Humanity exists packed into orbital arcologies, or stored cryogenically to minimise the resource drain. Perform unproductively and your project gets cut, sending you back into cold storage.
The acceptance of oppression and an inability to imagine a better system creates a strong sense of unease: “I mean, you can’t expect to sit around and be paid just because they’ll need you at some point.” Tchaikovsky pushes modern corporate attitudes to their extreme, creating a cautionary satire on the human cost of precarity, and the power of capitalist realism to suppress alternatives.
Humanity has survived Earth’s ruination by ceding control to corporations obsessed with efficient expansion to the stars – the paperclip problem at a civilisation scale. A mission to Shroud, a gas-giant moon wrapped in perpetual darkness, goes sideways when an orbital catastrophe forces an emergency landing.
Shroud’s metallic chemistry forms a fertile evolutionary soup for monsters that terrorise the survivors. But it’s the epistemic consequences of the alien’s physiology that produce Tchaikovsky’s deepest alien estrangement. Chapters from the alien perspective interpret events radically differently – there’s no embodied commonality, no somatic Rosetta Stone that can bridge the conceptual gulf. While the humans seek sentience in the alien workers, the alien perceives it in the corporation and its goals.
For all the above, this is primarily a survival horror, infused with a strong dose of Golden Age competence porn. Our protagonists are dropped into an impossible situation with only their wits and a clumsy walking habitat that had me picturing the robots in Silent Running or the chest in Discworld. My only issue was pacing – a slow start laden with expository internal monologue could frankly have been doled out as we go. The pages turn swiftly after the crash, but the long trek drags once the newness wears off and we anticipate the payoff. I enjoyed Shroud, but it would have been an even better book for some judicious editing.
