In a lot of ‘hard’ science fiction we extrapolate from the current state of knowledge, and catapult off into the ether, dial it to eleven, to create that speculative niche in which the story can play out. It’s what I did with Children of Time, where Fiona Cross’s research into spider cognition led to the thought experiment of ‘what if these spiders ruled the world?’.
Since then, I’ve played off science for a variety of books. Dogs of War is strongly informed by my reading into canine learning and cognitive capacity), Doors of Eden is a madhouse of speculative evolution and Alien Clay looks at the idea-space for alien models of ecology. Shroud, though, was the biggest challenge yet.
There is in fact a single scientist behind the inception of Shroud. The biochemist William Bains happened to pay a visit to Eastercon, the UK’s national science fiction convention, to give a talk about exotic biochemistries, how they worked and how they didn’t. Science fiction has its complement of unusual aliens, and often these are handwaved as being ‘silicon-based’ or similar, and I’d always thought I might try my hand at it.
Suffice to say Shroud is not that book, because Bains’ talk made it plain just how far you’d need to push the parameters to get a stable silicon-based biochemistry working. The whole talk was quite the eye-opener. As a fiction writer, you can end up with a rather cavalier idea of what works and what doesn’t, but I came out of the talk with a solid understanding of why we work with the particular set of molecules that we do, and what you’d have to change, to make any alternatives function.
And I may still write that book, but it would be a whole research rabbit hole of its own…
I spent a year thinking through what I’d learned, and what I might want to do with it. I still very much wanted to write a book with a very alien world and some very alien aliens, some place that would be incredibly hostile to human life, but where I could still have a recognisable living ecosystem (which, of course, would also be hostile to human life, just in a different way).
The next year, William Bains was back at Eastercon giving a talk on the chemistry of Venus, with an eye to the potential for life, and he was good enough to sit down with me for what turned out to be an epic talk over what parameters I might be able to set for a world, in order to get all the things I wanted out of it. Over the course of a good couple of hours the world – the moon, in fact – of Shroud came into being piece by piece. Its darkness, its freezing temperatures, its anoxic, dense atmosphere. A terrible place to be marooned, as my protagonists find out, but an Eden of alien life nonetheless, living in an ecosystem fuelled by strange chemical and energetic interactions and the proximity of its gas giant mother planet, far from its feeble sun.
The world then gave me the pressures that shaped its life: the blind, asymmetrical, weirdly-carapaced and cacophonous lineages that evolution made out of the stygian abyss of Shroud. And needless to say, the book tells a human survival story against all odds, two humans encountering an alien world, but it also tells the story about the minds of an alien world encountering humanity…
Shroud is out now. Order your copy here.