Shroud by Adrian Tchaikovsky

This was the only Hugo Awards 2026 nominee for Best Novel that didn’t come in the Voter’s Packet, so I got on the waitlist for it at the library, thereby ensuring that I’d actually read the book this year, lol. So on the one hand, I was unsurprised that not being in the packet meant that this novel polled last in the Hugos voting: we voters are nothing if not conscientious about voting only on what we’ve actually been able to experience! But that’s also a shame, because this was definitely one of 2025’s best novels of both sci-fi and horror.

The titular Shroud is the nickname given to a moon wreathed in a perpetual darkness that’s nearly impenetrable to most, if not all, contemporary sensors. Lacking in oxygen and possessing a higher gravity than humans can function in without significant augmentation, it’s not the kind of place that’s hospitable to human life.

That won’t stop capitalism tho! When the crew sent by the corporation to assess Shroud for asset stripping comes into orbit, we get a glimpse of the depressingly likely dystopia that far-future society in the stars has become, with corporate citizens being sent in and out of hibernation depending on their perceived utility to the company. (Also, please forgive me for the paucity of proper names in this review: I won Library Loan chicken but do not now have a copy of the book to reference as I type, alas. There were unsurprisingly a lot of people who were interested in reading this after me!)

Anyway, Juna and Mai are two members of a six-person team assigned to evaluating Shroud via mechanical solutions. Mai is a grumpy, big-brained engineer and Juna is essentially the administrative assistant who has to know how to do at least a little of everybody else’s job. A freak accident to their orbital station sees them shunted into an exploratory pod Mai had built, then plunged directly down to Shroud’s inhospitable surface. As they figure out how to survive the planet and get back to the only known point where they might still be able to contact what (hopefully) remains of the orbital, they run into local fauna, and have to figure out whether these strange new lifeforms are friend or foe.

First of all, I absolutely have to laud Adrian Tchaikovsky’s creative exobiology here. I haven’t enjoyed that kind of convincingly alien construction since Vernor Vinge’s A Fire Upon The Deep or, to a lesser but related degree, Brandon Sanderson’s The Way Of Kings. The real innovation here lies in how frightening that alien intelligence can be, and what that looks like when pitted against an equally amoral — some would argue less moral — human profit interest.

In the hands of a lesser novelist, Juna and Mai’s desperate trek across Shroud would be an inspirational “yes, we can” tale. The duo even entertain ideas of being welcomed back by their corporate masters as returning heroes, as the novel straddles the line between hard sf and horror. But Mr Tchaikovsky delivers an entirely earned sucker punch of an ending that I’m still thinking about as I type, a full week after reading those lines. If you enjoy hard sf at all, and if you can handle a decent share of horror, then I can’t recommend this novel highly enough. I didn’t get a chance to read it before the voting deadline so I couldn’t vote for it (or the four other nominees I hadn’t had time to get to either. SoonTM tho!) but I can recommend it highly now. This is the best thing of the author’s I’ve read so far and will hopefully/likely not be the last.

Shroud by Adrian Tchaikovsky was published June 3 2025 by Orbit and is available from all good booksellers, including