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inverarityA near-future novel of first contact with octopuses.
MCD, 2022, 456 pages
It's not often I read a book that makes me look up words, multiple times. This might be a sign of pretentious thesaurus abuse, but The Mountain In the Sea is a rare, truly literary SF novel and its esoteric terms mostly fit the theme, which touches on biology, consciousness, climatology, and artificial intelligence. But most of all, octopuses!
So we all know octopuses are really intelligent, right? Like maybe exceeding cetacean and primate intelligence. But even if they're smart, they're also alien, from a human point of view. How could they not be? A few of my favorite books — from Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Ruin to Shelby Van Pelt's Remarkably Bright Creatures — have featured octopuses. Octopuses are cool and I'm rather glad that the few times I tried eating octopus, I didn't like it, because they're one of the few creatures I'd actually feel guilty about eating now.
The Mountain In the Sea is set in a near-future vaguely cyber-dystopian Earth where environmental collapse is nearly complete and AI-guided robot ships are still scouring the oceans for the last meager scraps of protein that can be harvested. Some of these ships are crewed by slaves, literally press-ganged into service and forced to work long hours hauling, gutting and flash-freezing the last of the world's fish.
There are three main characters in the novel, whose threads are loosely woven together even though they never directly encounter each other.
The first is Ha Nguyen, a marine biologist who is brought to the archipelago of Con Dao, which was bought by a multinational corporation called DIANIMA to protect Con Dao's sealife from the rapacious overfishing of the robot ships. But it turns out that of course DIANIMA's motives were not altruistic: stories going back hundreds of years of a "Con Dao sea monster" are true. In fact, they have discovered a species of intelligent octopuses, and they want to figure out how these unique and alien minds work. Ha sees beauty and wonder in a non-human species that has language, culture, and even art, in their underwater stone-age stage of development, but needless to say, DIANAMA has other interests.
Ha must work with Evrim, the world's first android, a self-aware AI whose creation sparked riots and international legislation against ever creating another being like them. (Evrim is consistently referred to in nonbinary terms.) Evrim is now protected, and imprisoned, on Con Dao by Evrim's creator, another brilliant scientist who created DIANIMA. They are both guarded by Altsantseg, a terse Mongolian mercenary who controls killer drones from a fluid suspension tank.
Ha's story was the most interesting, because she's the most introspective, and of course because she's the one who makes contact with the octopuses. Evrim and Altantsetseg are almost equally alien in their own ways.
The second of the main characters is Eiko, a Japanese man who was abducted on a trip to Cambodia and is now a slave-worker on one of the AI factory ships. His story tells us more about the world in which they all work, where corporations are trying to squeeze the last bit of profit to be made out of a dying environment, and nation-states are largely too obsolete to stop them. Eiko and his fellow crew/slaves try to mutiny and escape from their ship and its remorseless AI, and are eventually set on a course that brings them to Con Dao.
The third character is Rustem, an Eastern European super-hacker living in Turkey. He is hired to hack a mysterious, enormously sophisticated neural net that his shadowy employers won't tell him about. Rustem is a mercenary, but as it becomes obvious that his employers are ruthless and certainly will not let him live past his usefulness, Rustem also is trying to escape while captured by the awe and the challenge of his task.
This book has a fair amount of action for such a thoughtful book, but it's not primarily an adventure. It's an exploration of sentience, and also a critique of late-stage capitalism, though I don't think the author was being particularly polemical. We see glimpses of what the post-hegemonic world looks like, with Tibet becoming a sort of mini-superpower thanks to its drone technology, Vietnam being a new financial center, and the United States and other Western powers not even mentioned; are they even still around? Who knows.
The octopuses were of course the real heart of the novel, and some readers might say there wasn't enough octopus in the book. None of them emerge as characters in their own right, merely a plot device that sometimes interacts with the humans.
There are a lot of profundities in this book, although the book excerpts from Ha Nguyen's (fictional) How Oceans Think and Dr. Arnkatla Minervudottir-Chan's Building Minds became so frequent that I wondered what their respective books actually contained besides meditations and shower thoughts on the purported subjects of their books.
This was overall a brilliant and genuinely thoughtful SF work that has the potential to be a classic, though the narrative meandered a bit between the three semi-related characters, and at times the author might have been a little too self-indulgent with literary flourishes. Still, would have been an almost perfect book with MORE OCTOPUSES!
My complete list of book reviews.
MCD, 2022, 456 pages
Humankind discovers intelligent life in an octopus species with its own language and culture, and sets off a high-stakes global competition to dominate the future.
Rumors begin to spread of a species of hyperintelligent, dangerous octopus that may have developed its own language and culture. Marine biologist Dr. Ha Nguyen, who has spent her life researching cephalopod intelligence, will do anything for the chance to study them.
The transnational tech corporation DIANIMA has sealed the remote Con Dao Archipelago, where the octopuses were discovered, off from the world. Dr. Nguyen joins DIANIMA’s team on the islands: a battle-scarred security agent and the world’s first android.
