April 2026

It was a busy May, so a late post for April!

Shroud by Adrian Tchaikovsky

In the distant future, Juna Ceelander is the least specialized employee on an exploratory mission seeking to strip mine unknown planets to churn out resources for her corporate overlords back on Earth. The mission brings Juna and her crew to a new planet, known as “Shroud” due to its oppressively dense atmosphere that permits virtually no light to penetrate. The team has started to establish a foothold on the planet from orbit, using drones and robots to land mining resources on the planet, when they discover what appears to be a new form of life on the planet, another possible resource to conquer. Before they can do much about it, though, the planet fires back, knocking their ship out of orbit and sending it crashing to the surface, killing most of Juna’s team, and leaving Juna with the seemingly impossible task of keeping herself alive and figuring out how to use her remaining resources and technology to launch herself off the planet while making sense of the life she finds on Shroud. Occasional alternating chapters tell the story from the perspective of the non-human life on the planet as it tries to make sense of and deal with this strange new being it has encountered.

Having just read and loved Andy Weir’s Project Hail Mary a handful of months ago, Shroud is an interesting spin on a lot of similar concepts: using the scientific method to find a way to survive a threatening environment; trying to understand and connect with alien life; trying to work together with others to solve a seemingly unsolvable problem. And though I did ultimately enjoy a lot about Shroud and would recommend it overall, the contrast between these two stories illustrates why I loved Hail Mary but Shroud left me a little cold.

There was a thing going around on social media a couple of months ago where people were roasting this review of the Project Hail Mary movie (which I haven’t seen yet) that combined overly-online irony-pilled internet lingo (“Heartwarming: millennial reddit chungus directors still serve American exceptionalist slop the old-fashioned way…”) with pretentious references (“Comolli and Narboni’s Cinema/Idealogy/Criticism elucidates this by following the Althusserian method of symptomatic reading…”) all in service of the general view that, because this is the story of people from different countries coming together to combat and solve problems and it feels good to watch, clearly it is a plot by capitalist oligarchs to pacify you into forgetting that the world is terrible and we are all doomed. (I confess, as off-putting and obnoxious as the review was, I am a sucker for an abrasive, condescending take-down, so I came away from reading that thinking “he seems like an exhausting person but he’s not totally wrong…”). I bring that discourse up to say that Shroud feels like it was written for the kind of person who had those objections to Project Hail Mary. Its characters live in a vaguely sketched-out hypercapitalist dystopia where corporations control everything: children are raised in “tanks” and only given attention and resources to the extent they can benefit the corporation, and people pass large chunks of their life in suspended animation hoping to be thawed out if their corporate overlords find a new planet to strip mine. The characters we meet are largely aware of and displeased by this state of affairs, but they don’t have feelings of righteous anger about it, we’re not told of any sort of resistance efforts, there is no gesture at any idea that this world might ever be improved. Is a near-future where hyper-capitalism has ruined the planet and made all human life and endless morass of suffering in which no one experiences anything like joy or hope or love more realistic than one where existing human governments can set aside their hostility and suspicion and greed to do good things for the mutual benefit of the world? I don’t think so — as grim as things can feel at times in the real world, there are always people fighting to do good, and Shroud truly spends no time explaining why anyone living in this society tolerates this state of affairs and how even the tiny few who benefit from it can have a meaningful existence. I don’t want to overstate the importance of the cultural conditions in which Shroud takes place — Juna’s role as a corporate drone in a hopeless world is largely background that only rarely informs the plot — but that backdrop really dulled my ability to connect with the story. Sure, following Juna’s perspective helps me root for her and see her point of view, but every time the story reminds me that her goal is just to get back to that life, it makes me think, who cares? What has she got to lose, or gain, for that matter?

I feel like hypercapitalist dystopian settings, both in drama and as satire, has really become overdone and I am so ready for it to end. It makes me think of a particular theory about solar radiation advanced by the comics writer Grant Morrison in their wonderful part-memoir part-history-of-comics book Supergods. Morrison is a brilliant person and a lunatic, providing trenchant analysis of the meaning and function of stories in society while also describing how they learned to practice witchcraft while taking hallucinogenic mushrooms in order to craft better Batman adventures. I can’t say the methods make sense to me, but I can’t argue with the results. Anyway, in Supergods, Morrison explains that, based on some combination of the distance of the Earth to the sun and the recurrence of solar flares and the waxing and waning of the magnetosphere, or something like that, the Earth experiences a rising and falling amount of solar radiation that cycles between high and low points roughly every 11 years. The shift from high solar radiation to low solar radiation is a frequency that people feel innately and that our culture responds to. At one end of the spectrum, we become more attuned to faster, sharper, harsher, tighter art. Punk music, tight clothes, sharp-lined art, and brutal plots rule the day. At the other end of the spectrum, we become attuned to languid, flowing, lyrical, psychedelic art. Disco music, baggy pants, swirly art, and abstract stories take hold. Morrison credits their success to anticipating and riding these trends and points to stories and themes calibrated to the solar radiation of the moment. It is the sort of theory that, when laid out, seems completely absurd and almost certainly rests on objectively false pseudo-science, but also, I dunno, maybe? So, when I find myself tiring of some seemingly ascendant trend like oppressive corporate dystopias, while a normal person might conclude that a lot of writers are dealing with the same anxieties about the current state of the world, as a reader of Grant Morrison comics, I find myself thinking “we’ve gotta be due for a shift in solar radiation, I’m ready for something new.”

