Shroud by Adrian Tchaikovsky
(Tor, 2025)
Reviewed by Stuart Carter
As an elevator pitch for Adrian Tchaikovsky’s latest novel, Shroud, I can think of none better than “it’s Terry Gilliam’s 1985 film, Brazil, meets Peter Watts’ 2006 novel Blindsight.” Pitch that to me and I’d buy it—not just because both are personal favourites, but because Tchaikovsky, against all odds, somehow succeeds in bringing these strange bedfellows together.
The spaceship Garveneer is orbiting the planet Shroud, looking for material resources to exploit. It’s just another step on an endlessly bootstrapping mission: Earth has been exploited past bearing and is no longer habitable, so humanity, having apparently learnt nothing, is relentlessly expanding, and each new system is stripped to pay for the exploitation or colonisation of the next.
Juna is a low-ranking member of the Garveneer Special Projects team tasked with cracking the mystery of Shroud, but their continued failure to “crack” Shroud is catching the attention of Garveneer’s upper management, known (in a euphemism that anyone who has worked for a big company will recognise) as “Opportunities”. If Juna and her team can’t earn their keep on the Garveneer, they’ll get put back to sleep in the habitat tanks, with all the other unproductive crew. And then, remarkably, a probe returns a brief signal: a few scant seconds of nightmarish footage reveals a dark tangle of blind, incessantly seething, terrifying alien life.
Under renewed pressure from Opportunities to cut corners in pursuit of efficiencies, Juna and her team are persuaded to build an experimental crewed craft that might—just!—survive the sightless, cold, crushing, screaming embrace of Shroud. It’s not a serious attempt, of course, because no one would go on such a mission. That would be madness. Until disaster strikes the Garveneer, sending Juna and her team crashing down into the horrifying darkness of Shroud, a darkness in which everything is moving, but also something is, somehow, watching.
The planet of Shroud is a remarkable creation. Tchaikovsky inexorably reveals it to be what I can only describe as a sort of gothic omniphobia: dark, crawling, and inescapable. There’s such an awful lack of hope throughout Shroud, even as Juna struggles to hold it together you can’t help but wonder why she even bothers. Reading it in my warm, brightly-lit home, I still shuddered at the slowly growing revelations and inexplicable horror of being trapped on this very VERY alien world. If you struggled with spiders in Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time you’re going to have a bad time reading Shroud, so well-realised is this cold hell of a place.
I mentioned Blindsight earlier, for that book’s comparable horror, but there’s a another level of “blindsight” here, too, because the denizen(s) of Shroud haven’t evolved to see as we do (light doesn’t penetrate their atmosphere) and the humans can’t see, for the same reason, except by using searchlights to find their way. The two species are on different wavelengths—literally! How do you talk to aliens when you are invisible to all their senses?
Shroud brings together the horrors of Blindsight and Brazil, but the inhabitant(s) of Shroud are only one half of the nightmare, and arguably not the worst half, because the world of the Garveneer and world of The Concern are as much a horror story as anything wriggling on Shroud. Juna, our narrator, might be a sympathetic character, and her slow descent into exhaustion and madness is well presented, but she’s still part of the human problem rather than the solution, supporting an inhuman, uncaring, inescapable social system.
Shroud is an exceptional tale by a writer at the peak of his powers, but beware, because it’s not a happy book!
Review from BSFA Review 25 - Download your copy here.