A generation starship has arrived at a star with a moon around a gas giant planet. The moon is tidally locked to the planet and has a very thick atmosphere, so thick that no light makes it to the surface. That’s why the people call the moon Shroud. The surface air pressure is twenty times that of Earth normal and since the moon is larger than Earth, the gravity on the surface is twice that of Earth. To top it off, it’s an ice-bound moon, it’s extremely cold and the atmosphere is mostly ammonia. The ship also discovered that the moon screams with electromagnetic energy to a point where all signals are completely drowned out.
So why are they interested in the moon? To harvest its natural resources. When they send down the first probes, they survive just minutes before the are destroyed. Eventually they send drones with cameras and searchlights to see what might be going on, and they discover that there is life on Shroud.
The surface is truly an alien hell for humans. Yet, they are building a lander suitable for the environment with plans to send down explorers. During an unexpected accident on the ship, two women are using the lander as a lifeboat and end up stranded, you guessed it, on the surface of Shroud, in that truly hellish environment.
Shroud is about humanity meeting an unexpected alien intelligence, so alien, that it they can’t figure out any way to communicate with them. I have often complained in these pages that the aliens in science fiction novels are too hokey, too much like humans, or perhaps little green men, to be believable. The Shrouded, as they call them, are believable, and their utter alienness makes them the best part of this book. The story is mostly slow, boring, and the humans seem bland and their politics is trite. But the illustration of the complexities of trying to communicate with something that does not even recognize you as a being, that has no concept of something even as fundamental to us as light, and sight, and eyes, and individual minds, makes the story interesting.
It kept me reading.
