Orson Scott Card's five-book saga starts as a tightly plotted military SF thriller and turns into something far more philosophical — a rare double Hugo/Nebula winner across its first two books.

Peter Godfrey-Smith argues that intelligence evolved independently in cephalopods and vertebrates, using the octopus's strange, distributed nervous system to ask what a genuinely alien mind might be like. Read alongside Ray Nayler's The Mountain in the Sea for the full effect.