Synopsis:

They looked into the darkness and the darkness looked back . . .

New planets are fair game to asset strippers and interplanetary opportunists – and a commercial mission to a distant star system discovers a moon that is pitch black, but alive with radio activity. Its high-gravity, high-pressure, zero-oxygen environment is anathema to human life, but ripe for exploitation. They named it Shroud.

Under no circumstances should a human end up on Shroud’s inhospitable surface. Except a catastrophic accident sees Juna Ceelander and Mai Ste Etienne doing just that. Forced to stage an emergency landing, in a small, barely adequate vehicle, they are unable to contact their ship and are running out of time. What follows is a gruelling journey across land, sea and air. During this time, Juna and Mai begin to understand Shroud’s dominant species. It also begins to understand them . . .

If they escape Shroud, they’ll face a crew only interested in profiteering from this extraordinary world. They’ll somehow have to explain the impossible and translate the incredible. That is, if they make it back at all.

Review:

A disclaimer before the review: I was sent a finished copy by the lovely folks over at Pan Macmillan for this review as I am taking part in the release tour over on Instagram today.

This was the first Tchaikovsky I’ve read and I can tell you that it definitely won’t be the last! I was immediately hooked and found the more I read, the less I was able to put it down.

Tchaikovsky is a master at dreaming up alien worlds and exploring them through very human eyes. In Shroud, our main narrator is Juna, and we follow her and the rest of her team as they orbit and then ‘accidentally’ explore a planet engulfed in darkness for the possibility of mining it for resources, only for them to encounter unexpected and unknowable alien life.

The strange planet and the stranger alien life that inhabits it were so interesting and so well written. A little way in we get a very unique POV added that helps us mere humans understand it a little better. The polarities between this POV and Juna’s were fantastic and only grew as the story progressed which made for fascinating reading. Having one dive deeper and deeper into despair while the other grew more curious and more excited was perfection.

As I said, we explore Shroud through very human eyes here and we take a good, hard look at what defines alienness and humanness through the pages of this book. The humans here are an extreme version of us, though I do fear it is a version that is slowly becoming recognisable. Corporate greed rules and the general population are nothing more than cogs in the machine, only ‘in use’ when they are actually useful to the company. It offered a stark look at what humanity is and what it could be.

Overall I had a great time reading this, and if you love some alien encounters on a very creepy and atmospheric planet, then this is for you.

Which Tchaikovsky should I pick up next?