Book Thoughts: Shroud
Having recently listened to two Tchaikovsky standalone sci-fi novels, I figured I may as well stay on course and picked up his Hugo-2026-nominated novel Shroud.
I think Tchaikovsky really excels at portraying alien perspectives and eliciting empathy towards weird consciousnesses. This was on display in his Children of Time series, and he flexes those muscles in this one with interesting radio-signal-based entities on a lightless and hopeless planet. Maybe it was his blatant painting as humans in the role of planet-stripping extraplanetary predators, but he really had me rooting for the home team.
It was a very engaging read and the author did a couple of clever things with the premise and setup; there was a lot of intent behind his decision to put two people in a single explorer pod, which added to the sense of claustrophobia initially and mirrored some of the multi-part-brain concepts at play later. I don't think there's anything here that was particularly mind-blowing, but the ideas were explored in creative and satisfying ways.
Good clean scifi fun, this one.