools in a shed, and are treated as little more than that.  It also explores the problems with a very style of communication much different than humans and even the spiders from “Children.”  

This book requires a lot of concentration.  It’s not that technical, just, again, very dense in its prose.  The world building is phenomenal, as Tchaikovsky always is.  It’s because of the denseness as well as the similarity to “Children” that I give it less than 5 stars.  It gets four out of five.  I’m not sure how I’ll vote in the Hugos yet.  I have four more books to read.  Then I’ll see how this compares to the others.