Here’s my last post reviewing the finalists for the Hugo Award for Best Novel. The award will be presented on Aug. 30 2026 at LaCon, Anaheim, California.

The list of finalists:

• A Drop of Corruption, Robert Jackson Bennett (Del Rey; Hodderscape)–reviewed HERE
• The Everlasting, Alix E. Harrow (Tor US; Tor UK)–reviewed HERE
• The Raven Scholar, Antonia Hodgson (Orbit US; Hodderscape)–reviewed HERE
• Death of the Author, Nnedi Okorafor (Morrow; Gollancz)–reviewed HERE in my posts for Nebula finalists
• Shroud, Adrian Tchaikovsky (Tor UK; Orbit US)–reviewed in this post
• The Incandescent, Emily Tesh (Tor US; Orbit UK)–reviewed HERE in my posts for Nebula finalists

Shroud, Adrian Tchaikovsky (Tor UK; Orbit US)

This novel of First Contact pits two intrepid members of a human exploratory mission against an unforgiving moon circling an unforgiving planet in a remote star system. The landscape is alien. The aliens who inhabit this landscape are utterly alien. Its human visitors have named the moon Shroud because it is so completely dark, enshrouded in murk, tidal-locked to its planet away from its sun. Its darkness is so complete that Shroud’s inhabitants have never developed the sense of sight. It makes no evolutionary sense they should have.

When a disaster in space strands human explorers Juna and Mai on the human-hostile moon away from the human-friendly but fragile environment of their starship, they know they have an outside chance of ever getting back to safety. But, each in her own way, they are ingenious. They find that one remote chance, and they go for it.

These two main characters are very different. Juna was chosen for the mission because of her people skills, while Mai is the consummate engineer impatient of the soft skills. Thrown together under such extreme circumstances, they learn to value each other and rely on each other’s strengths.

Among the obstacles they face: mysterious aliens who kill the one other survivor of their party yet somehow, for their own mysterious reasons, seem to mean the two of them well. These aliens are almost impossible to communicate with. Juna and Mai devise a crude signal, three blasts of static, that the aliens echo back to them. That’s the extent of it, and it’s not enough. It’s as if the aliens of Close Encounters of the Third Kind were reduced to three blasts of noise rather than five elegant musical notes, and it’s as if the humans were tone-deaf.

The humans and aliens are so. . .um. . .alien to each other that their sensory equipment doesn’t even work the same way. I dealt with that issue HERE, the first in a series including this post, an examination of Tchaikovsky’s first novel in his Children of Time series, as well as in this review of Tchaikovsky’s stand-alone novel Alien Clay, short-listed for both last year’s Hugo award for Best Novel and the Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel.

In Shroud, when Juna and Mai realize the aliens communicate with each other via a cacophony of radio waves, the two humans try to close the communication gap using math. They broadcast the Fibonacci sequence. Unlike the spiders of Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time, the Enshrouded glean nothing from this attempt. To them, it sounds like mere gibberish. They begin wondering if their strange visitors are even intelligent. Meanwhile, Juna and Mai are wondering the same about the inhabitants of Shroud. So much for human-based ideas of math as a universal. Take that, Golden Record.

This is an absorbing, wonderful novel. Like many of Tchaikovsky’s books, it’s about First Contact, alien communication, arduous journeys, impossible dilemmas. What did I love most about it? The envisioning of an alien mind. The envisioning of our human minds, alienated from themselves.

Much like China Mieville’s Embassytown, Tchaikovsky’s novels often deal with the problem (impossibility? near-impossibility) of human-to-alien communication, in large part because humans have difficulty imagining communication outside their own narrow physical and cultural and environmental parameters. Shroud is a shining addition to Tchaikovsky’s examination of this difficulty–maybe my favorite so far, although I haven’t read them all, not by a long shot.

But also, there’s a deep environmental warning embedded in Shroud, always in the background of every decision the characters make. How and why did humanity come to this terrible predicament, out in hostile space, away from its own home planet? And once that divorce from Planet Earth had happened, at what cost to humanity? Often we read SF that envisions the heroic human spirit probing beyond the stars, hurray. But what kind of dystopic society would such an attempt produce? What would it be like to live in such a society? Shroud explores these matters, right down to the gritty details of bureaucratic CYA.

Unlike the rebel protagonist of Alien Clay, the two main characters of Shroud have been carefully conditioned never to question their own confined, stunted lives. It’s something of a miracle they summon the initiative and creativity to come up with solutions, any solutions at all, to their deadly predicament. In the end, Shroud celebrates against all odds the human capacity for connection in an environment where there should be none, because humans themselves have deliberately set out to erase that capacity.

As a famous writer once penned, in a famous novel, “Only connect.” That same writer, in a different famous novel, showed how politics and culture and other nasty little artifacts of human nature make that aspiration nearly impossible to achieve.

In Shroud, unlike a lot of SF, we readers are served up no easy answers, and I like that. I like that so much.

Next up: My own take on the Hugo finalists