Really enjoyed the world building and setting. Hopeful that this will be continued in future books as would like to know what happens to the characters.
Pacing was great and the different POV’s kept it engaging.
Scientific terminology was quite heavy but to be expected from Adrian Tchaikovsky.

Entertaining but neither groundbreaking nor thought-provoking

First, the good: i liked the setting, there was enough fun stuff to keep me engaged, and the writing is nice. There's aliens to look at, weird shit to investigate, it's in space and then on an unwelcoming planet... if you like this kind of stuff, have at it!

The not-convincing-but-not-bad: the alien POV was fun for a bit, but i felt that it didn't go far enough. There was a lot of potential, but in the end it didn't feel as alien as it should have, and was too predictable. I wish the author had gone deeper into the weird and given us a more "experimental" narration for their thoughts.

The mediocre: characters were so boring! The narration is way too dispassionate and the main character felt like she lived a thousand kilometers away from us. Couldn't connect with her at all, which means i felt very little of the tension: it's hard to be a "gripping story" when everyone is so bland. The other characters were very much NPCs with 1 defining characteristic each, and i couldn't care less about them.
The pacing also suffered. I got to 70% feeling engaged and thinking it was the end, only to have it drag on for another 30%, and it being super predictable and boring. I didn't make a connection to the characters and the mystery was solved (at least to the reader) so i didn't feel compelled to read on (and i can attest that nothing new came up!).

The bad: if you start making a point about how bad it is to have huge conglomerates that exploit humans, then you need to actually engage with the deep thoughts. When i already can't care for the characters, you need to show me novel ideas, interesting arguments, or something (anything!) to explain your idea.
Here i just got told a hundred time that the Concern (the megacorpo) is bad and exploitative. That's not enough! Just saying: we have to do the work or else they'll put us back in hibernation is boring, sorry. There was a pseudo "i was a good worker but now i see the bad and i don't like it anymore" twist, except that the character had always been expressing rebellious thoughts so it didn't hit.
I didn't feel the reach of the Concern, their power, the bad life, or any of the bad things. It felt way too much like being in an office with a bad boss and a low budget -- but i don't need to go to space for that!
There was no exploration of the bureaucracy, the surveillance, the authoritarism, the inhumane living conditions, the raising of children, the re-writing of history to suit the needs of the machine... then why did you bring them all up? Felt like we were vacationing in a dystopian world without any meaningful thoughts behind it.

So in conclusion: read if you love anything with aliens and a little extravehicular adventure; don't if you like the deeper thoughts and concepts of sci-fi: Alien Clay (by the same author) has both, but done a lot better.

3.75 ⭐

Una piccola premessa: sono di parte, la mia opinione sul libro potrebbe essere influenzata dalla mia fedeltà indiscussa all’autore. Nonostante trovi che Tchaikovsky abbia reso meglio in altri suoi progetti (un esempio, Children of Time, con cui ha moltissimo in comune) anche in Shroud ho ritrovato elementi e tematiche cardine, a me ormai familiari, che melo hanno fatto apprezzare: il risvolto espansivo e distruttivo del progresso tecnologico con sequenze orrorifiche, AI, specie aliene senzienti, l'incomunicabilità tra specie diverse.
Posso definire Shroud un sci-fi cosmic horror costruito da molte voci, uniche e distinguibili tra loro a comporre una narrazione architettonica e complessa. Molto più semplicemente, first contact with alien.
La Terra non è più abitabile - molte opere di speculative fiction ci preannunciavano questo triste destino - e l’umanità si sposta in modo distruttivo alla ricerca di nuove risorse da sfruttare. Un ristretto gruppo di prodigiosi ed eroici pionieri dello spazio si muove nel cosmo nel disperato tentativo di far perdurare la razza. Tutti sono utili, ma se non si rivelano indispensabili subiscono il sonno criogenico volto a non sprecare e razionare al meglio le poche risorse. In questo senso, si potrebbe aprire anche un’enorme parentesi sull’aspetto ecologico della narrazione.
Shroud è spessa tenebre che avviluppa ogni cosa, aria densa e ammonica, irrespirabile, oceani ghiacciati. Le comunicazioni sono interrotte, specie aliene senzienti sono in grado di riconoscere le onde radio, ma spesso per entrambe le parti è difficile - impossibile - comprendere le intenzioni dell’altro. Juna e Mai, si destreggiano tra i pericoli di un mondo biologicamente sconosciuto e dalle conformazioni inspiegabili, sono in grado di rimanere vigili unicamente assumendo cocktail di droghe stimolanti e calmanti, unico scopo: tornare alla civiltà che conoscono raccogliendo quanti più dati - e quanti più traumi - possibili.
I POV sono tre, due dei quali poco convenzionali. Se la narrazione umana è lineare e frenetica e vuole giustificare le proprie azioni, quella aliena ci consente di sbirciare il risvolto della medaglia, di guardare con gli occhi dell’invaso e non dell’invasore. Un terzo punto di vista è quello effettivo del narratore - che io personalmente ho identificato come la genesi della razza aliena, ovvero la memoria del primo individuo che cerca di ricomporre la sua storia spiegando come si è arrivati al momento presente.
La narrazione è altalenante, sequenze molto veloci, pregne di avvenimenti e cataclismi, si alternano a momenti strascicati e questo mi ha fatto tentennare sulla valutazione finale. Uno dei concetti più interessanti sta proprio nelle forme di vita aliena di cui, all’interno di intermezzi, ci viene raccontata la genesi. Possessori di una coscienza semplicistica, ma funzionale evletale, ricorrono alla memoria e all’appartenenza come forma di sopravvivenza. E’ come se ogni singolo individuo sia il tassello di un grande unico corpo in grado di accumulare informazioni, ricordi, azioni e agire di conseguenza.
Ringrazio Netgalley, Pan MacMillan e Adrian Tchaikovsky per avermi concesso di leggere il libro in anteprima in cambio di una recensione onesta.

