Shroud

What a satisfying Tchaikovsky book. Yet another alien intelligence explored and this one truly, frighteningly alien. Both the sentients and the whole environment and planet.

The writing of the people is just good enough to work. The personal relationships are important, they operate as a foil to understanding the alien intelligence. Also the nature of the conflict between us and them. I've never thought Tchaikovsky was great at writing believable people but it works pretty well here. It helps the folks are in limited environments and circumstances.

There's a lot of interesting rhyming and parallels between the humans and the aliens. The nature of vehicles. The relationships between individuals. The approach to strangers. Innovation. Some of these parallels are explicit but a lot is implicit. The writing is quite deft here, particularly the way the main characters' friendship develops and becomes essential to the story.

One small regret: the alien intelligence shares a lot of commonality with the Tines in A Fire Upon the Deep. It's not a ripoff or anything, Tchaikovsky goes his own direction with it. But some the details of how the minds work is so similar it was a bit frustrating not to have a more direct comparison.