The background of the recording was just sections of monster shifting past one another, but in the foreground was the best view yet of a single creature as it reached for the drone. That blind spiral face opening out like a fractal, always with more and smaller arms unfolding from its heart. To a human eye there should have been some commonality there. They were not so infinitely alien, surely. And yet the blindness of them, the weird asymmetry of their bodies, the bizarre intricacies of their construction, like mechanisms, like toys, all spoke of a queasy wrongness.
page 62, 1.5 Light, Shroud by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Table of Contents
Before Shroud There Was…
In my 2022 reading challenge, one of the books I read was Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky, a book that I wish I had written a longer review for as it is one of the most unique and interesting science fiction books I’ve ever read. I am glad that I get to remedy that by talking about another Adrian Tchaikovsky book.
I first about Shroud in a video about upcoming June 2025 releases video by Elliot Brooks. At that point I put it in my TBR for later. I didn’t get around to reading this book until the new year, I just wasn’t particularly in a mood for science fiction in 2025 so I read very few sci-fi books that year, eight out of sixty-one according to my Storygraph 2025 reading wrap-up. The Monk and Robot duology by the inimitable Becky Chambers was the most notable book I read that year.
So near the end of 2025, I was looking through my to-be-read pile for books that I added in 2025 but didn’t get around to reading and placing library holes on some of them. Shroud was one of them and it was in my first library haul of the year alongside, Sula & Private Rites.
Without further ado, let’s get into it.
The Book
Shroud is very much a Adrian Tchaikovsky book and that is apparent from the jump. From what I remember of Children of Time the human side of the story was quite uninteresting and I was far more interested in what the aliens were up to. That was the case for this book as well.
After a brief prologue, the book goes into a mercifully short introduction of the human characters in this book and the kind of universe they inhabit. In the far future world of Shroud, humans live under a cyberpunk like corporate dystopia world where humans live under the aegis of mega corporations called Concerns. It is all rather droll stuff that I suspect anyone who has engaged with dystopian science fiction stories has seen many a time.
This section introduces the two main human characters of the book, Juna Ceelander & Mai Ste Etienne who are the only two human characters for the majority of the book. The book provides a partial list of the crew of the human space ship/station Garveneer but most of these characters are ancillary to the main plot and as such don’t get enough character development for me to form strong opinions about them.
Juna and Mai however are I think really quite well done. I liked their character development throughout their harrowing journey across the inhospitable and alien terrain of they crash landed on, the titular Shroud. Juna and Mai’s story is combines the best elements of survival horror into a tense package. Every little snag, every time our characters faced another roadblock, it spiked my heart rate, how were our characters gonna make it out of this one?
Let’s talk about the aliens in Shroud because I think they are the best aspect of this book. Adrian Tchaikovsky has a rare talent for writing aliens as truly alien. Not just humanoid creatures that have slight different physical and psychological characteristics. The aliens in this book are alien in every possible way – from what their bodies look like, to the way they eat, to the way they interact and communicate with each other, and to the way they understand themselves and the humans who so rudely crash landed upon their planet.
Out of all these sounds arose the sensory voice. The voice which returns to the ear bringing information on the physical nature of the world. At a range beyond the groping reach of limbs and antennae. With an acuity and informational load beyond the capacity of scent, and far less vulnerable to the environmental disruption of wind and weather. The handful of creature lineages that independently developed this facility became the next masters, and the rest died out, or were driven into specialized forms, eking their living at the margins of the world. Looking back, this change marked the next great age of the world. A mass extinction and replacement, driven by a single sensory innovation.
page 226, Interlude Three
The book alternates between two set of perspectives, the Light perspective which is the perspective of Juna & Mai and the Darkness perspective which is the perspective of the Otherlike, the sentient aliens living on this dark moon. Adrian Tchaikovsky occasionally sprinkles in narrative interlude sections that explain how the creatures of Shroud came to be.
The Darkness perspectives were hands down my favourite, they emphasized everything that makes Adrian Tchaikovsky’s writing so interesting to me. These sections got really fucking weird and it was truly fascinating to see how the aliens understood what the humans were doing from their perspective. It felt truly alien and it enhanced the horror aspects of this book, the fear of the unknown emanating from both human and alien as they struggle to understand each other.
I think where the book lost me was the ending. The book ended by leaving a very important question frustratingly unanswered and it felt like like cheap way to add a bit of mystery and suspense to the whole affair. It was a hook for a sequel for a standalone book which made it worse. If this was part one of a larger series I could at least look forward to getting some answers but alas I am to be left unsatisfied.
Conclusions
I think that my standards for what constitutes good science fiction are set perhaps a bit too high. The works of Becky Chambers has set a new bar of quality for sci-fi and nothing else has come close to matching those books. While Shroud‘s survival horror elements were evocative and its alien world truly terrifying and unique, the ending of the book left a sour taste in my mouth and downgrades this book to “average”.
This book made me want to read more science fiction and I am hoping to read more in 2026. Dear reader of this review: your suggestions are very much welcome; I have a penchant for space operas along with a healthy dose of intrigue, I won’t say no to cool space ships, weird aliens, and maybe some queer romance sprinkled in.
That is all from me this time around. See y’all in the next one.
Thank you for reading this blog post. Please consider supporting my writing work directly through Stripe or Patreon. Additionally, please share this post on your socials and/or with your friends. It really helps! If you have any thoughts/feedback/thoughtful criticism to share, feel free to use the handy contact me page to send that to me.