Unto Leviathan

The Argonos has been travelling through space across so many generations that its own records no longer name the place it started. Aboard, a rigid class system governs a population that has never known any other home, and authority is split between a captain and a bishop.

A signal draws the ship to a planet where a human colony has been slaughtered. Beyond it, a vast alien vessel drifts in the dark. Boarding parties cross over, and only some of them return.

The ship divides over what to do next. The bishop reads the alien vessel as a test of faith and wants it entered. The captain wants the Argonos to leave. Bartolomeo, the captain's crippled adviser, narrates and shares the captain's fear that the vessel is something far worse than a trial.

The book is Gothic science fiction, built on shipboard politics and church power. It was published in the United States as Ship of Fools and won the Philip K. Dick Award. The derelict gives away almost nothing, and the Argonos has to decide whether to stay or flee.