Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In this thrilling if somewhat long-winded meditation on extraterrestrial life and the trouble that awaits humanity if it tries to exploit the outer terra, Hugo Award winner Tchaikovsky (Service Model) imagines a distant galaxy being eyed for Earth's Third Stage Commercial Expansion. Within this galaxy, the planet Shroud appears uninhabitable, with no light source and an atmosphere of "roiling smoker's fug." But when the space vessel Garveneer detects an "all-frequencies storm of radio traffic" emanating from the planet, a Special Projects team awakens from deep-freeze hibernation to investigate. Using drones, the scientists discover the planet is crawling with a "hive mind" of tubular creatures. Before any theory about the worms' origin can be developed, however, a collision disrupts research and sends two team members--narrator Juna and macro engineer Mai--hurling toward Shroud in a two-person pod. Stranded, they manipulate the pod to cross the planet's cavernous landscape hoping for rescue even as they take the opportunity to observe Shroud's strange inhabitants--who study the humans right back. The old-fashioned Vernian adventure meshes well with the vividly rendered world full of bizarre creatures. This space fable is sure to please Tchaikovsky's fans. (June)
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Bizarre ecologies, nonhuman intelligences, and the genius of everyday people--this is the quintessential Tchaikovsky (Service Model) novel. Aspects of his prior work reverberate through the prose, adding a welcome sense of familiarity to a narrative that skitters at the edges of horror. It is a survival story about two researchers lost on an alien moon in an untested exploratory vehicle. The air is toxic, gravity is grueling, and the atmosphere is so murky there is no light. Worse, it's a world of constant screaming and chainsaw-like creatures. Armed only with their feeble lamps and a wealth of cleverness, Juna Ceelander and Mai Ste Etienne must trek across treacherous landscapes while learning how ill-suited their vessel is to the moon. They're followed or stalked or aided by an ever-renewing pack of alien creatures whose intentions are constantly in flux. If they survive, they may be hailed as heroes by their employers--or branded as resource wasters only fit for shelving away in hibernation. VERDICT This utterly engrossing novel melds the fascinatingly unexpected alien environments of Sue Burke's Semiosis or Wendy Wagner's An Oath of Dogs seamlessly with the joy for science embedded in Andy Weir's The Martian.--Matthew Galloway
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
If humans and aliens can't learn to communicate, someone will die. Industrialization has ravaged Earth, and the Concerns (i.e., corporations) that govern the planet are desperate for resources and locations to colonize. Everyone or everything must be of use to the Concerns, or they'll be discarded. So the scientific team in orbit around Shroud, a moon with an extraordinary amount of electromagnetic radiation and what actually seems to be some form of life, is under a great deal of pressure from its bosses to produce profitable results that will allow the planetary system to be more efficiently mined for raw materials and made ready for colonization. Then an accident in space leads to part of the team crashing onto the surface of Shroud inside an explorer pod. Their desperate attempt to find a way to call for help that will get through the considerable electromagnetic interference sparks many fraught encounters with what appears to be roving crowds of eyeless monsters, but are actually aspects of a sophisticated, multibodied hive mind trying to figure out what exactly the pod is. The humans and the alien collective on Shroud have very different ideas about what a life form is, how communication and information retrieval should be conducted, and how to recognize sentience. These misunderstandings verge on the deadly and ultimately prove transformative to both parties. The plot of this novel, driven by a disaster that strands humans among dangerous aliens, concerns a repressive government whose strong resistance to an equitable first contact is met by potentially stronger resistance from the alien contactee(s). As such, it is more than a little reminiscent of the author's Hugo-nominatedAlien Clay (2024), even if the government and the alien are quite different. While it reads like a meditation on the same theme, especially in the relevance of its socioeconomic and political milieu to contemporary circumstances, it is also well crafted and full of tense moments, building up to an emotional gut punch. All retreads should be this good. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
