Shroud. A book review.

https://xpil.eu/2mNHq 📋

Readers familiar with Andy Weir's Project Hail Mary will likely spot quite a few similarities. "Shroud" tells the story of what happened near the moon Shroud, orbiting a Jupiter-like gas giant in some galactic backwater.

So how did we end up there?

Humanity is trying to emerge from the Second Bottleneck. The First one hit when we nearly exhausted Earth's resources and had to flee into the Solar System. That went fine, but humans being humans, we still managed to beat the crap out of each other over dominance, prestige, power, and whatnot - leading to the Second Bottleneck. Having thoroughly trashed the Solar System, we headed for the stars.

Thing is, stars are bloody far away^{[citation needed]}. So we packed all of humanity's jelly into massive hibernation tanks and launched ourselves poste restante in every direction of the Universe, setting up automatic systems to wake us up only if we reached other planetary systems worth exploring. Kind of like Von Neumann probes, but with an organic twist. Naturally, only the essential people get woken up - the rest "sleep" until humanity digs itself out of the hole.

So, Shroud is in one of those planetary systems, which we find out more or less in the first two or three chapters.

Shroud is full of electromagnetic noise. No idea where it's coming from, because there's no sign of life. And there is no life, because the moon's surface is pitch black. Under a thick layer of clouds, with nearly double Earth's gravity and dozens of atmospheres of ammonia-sulfur-hydrogen gas, life never stood a chance.

Despite those brutal conditions, the moon still has to be put to use. Space is mind-bogglingly empty, so even if we can't settle there, we must extract resources for the continued survival of the species - the highest value of all.

I won't say much more to avoid spoilers, so I'll start wrapping up this mini-review. I'll just add that the similarities with Project Hail Mary are few enough that there's no reason to accuse the author of plagiarism (the book came out only six weeks ago, so three years after Hail Mary). And yet, there are enough parallels to give Weir fans a solid dose of joy.

The story is divided into three parts. The first, about 10% of the book, sets the scene and paints a rough picture of humanity to ground the story. The second - the bulk of it, about 70% - is a low-budget (yet gripping) sequence of events that could easily be staged in a theatre without changing sets, and with a minimal cast. The third - the finale - is a complete surprise. Not just one twist, but several! I couldn’t have come up with any of it, even if I bent over backwards, straightened up, then bent over backwards again.

(Likely the reason why I write mediocre book reviews in this arsehole of the Internets, instead of creating proper books.) 🙂

My rating: 10/10 (and I don't do ten-out-of-tens easily). A really good read - highly recommended.

https://xpil.eu/2mNHq 📋