A Planet for Reluctant Revolutionaries

Curmudgeon marine biologist Dr. S clawed her way to a respected research career through outsmarting and outperforming her male colleagues at every step along the way. Now sixty years old, she’s grooming her final grad student Naomi, a climate activist, to take over her research on octopus communication before she retires. Naomi is brilliant and she practically worships Dr. S, but the two women are poles apart on how to build a career in today’s world; the tech, the culture, the politics, and the climate are so very different from Dr. S’s era, and their differences are fraying their relationship.

When they stumble on an underwater settlement of refugee aliens resembling octopuses, they set to work on the nearly insurmountable task of finding a joint vocabulary. Then a spaceship arrives in orbit and they are thrust into dealing with absurdly hawkish men in the US government and the alien equivalent of a tech bro billionaire whom the refugees thought they’d escaped. An interplanetary confrontation is brewing, and Dr. S, Naomi, and their new alien friends will need to work across species and across generations to defuse it.