Typhon's Children

Philip K. Dick Award: Best Novel nominee (1999).

To the new colonists, the teeming, ocean-dominated planet of Typhon seems a wondrous and exotic paradise – until the land erupts with incomprehensible violence, consuming the colony in a fiery hell. Their supplies lost, the survivors find themselves struggling against a world where death wears many guises. But the deadliest menace strikes from within – for every child born on Typhon suffers strange, degenerative mutations. Unless the situation can be reversed, the Typhon colony is doomed.

Per Langstaff is a scientist obsessed with the life-and-death mystery, certain that the answer to the colony's survival lies with the virulent planet itself. His staunchest ally, Dilani, is a rebellious young girl born deaf to sound and convention, an orphan as unruly as the oceans themselves. Together these two outcasts, bound by a shared love of the depths, embark on an unforgettable journey that will take them to the utmost reaches of humanity... and beyond.