The Jesus Incident by Frank Herbert

A human colony struggling to survive on a hostile, oceanic planet must contend with a newly sentient, godlike starship whose emergence forces questions of creation, responsibility, and faith; as the colonists face an unpredictable biosphere and bitter political and moral conflicts, they are driven into fraught negotiations with an inscrutable intelligence that challenges their notions of free will, ecology, and what it means to play god.

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