Let's not bury the lede here. This is one of the best books I've read this year, and if a better SF novel is published in 2025 we're in for a good time. I can't remember the last time I was this impressed - or this moved - by a sci-fi book.

The best first contact stories invariably have something to say about what it means to be human. Putting us next to another sapient species means we inevitably begin to draw comparisons. How do we define "alien" if not by pointing at it and saying "not human"? In defining what makes something alien we inevitably are forced to reckon with what makes us human.

Shroud puts humanity on full display, peeling us apart piece by piece and looking at the resulting mess. It's a novel of both the best parts of human nature - ingenuity, curiosity, empathy, resilience - and the worst - violence, the endless cycle of colonisation and extraction, the reduction of people to little more than cogs in a machine. The arrogance to think that we're uniquely special.

Tchaikovsky's writing here is, I think, the best in his career. I've never read a book of his that I didn't at least enjoy, but in the past - specifically in the Shadows Of The Apt series - I've sometimes got a bit lost in his action scenes and the way he describes "weird" things. Shadows... was over a decade ago, though (The Empire In Black And Gold, terrifyingly, 16 years ago), and he's had plenty of time to improve his craft. Shroud is the evidence that he's put the work in. The frozen moon of Shroud is a truly weird, alien place, populated by some of the strangest aliens I've ever seen in fiction, but the prose is crystal clear. I can picture this world, and the awful things that happen to our main characters during their journey across it, like I was right there with them. The pacing, too, is great. This rattles along like the best of thrillers. There isn't a single wasted moment here. It's a proper gripping page turner, evidenced by the fact that I write this after having stayed up until 2AM against all my better judgement to finish reading it.

Over the past few years I've been really drawn to moody sci-fi horror. In 2020 I wrote The Wretched, a solo journalling game about being really stressed and having a terrible time on your own in space. Some of my favourite SF of recent years has had very similar themes. The Wretched was absolutely a response to the unique isolation of COVID lockdowns, and I suspect that's also true of much of the fiction along similar lines that's emerged since then.

Shroud is also a novel about having a terrible time in space, but it's specifically a novel about having a terrible time in space and leaning on shared bonds and our connections with other humans to help us endure and survive. Even in its most bleak moments, even when our worst impulses as a species are on display, it's still a novel that has some hope for the future. As I was reading it I couldn't help feeling like it feels like a novel about healing and rebuilding. As with a lot of recent SF I think this is a book that was forged in the aftermath of lockdowns, but it's a book that's able to imagine a coming together of people in the aftermath of catastrophe rather than one that wallows in isolation.

Shroud is released in February 2025, and I can't recommend it highly enough. I'm very grateful to Tor and Pan Macmillan for furnishing me with an ARC. Don't sleep on this on when it lands.