Shroud

De: Adrian Tchaikovsky

Narrado por: Sophie Aldred

On a planet shrouded in darkness, a stranded crew must fight for survival. But, the darkness may have plans of its own in this wildly original story from Adrian Tchaikovsky, Hugo and Arthur C. Clarke Award-winning author of Children of Time.

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 . . .

©2025 Adrian Tchaikovsky (P)2025 Orbit

Reseñas de la Crítica

"The most inventive alien world I've ever encountered in SF... Pure Tchaikovsky. I swear the man is some kind of genius."—Peter Watts, author of Blindsight

"Adrian Tchaikovsky explores worlds where no one else would dare to go, and the unimaginable becomes believable... This is hard-edged science fiction that never loses its soul."—Sue Burke, author of Semiosis

"Crunchy, conceptual SF at its best...the best alien contact novel I've read since Peter Watts' Blindsight, and that is high praise indeed."—Richard Morgan, author of Altered Carbon

Maybe the series gets better?

But as a standalone book it was not my favorite.
It’s a “crash-land and don’t get eaten” survival story with an amorphous consciousness arising in the background. It portrays humans so cynically there were maybe ~1.5 people who I even cared if they survived, and their best hope was to return to being slaves of their awful space mining corporation.
The alien life was too abstract to really function as a character.
I don’t get it. Tchaikovsky *knows* how to do characters, even out of radically different forms of emergent consciousness.

Engrossing Visuals

Tchaikovsky’s writing style allows for easy listening while simultaneously building a world of visuals inside your head that keep you entertained throughout.

Typical Tchaikovsky in that there is nothing “typical” about it!

Tchaikovsky always does such a great job with the unknown that is space and with space’s inhabitants. Such a lovely writer and able to create truly new ideas about what it means to be an “alien” or a “human” for that matter! Loved it!

Great delivery - highly recommend.

Great delivery - highly recommend. The story plot is very interesting. well written. A good dystopian POV…I sure hope it never comes true.

It’s all about the reader.

Great performance by the reader, made me finish this book quickly. The story was okay as well

Very slow, both story and narration.

Interesting concept but hard to stick with the excruciatingly long development of the story. Narrator’s voice was pleasant but I had to increase speed to 1.2 to listen.

Alien, human, and utterly wonderful

Tchaikovsky delivers again. This one might end up as a standalone it sounds like, though he has as always left it open ended. If you enjoy his other work, you will enjoy this.

Not His Best Work

Man, I love his books in general, but this was a slog. Halfway through the book and I still don't even care if they all die, just so this monotony will end.

I just can’t get into his books

I can now say I really tried with Tchaikovsky. I read children of time and hated it, and now read this and thought it little better. It’s probably because biology was my least favorite science class in school. I thought the story lacked much action, and I just cannot relate to alien narrators and descriptions of how they work in their environment. I’m a team human kind of guy. I did find the premise behind the aliens to be interesting, though. But that was about it. I think I’m going to close the door on this guy. I just don’t see what others do.