"The WE", as one character in John Dickinson's latest children's novel explains, is the World Ear. "Although when we say 'the WE' we really mean the thing that is created when billions of brains are all linked by the World Ear [. . .] With simple self-training programmes designed for children, the World Ear can allow an infant to begin communicating at a basic level within a few months."

The World Ear, then, is the logical extension of today's social networking sites, where phones and consoles have been replaced with implants, every action can be shared, and all decisions seemingly reached by some level of collective consensus. No one is a stranger. Everyone knows everything about everyone else: age, qualifications, social status and even antisocial traits ("if any").

That's back on Earth.

The events in the novel, however, concern just a handful of people, freed from the collective to gather scientific data in an isolated space station  "a hulking sponge of artificial fabrics, machines and ecosystems" lurking in an icy crevice of a faraway moon, "like some soft-skinned reef creature"  over eight years' journey from Earth. Perhaps they are the last genuine free-thinkers and, thus, "true humans", in existence; the few remaining people who can think of themselves as "I" as well as "we". Here, they actually have to talk to each other to communicate.

True humans they may be, but they're almost physically unrecognisable as such: big-headed with puffy, swollen faces, their brittle-boned arms and legs are almost without muscle and painfully thin. This is the result of their having no need for weight-bearing muscles in the lighter, artificial gravity. They're condemned to a life of fluids rising to their heads. Their skin has paled through lack of sunlight.

WE is a science fiction novel with the emphasis on the science. The protagonist is Paul, the station's new "telemetry executive", sent to replace Thorsten, who is reported as having died in an accident. The details of how the science station survives in such extreme conditions, the roles of the crew staffing it and their day-to-day duties as they investigate the vast green-blue gas giant they orbit all ring true. They're realised with a sure hand. Dickinson has created a totally convincing and claustrophobic setting.

On one level, the characters' lives are mundane and everyday, filled with the mistrust, squabbles, petty rivalry and sexual tension one would expect of a small group of men and women working on repetitive tasks in close proximity. Yet what makes them seem so normal to the reader is what makes them stand apart so uniquely from the WE. They are cut off from the rest of humankind by much more than just the vast distances between them.

Though there are some truly gripping moments of extreme danger, this is a novel of ideas more than action, but it is to Dickinson's credit that intellectual argument and internal conflict have been used to create such a strong driving force.

Paul not only begins to question the role of the WE but also the true intentions of the people with whom he'll now spend the rest of his life. He finds it difficult to adjust to an existence free from the comforts of instant response and reaction. Sole decision-making has its merits, but now he has to learn to read people and their emotions and motivations from the outside. And how honest and open is everyone being?

Even in space, humanity has the potential to be its own worst enemy.

Philip Ardagh's Grubtown Tales are published by Faber.