Review by Duncan Lunan

First published in slightly different form, ParSec # 13, April 7^th 2025.

Writing in Scientific American, April 1964, Freeman Dyson suggested that intelligence may be ‘a cancer of purposeless technological exploitation, sweeping across [the] galaxy as irresistibly as it has spread across our own planet’.  That’s what humanity has become in this novel, and a grim prospect it is.  When our ‘purposeless technological exploitation’ finds a life-bearing planet, that’s an obstacle to be swept aside;  intelligent life is even more of an inconvenience.  The humans in this book are not nice people;  try to pretend they’re not us. 

The latest planet to be consumed for its resources is Shroud, which has more than its share of other inconveniences:  an atmosphere so dense that no light whatever reaches its surface, and an electromagnetic spectrum jammed with radio noise which blocks all communication.  David Brin has suggested that high-tech civilisations may fill the Galaxy every 30 million years or so, only to wipe themselves out in industrial accidents, and that’s what nearly happens here – an asteroid being moved for exploitation collides with one of the first exploration units, killing most of the occupants and scattering the survivors in life-pods, two of which make it to the surface of Shroud, one containing a supervisor and the other two technicians, all of them injured.

With radio blanked out by noise, and no way to summon help, all they can detect is what’s within the radius of the pod lights.  What they see is a confusion of parts of organisms which are made up of stick and plate-like components, multiply interconnected both mechanically and organically, able to rearrange their exteriors almost at will, to combine and recombine and move over great distances.  They may be intelligent and certainly have curiosity, evolving the tools to take the supervisor’s pod apart and swiftly making an end of him.

The two techies fare better because their pod is adopted by a larger organism, not just curious about the ‘Stranger’ but actively wishing to help it, if only to see what it does next.  It thinks of the pod as a single organism with a strangely rigid shell, and neither side ever really understands what the other is, although the Shroudite makes great sacrifices to help and protect the Stranger, changing its own nature in ways which at first seem irreparable.

On a personal note, I was haunted by a memory which took a long time to surface.  Around the age of four or five, I was taken at Christmas to a big store on Sauchiehall Street in Glasgow, to meet an incoherent Santa Claus and to see a demonstration of a new type of constructor set, composed of sticks and flexible joints, being marketed as a alternative to Meccano.  I was bought one of the simpler sets, which I lacked either the dexterity or the strength to master.  But what came back to my mind is the memory of some of the big structures on display, animated by springs and small motors, whose odd movements, I realised 75 years later, were what seemed familiar about the Shroudites, though they are far more complex and able to host organic cores deep in their multilayered structures.

Although it seems they have no chance, the two techies decide that all they can do is make for the pole of the planet, where exploitation of its crust has already begun by space elevator.  Leaving aside how they built that anywhere off the equator, as the pod lurches north on its damaged legs, there’s a seemingly endless series of encounters with many types of terrain and forms of life.  Think what The Martian might be like if Mars was teeming with truly alien life, some of it wanting to help, some unintentionally dangerous and some explicitly carnivorous.  The techies try to communicate but only manage to get a 3-pulse signal accepted by the Shroudites as a handshake:  the latter ignore all attempts to teach them arithmetic, while they can’t understand why the pod ignores messages like ‘look out, there are underground traps ahead’.

Not everyone will find this enjoyable.  It requires a lot of reader concentration, and without that, there’s a danger that the book might seem like one of those jokes where you’re given the key information at the beginning, and the trick is to get you to forget it before you reach the end.  Don’t try to read Shroud as a puzzle to be solved:  immerse yourself in it, like trying to forget you know the ending as you work through The Lord of the Rings. 

Otherwise  (SPOILER WARNING, and I mean that), there’s a real risk that you may recognise that this has been done before, by at least two well-known authors, in novels with similar plot structures.  If I give you even a hint of what those are, and you know them, you’ll immediately realise how the story has to end and then there would much less point in reading the book, which would be a pity because it’s well done and worth the effort to read it.  If your brain tries to figure out where it’s going, clamp down on it and focus on what’s happening on the page that you’re on.