An utterly gripping story of alien encounter and survival from Adrian Tchaikovsky, author of the Arthur C. Clarke Award-winning 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 . . .

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.

Shroud is another Tchaikovsky masterclass in exploring other ways of being and what alien and aliens might really mean. Shroud is a world far more hostile than the gentle M-class planets so beloved of Star Trek The Original Series, and in this enthralling tale a pair of compelling characters find themselves struggling for survival in its ultra-harsh environment.

In some of his previous extra-terrestrial outings, Children of Time, Children of Ruin, Children of Memory, and Alien Clay Tchaikovsky gave us a huge range of different ways of living. There were spiders that we rooted for over their human adversaries. Then the octopuses with complex, colourful, creativity that harnessed the inherent rebelliousness of having a brain in each leg. We saw a bizarre form of intelligence encoded in gene-like wiring and desperate for adventure, and we had an artificial construct that despite never having lived or died, still merited its own existence. And in Alien Clay we got a whole biome of connectivity and collaboration that haltingly taught human prisoners the eternal truth – no-one is an island.

In this latest excursion into the alien, Tchaikovsky again toys with the science of evolution, the nature of organisms, and that most precious aspect of life – connection. At the same time, he takes a side swipe at what others might term ‘the invisible doctrine’ of corporate colonial capitalism which has been pushed on contemporary society as an axiomatic truth rather than a challengeable fallacy.

Our first-person protagonist is Juna Ceelander, administrator within a team of six ‘special projects’ scientists on a space exploration and mining ship the Garveneer. In this vision of humanity’s future the Garveneer reminded me of a pitiless Vogon construction ship, in its role of mining the cosmos, creating space highway hubs and supporting the continuous omnidirectional expansion of our species.

Contemporary progressive voices have pointed out the absurdity of infinite growth on a planet of finite resources, and the backstory of Tchaikovsky’s space-faring civilisation does include a ‘first bottleneck’ or chokepoint on Earth of shrinking resources and climate crisis that has driven humanity into the stars. That kind of future might be the intended outcome of Elon Musk’s obsession with missions to Mars – or it could be just the extrapolation of the savage colonialism that birthed Western Civilisation, with European countries prospering on the riches of the many countries they so graciously settled! Either way Tchaikovsky’s story pursues the dubious logic of a civilisation hell bent on hunting down new worlds to exploit rather than looking after the one we’ve got.

Juna Ceelander’s life in this ‘Brave New Universe’ is anything but secure. Born and bred in communal habitat tanks and groomed for useful work she and her team mates have been kept in the cheap dreamless sleep of suspended animation “on the shelf” in the ship’s hold. They have waited there until an assignment could be proposed where they might be able to recoup the “wage-worth” of waking them up.

Tchaikovsky’s  vision is one of ‘incorporated fealty’ – a kind of indentured servitude to a corporate – rather than feudal – overlord. This circumstance has arisen because only Big Corporations could have been “the salvation of our species … unfettered as they were by the bonds of accountability and reciprocal responsibility.”  (If you don’t realise how much that is a near-future, rather than a far-future prognosis, then let me tell you about the panel where it was seriously suggested that “only the fossil fuel corporations are big enough to  tackle the climate crisis – that they fecking caused.”)

Juna and her fellow team members have been woken from sleep to work on a puzzling object, the moon named Shroud orbiting a gas-giant in the star-system that the Garveener and its detachments are setting about mining to buggery.

The mystery of Shroud is that it is blazing with electromagnetic radiation, emitting a sheet of radio-wave white-noise like an inchoate scream into the void of space.

“It roared. Howled into space, shrieking its pain far out across the void in a thousand tongues. A constant, all-frequencies storm f radio traffic that blazed bright on every instrument we had.”

Now compare this with Earth which has been bawling into space with radio-noise for over a century, everything from Marconi’s first dot-dash-dot-dot to endless reruns of The Big Bang Theory. However, the Special Projects team’s efforts to distil anything as systematic as a Morse signal (let alone a fully fledged sitcom) from the noise of Shroud meet with failure.

Examining the surface by telescope is impossible, due to the dense swirling opacity of Shroud’s atmosphere, while manned missions are scarcely less viable with the combination of a toxic oxygen-free atmosphere, high pressure and well-below zero temperatures.

Garvener’s higher management – The Opportunities team – grow impatient with the half-dozen Special Projects team’s faltering efforts. It is after all in the nature of Opportunities to want to understand quickly what is there and – more importantly – how it can be exploited. Special Projects risk being shelved if they cannot come up with some return on the investment of resources that they have squandered on remote drones, processing power and a rather dubious prototype manned exploration vessel.

Stress and pressure do not make the best working conditions and contribute to the disaster that forces Juna and others in the team to get upfront and personal with the surface of Shroud, and to discover there is something more than just electrical noise down there.