Okay, that is a lot of words that are not especially about Shroud. But this is what I was thinking about for the weeks I was reading this book, and it makes my brain feel satisfied to put down a final version of those thoughts and shove them out into the world rather than to just think all these thoughts and not share them, so, there it is.

To be more directly on-topic: Shroud is pretty good. It is an exciting adventure. The science stuff has some cool ideas. The chapters from the aliens’ perspective are unlike anything you’ve ever read. There are some good ups and downs, some good surprises, moments where I was afraid for the characters, and moments where I was excited for them. But, ultimately, the setting and my inability to connect with much beyond the narrow interest of the characters whose perspective we saw meant that this was a book I admired more than I enjoyed. Well done, interesting ideas, cleverly written, but it didn’t speak to me.

Clown Town by Mick Herron

The ninth full-length novel in the Slough House series, Clown Town restores some key elements of the series focusing on the Slow Horses team of failed British spies while escalating long-simmering conflicts towards what feels like an impending final resolution. This entry focuses on a blackmail plot hatched by a group of senior citizens who are clearly a kind of vision of the future for the Slow Horses — former spies who were disrespected and discarded by the spy services and, in their retirement, find themselves on the edge of poverty, shamed by some of the things they did for their country and hurt that they can’t even collect a decent pension. The former spies’ ill-conceived scheme inevitably collides with the Slow Horses own blunders, and Slough House leader Jackson Lamb makes a big move amid the chaos, taking a big step in the direction of a conclusion to the whole series.

I love these books. There’s not a ton more to say about them. They’re fun spy mysteries with the unique twist of the spies being mostly terrible at their jobs. You definitely get the sense that Herron is working towards an ending here — probably in the next book, but maybe two more — and I think that has mixed-to-positive results. In the third or fourth book in a series like this, there are certain outcomes that are mostly off the table, so you can’t take certain threats too seriously. Not so by book nine — anything can happen at this point, and my only real objection is that you can see some characters’ endings coming in a way that may feel almost anticlimactic. But I can’t judge that until it happens and, who knows, maybe I’m totally wrong about where several of these plotlines are heading. In any case, I’ll keep reading these until they’re done.

Esoteric Ebb by Christoffer Bodegård

Esoteric Ebb focuses on a cleric who comes to town with an assignment to solve the mystery of an exploding tea shop on the eve of the town’s first election in years. The game openly lifts much of the structure and mechanics of Disco Elysium — you have a series of attributes that respond to dice rolls to explain to you how you’re perceiving the world — but applies them in a much more traditional fantasy dungeons and dragons-style fantasy world. Like Disco, Esoteric Ebb has a rich and complicated world with deep backstory, politics, and history that you learn about in wonderfully-written prose as you explore every nook and cranny of this world. Even though it’s got knights and wizards and orcs and goblins, it’s a vaguely contemporary world where people speak in modern language. There’s no voice acting in the game, so it is a lot of reading — I saw an interview that mentioned the script for the game is over 1 million words long — but it works because the writing is excellent. It’s a good mystery, with fun characters, in a surprising world, and most of all, the writing is really hilariously funny too. I had a blast with this, even if some systems were a little confusing, the controls were occasionally a bit awkward, and by the end of my ~25 hours with this game, my eyes were getting tired of all that reading. It’s a great game, a great story, and a great experience.

Quicker thoughts:

Paradise Season 2

Season 2 of Paradise picks up where Season 1 left off — not so much in terms of plot, as it discards plotlines and mysteries and characters from the previous season seemingly at random — but in that this remains either a very good bad show or a terrible good show. There are a few really strong performances, some cool ideas to explore, and an episode or two that is actually quite good, but the rest of the show feels like the writers were playing Mad Libs to come up with ideas. Our hero…crashes a plane…and then is rescued by…mute children?…who are…maybe evil?…but then he finds himself at…Graceland? By the end of the second season, this show is about something entirely different than it was in the first season, and I refuse to believe that the two main concepts driving the end of the season were ever considered when they started the show. It is a very stupid show, and undeniably pretty watchable. When Season 3 comes out, I am going to be mad at how stupid it is, and I will probably watch it all.

Rooster Season 1

Bill Lawrence’s shows (Ted Lasso, Shrinking, Scrubs, etc.) are really charming but tend to get a little too in love with how cute they are to the point they start to annoy me. I feel like I can already tell Rooster is going to get there, as it seems clear they’re going to try to convince me that Connie Britton and Phil Dunster, the exes of the main character and his daughter, respectively, are some how not The Worst when they plainly are. But, almost against my better judgment, this is a super cute and funny show with Steve Carell as a kind of sad sack divorced dad novelist who ends up teaching at the same university where his daughter is a professor. I saw a funny headline somewhere on the internet about this show questioning whether anyone writing this show ever went to college, which is a fair question given basically every plot thread in the show, but also, if anyone wants to learn about life on a college campus, watching this show would be a strange way to accomplish that. It’s a silly show with mostly charming people mostly learning sweet lessons.