A Not-Quite Human Story Unable to find a home and acceptance on Earth, an intrepid band of misplaced youth seek their ancestral home among the stars. Unfortunately, their reception is not what they hoped. The home they discover is a hostile environment, involved in a huge interstellar war with a hostile alien species. Viewed as untrusted interlopers, they search for a place in a universe with no use for them, and no place turn for assistance. One chapter has some explicit interspecies sex, but it's part of the plot.
There's some reaction these days that holds scientists responsible for war. Take it one step further: What happens if "book-learnin'" is held responsible.?
The loss of solar heating has caused the Earth's atmosphere to freeze into thick layers of "snow". The boy's father had worked with a group of other scientists to construct a large shelter, but the earthquakes accompanying the disaster had destroyed it and killed the others. He managed to construct a smaller, makeshift shelter called the "Nest" for his family, where they maintain a breathable atmosphere by periodically retrieving pails of frozen oxygen to thaw over a fire.
Under normal conditions a whole person has a decided advantage over a handicapped one. But out in deep space the normal may be reversed--for humans at any rate.
Until the extraordinary affair at Sidmouth, the peculiar species Haploteuthis ferox was known to science only generically, on the strength of a half-digested tentacle obtained near the Azores, and a decaying body pecked by birds and nibbled by fish, found early in 1896 by Mr. Jennings, near Land's End.