Shroud
A gripping first contact story from Arthur C. Clarke Award winner Adrian Tchaikovsky
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4.0 • 4 Ratings
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
‘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 . . .
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Praise for Shroud
‘Clever, vivid and terrifying . . . No one has an imagination like Adrian Tchaikovsky’ – Jim Al-Khalili, presenter of BBC Radio 4’s The Life Scientific
‘Crunchy, conceptual SF at its best’ – Richard Morgan, author of Altered Carbon
‘This is hard-edged science fiction that never loses its soul’ – Sue Burke, author of Semiosis
‘Makes Andy Weir's vision of Mars in The Martian look like a Caribbean beach resort’ – The Fantasy Hive
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this thrilling if somewhat long-winded meditation on extraterrestrial life and the trouble that awaits humanity if it tries to exploit the outer terra, Hugo Award winner Tchaikovsky (Service Model) imagines a distant galaxy being eyed for Earth's Third Stage Commercial Expansion. Within this galaxy, the planet Shroud appears uninhabitable, with no light source and an atmosphere of "roiling smoker's fug." But when the space vessel Garveneer detects an "all-frequencies storm of radio traffic" emanating from the planet, a Special Projects team awakens from deep-freeze hibernation to investigate. Using drones, the scientists discover the planet is crawling with a "hive mind" of tubular creatures. Before any theory about the worms' origin can be developed, however, a collision disrupts research and sends two team members—narrator Juna and macro engineer Mai—hurling toward Shroud in a two-person pod. Stranded, they manipulate the pod to cross the planet's cavernous landscape hoping for rescue even as they take the opportunity to observe Shroud's strange inhabitants—who study the humans right back. The old-fashioned Vernian adventure meshes well with the vividly rendered world full of bizarre creatures. This space fable is sure to please Tchaikovsky's fans.