A dark, crushing world inhabited by strange creatures and with resources that humans can plunder. Until two humans find themselves stranded, at the mercy of those primitive aliens.

This is an enthralling story, full of claustrophobic scenes, set on a world that is toxic to humans, but where the locals have developed a way to survive, and thrive.

I've loved every book I've read by this author, and this one was exceptional. The world building and the creativity that went into the different creatures on Shroud is phenomenal, and the human interactions are, unfortunately, just what you would expect. A must read for anyone who loves sci-fi, and for Adrian Tchaikovsky fans! Highly recommend.

Tchaikovsky has managed to write a book that feels super filmic even though it’s basically set in pitch blackness. Lots of exobiology, lots of adventure, lots of drugs, and plenty of corporation bashing - what’s not to love?

Excellent, both a tightly written science fiction thriller and a parable of "mastery of the universe"

I love a story about intrepid spacefaring humans exploring an alien planet and Shroud delivers just that (although it’s actually a moon!). The sheer level of detail that Adrian Tchaikovsky goes into in creating the darkness and overwhelming noise of Shroud is incredible. I loved seeing the layers of this utterly alien environment being peeled back.

I do wish the characters had been a little more developed. I really enjoyed our two main characters, but felt there could have been more moments of bonding and stronger personal arcs for both of them. But having said that, this novel is really more about Shroud than the people exploring it and the adventure-packed story definitely delivers on that front!

Weirder, more compelling, and a lot more fun than it has any right to be, Shroud picks up scraps and threads from other Tchaikovsky novels — just-so evolutionary sagas, pitch-black hydrocarbon exoplanets, very human awfulness — and reweaves them into a surprisingly taut and fresh adventure. One of his better one offs, which is a high bar to clear when you’re in a deep-sea bathysphere and crushing gravity.

———————

On the surface Shroud is arguably a bit of a throwback, following two castaways struggling to survive treacherous landscapes, freezing oceans, and alien monsters as they struggle back to (our) civilisation. It’s a plot that could have come straight out of 1950s sci fi and the American-pioneers-in-space canon, but one of Shroud’s great pleasures is how gleefully Tchaikovsky inverts the elements of his premise; instead of Heinleinian freemen, our space pioneers are two women stuck in corporate peonage, their ingenuity is largely bumbling about while the locals do the actual surviving, and all the derring-do happens while our heroes are prone in acceleration couches cranked up on improbably large doses of pharmaceuticals.

