HANDS

They have seen outsiders five times. They know what outsiders want. Then something comes down on the reef that wants nothing at all.North Sentinel Island, present day. About a hundred and twenty people live there, and the outside world is forbidden to touch them. Tomale, the oldest hunter, has spent his life turning the island's five encounters with the outside into lessons: outsiders come for something, they leave when you make it cost, and they take back what is theirs. He has never been wrong.Then a ship settles onto the reef on the top of a tide, and a machine walks out of it and begins taking people.Inside, Tomale's niece Ieke learns what the taken are for. The beings in the ship cannot survive on the island; anything done in the open has to be done by hands that can live here. So the hands haul wood, and are lifted each morning to be weighed, and the ones who weigh least are let go over deep water. Nobody is punished. Nobody is spoken to. The visitors are not cruel. They are counting.On the beach, Tomale applies the lessons. He lays down bows. He lays down pigs, and iron, and at last a child. Nothing is taken from the sand. When the last lesson fails, the island is left with the only thing it has ever known how to do with a force that takes and cannot be paid: learn what it will not take, and become that.*Hands* is a hard science fiction novel told entirely from the point of view of a people who have no word for why. Their speech and thought are rendered in a deliberately constrained register, and every fact about the visitors on the page is something an islander saw. The science is consistent and never explained. The ending is theirs.From the author of *Overtaken* and *Hung Round*.