Shroud takes place in the far dystopian future after humans have wrecked the earth and have to live in space stations. Society is essentially one mega-corporation and humans spend all their time looking for new planets to extract resources from. We follow one character’s point-of-view, Juna, as a series of events cause her to crash land on a planet with an alien lifeform. Juna makes a desperate gambit to use her damaged escape pod to traverse the pitch-dark, hostile planet to make it back to her space station.
And…surprise! The aliens are there! The aliens get their own point-of-view chapters that are so weird and creative. I’ve never spent more time imagining how a character would look than with these aliens. They’re so remarkably different from anything I’ve read before and such a joy to puzzle out and get to know as characters.
My favorite part of the book is the astoundingly unique worldbuilding. Tchaikovsky clearly describes all angles of this world, from gravity effects to unique biospheres to alien culture, all without any tedious info dumping. The main character is believable in her situation and the plotting rises in an arc that makes the book impossible to put down.
The ending is not quite a twist, but certainly something I wasn’t expecting. Shroud is the first book in a long time to really capture my imagination so completely. It’s been months since I’ve read this book and I’m still thinking about it and recommending it to everyone with even the slightest interest in science fiction!
You can read Shroud in regular print from our collection.
FCPL Outreach Manager
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