The octopuses hold the key to unprecedented breakthroughs in extrahuman intelligence. The stakes are high: there are vast fortunes to be made by whoever can take advantage of the octopuses’ advancements, and as Dr. Nguyen struggles to communicate with the newly discovered species, forces larger than DIANIMA close in to seize the octopuses for themselves.
But no one has yet asked the octopuses what they think. And what they might do about it.
A near-future thriller about the nature of consciousness, Ray Nayler’s The Mountain in the Sea is a dazzling literary debut and a mind-blowing dive into the treasure and wreckage of humankind’s legacy.
It's not often I read a book that makes me look up words, multiple times. This might be a sign of pretentious thesaurus abuse, but The Mountain In the Sea is a rare, truly literary SF novel and its esoteric terms mostly fit the theme, which touches on biology, consciousness, climatology, and artificial intelligence. But most of all, octopuses!
So we all know octopuses are really intelligent, right? Like maybe exceeding cetacean and primate intelligence. But even if they're smart, they're also alien, from a human point of view. How could they not be? A few of my favorite books — from Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Ruin to Shelby Van Pelt's Remarkably Bright Creatures — have featured octopuses. Octopuses are cool and I'm rather glad that the few times I tried eating octopus, I didn't like it, because they're one of the few creatures I'd actually feel guilty about eating now.
The Mountain In the Sea is set in a near-future vaguely cyber-dystopian Earth where environmental collapse is nearly complete and AI-guided robot ships are still scouring the oceans for the last meager scraps of protein that can be harvested. Some of these ships are crewed by slaves, literally press-ganged into service and forced to work long hours hauling, gutting and flash-freezing the last of the world's fish.
There are three main characters in the novel, whose threads are loosely woven together even though they never directly encounter each other.
The first is Ha Nguyen, a marine biologist who is brought to the archipelago of Con Dao, which was bought by a multinational corporation called DIANIMA to protect Con Dao's sealife from the rapacious overfishing of the robot ships. But it turns out that of course DIANIMA's motives were not altruistic: stories going back hundreds of years of a "Con Dao sea monster" are true. In fact, they have discovered a species of intelligent octopuses, and they want to figure out how these unique and alien minds work. Ha sees beauty and wonder in a non-human species that has language, culture, and even art, in their underwater stone-age stage of development, but needless to say, DIANAMA has other interests.
Ha must work with Evrim, the world's first android, a self-aware AI whose creation sparked riots and international legislation against ever creating another being like them. (Evrim is consistently referred to in nonbinary terms.) Evrim is now protected, and imprisoned, on Con Dao by Evrim's creator, another brilliant scientist who created DIANIMA. They are both guarded by Altsantseg, a terse Mongolian mercenary who controls killer drones from a fluid suspension tank.
Ha's story was the most interesting, because she's the most introspective, and of course because she's the one who makes contact with the octopuses. Evrim and Altantsetseg are almost equally alien in their own ways.
The second of the main characters is Eiko, a Japanese man who was abducted on a trip to Cambodia and is now a slave-worker on one of the AI factory ships. His story tells us more about the world in which they all work, where corporations are trying to squeeze the last bit of profit to be made out of a dying environment, and nation-states are largely too obsolete to stop them. Eiko and his fellow crew/slaves try to mutiny and escape from their ship and its remorseless AI, and are eventually set on a course that brings them to Con Dao.
The third character is Rustem, an Eastern European super-hacker living in Turkey. He is hired to hack a mysterious, enormously sophisticated neural net that his shadowy employers won't tell him about. Rustem is a mercenary, but as it becomes obvious that his employers are ruthless and certainly will not let him live past his usefulness, Rustem also is trying to escape while captured by the awe and the challenge of his task.
This book has a fair amount of action for such a thoughtful book, but it's not primarily an adventure. It's an exploration of sentience, and also a critique of late-stage capitalism, though I don't think the author was being particularly polemical. We see glimpses of what the post-hegemonic world looks like, with Tibet becoming a sort of mini-superpower thanks to its drone technology, Vietnam being a new financial center, and the United States and other Western powers not even mentioned; are they even still around? Who knows.
The octopuses were of course the real heart of the novel, and some readers might say there wasn't enough octopus in the book. None of them emerge as characters in their own right, merely a plot device that sometimes interacts with the humans.
There are a lot of profundities in this book, although the book excerpts from Ha Nguyen's (fictional) How Oceans Think and Dr. Arnkatla Minervudottir-Chan's Building Minds became so frequent that I wondered what their respective books actually contained besides meditations and shower thoughts on the purported subjects of their books.
This was overall a brilliant and genuinely thoughtful SF work that has the potential to be a classic, though the narrative meandered a bit between the three semi-related characters, and at times the author might have been a little too self-indulgent with literary flourishes. Still, would have been an almost perfect book with MORE OCTOPUSES!
My complete list of book reviews.
