Shroud by Adrian Tchaikovsky
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Adrian Tchaikovsky has a knack for creating terribly dystopic human societies. You can’t really blame him given what he has to work with. But the human society in Shroud is one of the worst.
It seems humanity nearly perished in the ‘Bottleneck’: a disastrous combination of resource scarcity and climate catastrophe (that is absolutely heading towards us if our collective governments and companies don’t get their shit together now). In Shroud, humanity survived because of the corporations doing what was ‘expedient’: a single word that – no doubt – covers a deep chasm of suffering. As a result, the remaining humans owe fealty to what became the ‘Concern’. A vast instrumentality that thrust us out toward the stars, not for the wonder of exploration or the chance to learn new things, but to make damn sure those resource constraints never bothered us – or more importantly, the Concern – again.
Humanity has become little more than locusts, settling on star systems with the sole intention of extracting every single resource they contain before moving on to the next. And only those humans who can demonstrate their ‘wage-worth’ in supporting the extraction effort are kept in active employment. The ones who can’t don’t last long, and even the ones who are useful find themselves ‘shelved’ – i.e. placed in suspended animation – when they’re not actively needed. Spend long enough on the shelf without being needed and you’ll likely be jettisoned along with the rest of the garbage. There is no longer room for art or love or whimsy. There is only the needs of the Concern. It’s the worst of all possible worlds.
But things can always get worse. Through a series of unfortunate events, Special Projects Administrator Juna Ceelander and Special Projects Macro Engineer Mai Ste Etienne are thrown out of their spaceship and crash land on the inhospitable moon of Shroud: a landscape of crushing gravity, poisonously thick atmosphere, and sub-zero temperatures set against a cacophony of naturally occurring electromagnetic transmissions, which means there is no way for them to signal for help or be detected from orbit. And worse than that, there’s something alive down there with them.
The other thing Tchaikovsky is good at is creating truly alien creatures. His novel Alien Clay posited an entire planetary biology that functioned like a Lego set with different creatures being able to join together in infinite combinations to create gestalt animals. Something similar happens in Shroud in that the creatures who inhabit the planet – and who communicate by electromagnetic signals – operate like individual neurons or ‘nodes of thought’. If enough of these creatures are physically adjacent, they reach critical mass and an ‘I’ coalesces that is composed of the interconnection of these alien neurons. One such collective comes across Ceelander and Ste Etienne’s vehicle and so begins a journey towards understanding for both species.
But as individual ‘nodes’ move away from the collective, the concept of ‘I’ can become malleable or be lost or change altogether. As Tchaikovsky points out the idea of identity is a conceit, not just for these creatures but for humans as well, and in between all the adventures there’s a lot of meaty conceptualising of the core ideas of the novel, which I found as engrossing as they were entertaining. It also means the two humans find themselves pursued, threatened and/ or aided by whatever alien consciousness happens to coalesce near them.
Of course, first contact between species leaves both parties irrevocably changed, often in ways either or both would not have chosen (if they had a choice). As a consequence, the conclusion of Shroud is either chilling, strangely hopeful or a combination of the two. Highly recommended.
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