David’s Reviews > Shroud > Status Update

"...the immensity of the globe has been shrunk for me." Crikey, humans. You're rolling around the planet in the eternal dark, bowling over aliens, flying your drones like you own the place. And then this happens. What. Have. You. Done?!

Oh snap! "We had, inadvertently, given these Shrouded the air."

What an observation! "I had to stay strong for her, just like she was staying strong for me. Normally this would have been because you couldn’t show your weak spots, in case they were brought up in your next appraisal and ended up degrading your wage-worth. But right then it was because she was the only person I had in the world, and if I exploded on her, then that would just have been more weight for her to carry."

Nice construction: "I was not happy. I couldn’t even draw a map from where I was to happy, not in the dark like I was."

Lol, buffing vs. resourcing.

C'mon li'l probe...

This is a cool alien mentation model: a distributed identity that attenuates with distance and eventually calves into a new iteration.

Proceeding along the lines of Asimiov's _The Gods Themselves_, here we have alternating chapters from human pov ("light") and alien ("dark"). And some third omniscient historian interludes telling us how life evolved on Shroud. The Shrouded (alien) is rather astute, and I would call bullshit, but for its fatal mistake. This is no Mary Sue alien! Good stuff, and believable.