Tchaikovsky, as always, brings a satisfyingly scientific precision to imagining the dark strange world of Shroud. This is surely his most hostile world yet, inimical to carbon-based oxygen-breathing life – Shroud makes Andy Weir’s vision of Mars in The Martian look like a Caribbean beach resort. It is as though the dense swirly opaque clouds of Venus, the tempestuous winds of Neptune, the methane rich atmosphere of Jupiter and the hidden oceans of Triton, had been combined onto one begotten iron cored rock. There is no spacesuit that would withstand these elements, so Juna and her companion are confined within the claustrophobic interior of a kind of Deep Submergence Vehicle (DSV) like the Alvin helped probe the Titanic’s wreck, only this vehicle has legs and arms!

Like the deep oceans of Earth that ALVIN the DSV explored, the absence of light for photosynthesis should – in Juna’s expectations at least – have stalled the development of life.

“By Earth Standards, any life there should have been eking out an anoxic, chemosynthetic existence in a thermal vent. Nothing but microbial scum, with perhaps a few colony organisms building high-rise necropolis on one another’s graves. Heavy, cold and dark. And crushed.”

However, in a mixture of alien perspective sections and interludes of a more omniscient overview of Shrouded evolution, Tchaikovsky explores how life of fragile but significant sophistication could have developed. For example, on earth sea creatures metabolised Calcium carbonate (Rock!) to create protective shells, in a similar way the shrouded could evolve hides of metal. The nature of life, fundamentally is just a self-replicating molecule (in our case the genes of our DNA) driven by natural selection into ever more sophisticated means to protect and advance its capacity for reproduction. The starting necessities are just a ready availability of the raw materials to reproduce, a solvent in which those chemicals can mix freely, and a source of energy. For us the chemicals are largely carbon based, in a water solvent, fuelled by solar energy. But shroud offers different solvent and raw materials that can harness the same principle – indeed elsewhere in the solar system those processes may already be under way.

However, besides considering the essentials for living, replicating creatures, Tchaikovsky considers the nature of life and thought and self. The development of human babies is an interesting one where the child gradually gains control of its own nervous system and realises that its limbs are within its control. At first the boundary between “me” and “not-me” is a fuzzy one, to the extent that their parents – as appendages that seem to respond to the baby’s raw emotional urges – can appear to be merely particularly busy limbs, rather than separate entities. Indeed, the realisation that there is a physical boundary to self can be something of a mortifying one for the developing mind, one that still haunted the poet William Blake.

“Let me put this into words you can understand. The great illusion of mind is its singularity. The lie that it originates from some inalienable and solitary point. The self. The soul. On Earth, mind arises from the interaction of millions of neurons, deceiving the organism into believing that it thinks.”

But the shrouded forms of life, blind to visible light, but communicating across space in the same electro-magnetic signals that course through our nervous system, find their sense of self spilling beyond the constraints of individual bodies. That combination of collectivity and connectivity makes for a captivating vision of alternate life. However, it also opens scope for misunderstanding and miscommunication. The stranded scientists have to work hard not just against the incredibly hostile environment, but to somehow establish a link with a life form that has – not just a different kind of biology, but an entirely different way of being.

Tchaikovsky keeps us to a fairly tight cast of human characters, for the bulk of the book Juna and her companion are alone on a forlorn struggle for survival against immediate short-term threats. However, Juna makes an engaging voice – the people pleasing administrator – connecting the various mercurial brilliances of Special Projects and balancing the pressures of their egos. Sustained in adversity by a pharmacopeia of drugs that their vehicles systems deem necessary, Juna is understandably never very far from hysteria.

“I was not happy. I couldn’t even draw a map from where I was to happy, not in the dark like I was.”

Another analogue for Juna’s predicament that strikes me is that of the trio of Apollo 13 astronauts. There is the same interdependence of a shrunken team, the same confined space, the same desperate need for ingenuity. However, the Apollo 13 astronauts never faced actual aliens, and – unlike Juna and her companion – had the advantage of continuous communication with an extended Capcom team.  Shroud’s scream of radiowaves masks any signal the despairing explorers might send.

Despite the crippling uniformity that the avaricious society demands of its wage-slaves, Tchaikovsky shows how The Special Projects team and their Opportunities team managers can develop individuals characters and ambition, such that you feel for those that inevitably fall in the various unfolding disasters.

While the central meat of the story is women-against-the-environment-(with-aliens), Tchaikovsky brackets this with women-against-society as both the humans and the aliens are altered by their experience of each other. The shrouded are quick learners and the humans have some adaptation of their own to consider.

The prose flows smoothly, unobtrusively revealing plot, setting and character, with Juna gifted some wonderfully acerbic observations of her superiors.

“Now he was reminding us all of the abrasively cheerful leadership style he practised, which felt like sandpaper on the frontal lobes.”

As always, Tchaikovsky uses the mirror of the alien to show us something of humanity. Within this visceral and enthralling narrative of women-against-the-environment is both a damning indictment of capitalism’s endless quest for exploitative expansion and a sharp observation of what might constitute self and sentience.

Shroud is due for release 27th February – you can order your copy on Bookshop.org