Tchaikovsky is incredibly prolific and blessed with ideas, as shown here, in Shroud.
If I was pitching Shroud to a friend, I might say it’s a mix of The Martian with a futuristic space horror.
We start with a team of scientists investigating a dark and mysterious planet, at the behest of a giant corporation that will simply plunge them into stasis once their job is done. When disaster happens, two team members end up separated from everyone else, plunged into the depths of the planet, trapped inside a small pod that can just about keep them alive. Rescue isn’t coming.
The only thing they can do is try to navigate halfway across the planet without ever leaving the pod – but there’s something oddly alive and conscious moving around them, something so alien they don’t even know how to try communicating…
The author excels at dreaming up new alien ways of existence and this book is no different. The chapters from the Shrouded perspective are fascinating as they evolve over the course of the story. I was less interested in the human characters in some ways – they never quite truly came to life for me. Many of their chapters are hard SF depicting tough times and exhausting journeys and felt a little repetitive – I came a bit close to skimming those.
But it all comes together at the end, so for me it was worth the toil of the journey!
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