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 !!

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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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.

This is a book about humanity. What it is, what it means, how it's expressed, and how it affects us. It's also a damned fine sci-fi adventure yarn.

Told through two mostly alternating points of view, one human, one alien, the narrative follows a human resource-stripping mission sent out ahead of the greater human diaspora to find and grab all the resources they can, and where applicable establish waystations for future humans to use and colonise. Along the way they discover Shroud, a tidally-locked moon of a gas giant, where the atmosphere is so thick that at the surface there is nothing but darkness. Well, darkness, and life. And when disaster strikes and two of the humans, Juna and Mai, get caught on the surface with nothing but their tiny pod to keep them alive, that life begins to take an interest in them.

As I mentioned at the top of this review, this book is about what it means to be human, and while the humans in this book are recognisably us, they're a version of us that's become consumed by corporate excess, absorbed into the gestalt that is the corporation machine, commodified, and ultimately dehumanised by the world they live in and the society they belong to. Spending most of their time in sleep pods, 'shelved', as it's referred to, the main human characters are consigned to an existence in which they're nothing more than interchangeable parts in the greater organism that is the corporation, which in turn is the ship and its mission.

The alien life of Shroud, on the other hand, is a gestalt that has fractured, a hive mind that can only maintain its memories and reason by staying close to its constituent parts. And should one or more of those parts get separated from the whole, a new colony is formed, a new mind begins.

Just like the uplifted species Tchaikovsky gives us in his <i>Children of Time</i> series, the aliens here are ridiculously well written, and genuinely feel alien. But then again, so do the humans to some degree. At one point Juna, the human narrator of the story, compares the Shrouders to ants, but clearly doesn't see that the same comparison could be made of the humans themselves.

As with pretty much all of Tchaikovsky's high-concept sci-fi, the writing here is a seamless blend of technical exposition and character-driven exploration. The growing sense of despair and defeat felt by the human narrator is perfectly captured throughout the developing story, and the sense of wonder and enlightenment that fills the Shrouders as they learn more about the strange creatures that have invaded their world is just as palpable.

There are a lot of moments throughout this book where I wanted to slap one or more of the human characters, but it's the ending that ultimately got to me. The final wrap-up, and the way in which everything is brought full circle, almost had me throwing my kindle across the room in frustration. But in a good way. Even now, a week and a half after finishing it, that ending still sticks with me, and that, above all else, is why I love this book.

Definitely a strong and well-earned five-stars, and definitely one I'd recommend you read.