And somehow, despite the obvious potential for a fatal tonal clash, Shroud feels incredibly natural. A lot of the credit here has to go to Tchaikovsky’s mastery of incident and adventure-story plotting, which keeps things moving at a brisk clip with fresh perils while still tipping the hat to the drudgery of trying to cross half a planet inside a jazzed-up diving bell. It certainly helps that Tchaikovsky has outdone himself in imagining a truly alien ecosystem, logically drawing out how a lightless, crushing world might plausibly produce life very that is much not as we know it (and yet somehow also yielding excellent critters for driving a survival story forward).

The action off of Shroud is a bit less seamless, with the other human corporates being (usually) a bit too moustache-twirling and their local opposition a smidgen too all-capable for my taste, even if there is some nuance. But as the final twist of the plot makes clear, the actual heart of the story is firmly back on the ground, with inventive alien life rubbing shoulders with humans putting one robotic leg in front of another, again and again and again.

I honestly don't know how Adrian Tchaikovsky does it. Book after book, one better than another, and not a single one that I didn't like. This one is probably my favourite out of all his works after the whole Children of Time series, because it's also concept-driven rather than character or plot-driven, and this is my jam as far as sci fi goes.

It's hard to describe the plot of the book without going into spoilers, so let's keep things vague here. A group of explorers is tasked to research a strange moon with intensely dense atmosphere that is also entirely saturated by radio waves produces by strange forms of lives there; things don't go according to plan (obviously). The rest is best left unknown until the reader actually gets through the book but I absolutely guarantee that anyone who loved Children of Time and its sequels would love this book as well.

Thank you to author and publisher for the arc!

I am a huge fan of Tchaikovsky, so when I saw this on netgalley I ran to request it.

I genuinely think this is one of his strongest works so far. The story was compelling, the characters were well-written to the point where you truly cared about what happened to them and there was just the right amount of thrill to the book where it didn’t become dramatic.

I don’t know how he does it, but yet again an amazing addition to Tchaikovsky’s backlist.

It's simply not possible to read Mr Tchaikovsky's stories quickly! His work is always so rich with details and descriptions that you can create a 'movie' in your mind of the words you're reading. Shroud is superb. There's the Special Projects team as they try to decipher Shroud's secrets from their little space station, the sinister aspect of Shroud itself, the unfortunate accident that strands members of the team on Shroud's surface, and how they felt when they realised just how little they actually knew about Shroud's 'inhabitants' from their observations from space. The story is simply mind-boggling! And the ending ... just wow!
Thanks to Netgalley, Pan Macmillan, and Adrian Tchaikovsky for a free ARC in exchange for an honest review

I really enjoyed this book. It was entertaining and it kept you guessing. There was enough peril to keep it interesting without it being too much to make it so you didn't want to go on. I liked the characters of Mai and Juna. I liked that they both had mental breaks because who wouldn't in their position? I found the science believable but not too complex even if I did have to look up quite a few words. I liked that the aliens weren't even remotely like humans. I believe that the exploitation of worlds is exactly what would happen if we ever got that technology. I give it 4.5 stars.

I would probably read anything Adrian wrote including his latest shopping list because I’m pretty sure it would be better than most books in the current top 10!
I’m not going to bore people who can be bothered to even read my review by recanting the story, it’s very good! Read it !!

In the far flung future, humanity lives among the stars and exploits any planet it comes into contact with. On the moon of Shroud, a survey team comes into contact with a primitive society, but one with the capacity to learn. When they become stranded, will peace or science win the day?

Well, neither actually. Hard SF fans will lap this up quicker than a second-hand copy of New Scientist, but it’s not dynamic enough to sustain attention. The writing is heavily factual. And, yes I’ll admit that is a trope of the genre. But despite the odd flourish (humanity is genetically engineered for deep space) the crew are the hard-boiled narks that have inhabited SF since the Nostromo in 1979.

The plot picks up a little in the middle eight of the book, but this is what Whovians will know as ‘base under siege’. The prose style here is choppy, episodic and resolved far too quickly. The alien race (worm-like, using endoskeletons and sacrificing the injured to their god) is a fascinating concept, but they are seen first as bloodthirsty Lovecraftian beasties and then noble angels at the ends of the novel.

It’ll have its fans, but it found it too cold and worthy to keep my interest. It’s published by Pan Macmillan on February 27th, 2025 and I thank them for a copy. #shroud

Fantastic worldbuilding and alien biology as always from Tchaikovsky, but while the beginning and end grabbed my attention, the middle was a bit of a slog at times. Still an excellent read but I think it could have been even better at novella length. Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC