Shroud
‘Thrilling, terrifying and fascinating’ Tim Peake, British ESA astronaut They looked into darkness. The darkness looked back... An utterly gripping story of survival and first contact on a hostile planet from Adrian Tchaikovsky, author of the Arthur C. Clarke Award-winning Children of Time. A commercial expedition to a distant star system discovers a pitch-black moon alive with radio activity. Its high-gravity, high-pressure, zero-oxygen environment is deadly to human life, but ripe for exploitation. They named it Shroud. Under no circumstances can a human survive Shroud’s inhospitable surface – but a catastrophic accident forces Juna Ceelander and Mai Ste Etienne to make an emergency landing in a barely adequate escape vehicle. Alone, and fighting for survival, the two women embark on a gruelling journey across land, sea and air in search of salvation. But as they travel, Juna and Mai begin to understand Shroud’s unnerving alien species. It also begins to understand them. If they escape Shroud, they’ll somehow have to explain the impossible and translate the incredible. That is, if they make it back at all... * * * Praise for Shroud ‘Clever, vivid and terrifying...
Stats for nerds
8recommend
12mentions
10people
2025–2026years
75% recommend17% neutral8% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- For another perspective on this, see the book Shroud (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shroud_(Tchaikovsky_novel)), there is all sorts of nifty commentary on oxygen related to your point.
(it's a great book in general, but the bit about our use of a volatile gas for a living environment is pretty neat)
- For those who already read Rendezvous with Rama but need their alien aliens fix I can highly recommend "Shroud" by Adrian Tchaikovsky. It is a similar theme with modern writing and convincing aliens as is pretty much expected by now from Tchaikovsky.
- "Wonder" might be the wrong way to describe it, but Blindsight by Peter Watts gave me the same feeling of "this is incredibly alien and I have no idea what will happen next".
Other books with a similar plot structure and deeply alien vibe:
- Shroud by Adrian Tchaikovsky (recommended elsewhere in this thread)
- Pushing Ice by Alastair Reynolds
I know there's one I'm forgetting.
- While reading Pushing Ice a very common thought I had was "did Reynolds want to do a Rama sequels?"
Shroud is great, easy recommendation. Another of Tchaikovsky, Alien Clay, also great, also very alien.
- This short story is set in the same universe as Tchaikovsky's excellent "Shroud" novel and in fact it's the same ship. I wonder where it sits in the chronology because I think the ending of Shroud surely permits an interesting sequel.
- In Shroud, Tchaikovsky does very alien (“real” aliens, not “uplifts”) very well. Anthropocentrically, it does not “end well.” Literarily, it vies for my favorite SciFi read of ‘25. Technically, I read “There Is No Antimemetics Division” last year, but I’d already kind of read it... or at least I think I thought I had.
uh uh, uh
