
Shroud
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Narrated by:
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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 OrbitListeners also enjoyed...




















Critic reviews
"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
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Engrossing Visuals
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One of Tchaikovskys best
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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.
Maybe the series gets better?
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Unique Story
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I look forward to his next creation.
WOW!
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The idea of it—the 2 kinds of mind, trying to imagine each other.
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Typical Tchaikovsky in that there is nothing “typical” about it!
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My favorite book of Adrian's since Children of Time
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Gets better as the story develops
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Tchaikovsky takes a classic sci-fi element of alien first contact with truly alien lifeforms, not simply their biology, but also their mental processes which are shaped by the unique environment in which they have evolved. All too often, aliens are anthropomorphized, but more likely it’s the environment that shapes intelligence, rather than biology.
The narration is quite good with solid character distinction. Pacing is a tad brisk.
Alternative alien intelligence
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