Natural History

the long version

"In the far future, humanity had engineered itself into new forms capable of spaceflight, the terraforming of planets, and the exploration of the deepest oceans. Evolution has reached a new zenith, and it seems there is no environment we cannot conquer. But when an interstellar voyager meets a piece of alien technology in a head-on collision, the results go to show that the synthesis of the human race and its own technology is not the first nor the most advanced of its kind in the galaxy." "In the ensuing adventure the humans in question lose sight of their own civil and personal conflicts as they struggle to identify whether they can ever establish any communication between themselves and the sentient technology by which they are being inexorably consumed - or is that evolved?"--BOOK JACKET.