Emily M’s Reviews > Shroud > Status Update

“A single body of mine, isolated from the whole, would not be capable of such thought as this Stranger is displaying. I open myself to the possibility that, despite its limits and the shortcomings of its speech, the Stranger might hold the basic germ of sapience within it. An alien sapience, constrained to a single body, inferior no doubt, and yet…”

"'Is it...' I stared blankly. 'Is that art?'...I was, of course, the fanciful one...Mai Ste Etienne would never have any truck with that kind of nonsense. She made another noise, and I knew she was about to put forward some absolutely self-evident practicality... 'It's an orrery,' she said. 'I'm sorry, WHAT?' I demanded. 'Look at it. Big thing in the centre of the solar system. Other worlds, moons surrounding it.'"

“I crossed these mountains. Not over, but through, within the earth. And that was where the fear was…Underground is a good place to make a home, where the world cannot intrude into my thoughts. But not THIS underground…It is a place of hungry ghosts.”

Very ‘Mines of Moria’ vibes here, from the alien POV!

“That was some high-level thinking. Or it would be, in a human…Our xenobiology primers cautioned against imputing actual intelligence to any aliens we might discover, merely on account of complicated things they…do. Of course, Concern doctrine was very focused on resource extraction…there was always a good commercial use-case for minimizing the potential rights of whoever’s environment you were destroying.”

“‘You are in danger of a demerit when we make contact with the Garveneer though.’ ‘Director,’ Ste Etienne said frankly, ‘if we ever see the inside of the Garveneer again it will be because of me…you will personally carry me around…on your shoulders you’ll be so fucking grateful.’ I actually held my breath. Despite everything…I was still enough of a slave to my socialization to be horrified.”

“‘Right then.’ Ste Etienne still sounded calm, in a situation where calmness was surely insanity, and ranting and shrieking should have been the norm. It was only her presence that stopped me howling like a wounded animal, honestly. Only the discovery that sheer social embarrassment was apparently a stronger driver for me than fear of death.”

"So many of Shroud's parameters would gang up like thugs to kill you, but somehow it was the dark that upset me the most. The dark, and the things living in it. Very unprofessional of me to think about a marvel of alien life like that, but there was something profoundly horrible about the idea of all that colourless, blind life fumbling about down there, groping through the methane-clogged murk."

God, this corporate-driven space expansion scenario somehow manages to be even more depressing than ‘Alien’’s!
Though, knowing Tchaikovsky, I suspect that weird dark moon may hold the key to breaking the pattern. No idea how, yet - that’s just his MO!

What do you do when you aren't really in the mood for either of your two current books? Choose a third one, of course!
Adrian Tchaikovsky never misses for me, so let's hope that trend continues with this one.