This story is philosophically engaging in the way all of the best science fiction is, and I recommend it for its exploration of concepts such as consciousness, communication, choices, and freedom. Although the story includes revolting depictions of senseless cruelty and violence, one of the themes is the importance of awareness of and connection to each other and our world. I consider it hopepunk.

The plot is interesting and occasionally exciting, but slowed down by the multiple points of view. The connections between those points of view didn’t become apparent until the end. I liked the ending, but it’s not neat and tidy. Part of me wishes there had been an epilogue, but perhaps it’s better this way. It has certainly given me plenty to think about.

I enjoyed the excerpts from the characters’ books, which gave the author a chance to share more of the science and philosophy he grappled with during his research. I also appreciated him including some of his sources in the Acknowledgments.

Thanks to MCD Books/Farrar, Straus and Giroux for providing me with an ARC through NetGalley, which I volunteered to review.

There are some interesting concepts in this book that seem to explore the future connection we will more than likely have with AI tech and application of it to what amounts to an alien species. But I had a difficult time getting into this book. 17% of the way in I felt like I got an extremely detailed description of the world and the characters, but was nowhere into what was considered to be the plot.

Thanks to NetGalley and MCD for an ARC of this book.

Immediately got "Arrival" vibes from this near-future, possibly-dystopian sci fi novel. Fascinating style of prose, both lyrical and gritty/detailed. From the android to the face-morphing masks to the impacts of climate catastrophe that seem to be in the news almost daily, the combination of pure imagination and real/pseudo-science was beautifully blended.

Slow to start, but that's a common attribute of worldbuilding-heavy genre fic.

This was a really good and interesting book, you will learn a lot about octopus and their intelligence, the cover art of this book hints at octopus being a main character. This story is told from a few perspectives, one a scientist who has been sent (or banned depending on your interpretation) to study marine life on this island that had been bought by a large corporation and who paid the people that had lived there generously to move off. That gave the island the opportunity to recover from over population and over harvesting of animals on the island and marine in the ocean. Dr Ha specializes in octopus, their mating, eating and social habits, and some of the octopus have been exhibiting unusual behavior. Dr Ha and an almost human robot, Evrim, are to work together to observe and discover why the octopus are behaving the way they are. Meanwhile we learn about Eiko, a young man who was to start working for the corporation that had bought the island Dr Ha is on, but on a night out he is kidnapped and wakes up on board a fishing vessel, forced to work in order to get fed small rations. The story goes back and forth between Dr Ha, Eiko and Rustem a hacker, each chapter is prefaced with a quote from either Dr Ha or another expert which were interesting to read. I would highly recommend. Thanks to #Netgalley and #MCD for the ARC.

While the concept of this book interested me, the execution did not keep me engaged. I kept waiting to read about what happened to bring the world to its current state. The different storylines did not make sense for a while, but fortunately they came together in a good way before the end.

I received a free copy of this book to review through NetGalley.

I may not have been used to the author's way or writing or style, but I found my mind drifting a lot as I was reaching this. So much so that I would lose my place and then my mind would wander.

I loved this book. I have always had a fascination with octopuses and the secrets of the amazing minds so I was not surprised to see that someone finally wrote a novel about just that idea. When humans find intelligent life living under the sea in an octopus community one scientist risks everything to be able to study them. But their is a fortune to be made from this discovery and every shady group is stealing for a chance to swoop in and take these octopuses for themselves. A Mountain In the Sea was an excellent read and do believe it could contend for a Book of the Year finalist.

I found this book very intriguing and definitely enjoyed the mix of science fiction and environmental wildlife topics.

The Mountain in the Sea has three story lines: the island where the octopuses are studied; a fishing vessel run by artificial intelligence and manned by forced labor; and a brilliant programmer. The main story is the island where the marine life is protected from outsiders by an almost military force, thanks to one special character. A scientist and an being who was artificially created but seems to have become much more are the other two residents.

There is so much to this book, from scientific advances to extreme damage to the environment. This is not a pleasant world, but the three on the island are insulated from the outside world and focus on the octopuses, who seem to have advanced to a new level of intelligence and social structure. The story is painful, this is not a world I would want to live in, but it is fascinating in both the science and for social issues.

I received an advance review copy of The Mountain in the Sea from NetGalley and the publisher and this is my honest review.

I just finished The Mountain in the Sea last night. I liked it! I love when a.book combines learning with entertainment, and that's just what this one did. I was even inspired to do a little of my own research into octopuses! They're fascinating.
The Mountain in the Sea felt like it was building up to an incredible climax, and I thought there would be some action. But, I was letdown in that way. I was a bit confused by several things at the end of the book, and it didn't seem like it tied up many loose ends.
But it kept my attention throughout, and I enjoyed the story.

I feel as though I gained some intelligence while reading this book. This is a story that offers something complex, but told in a way where you’re not left scratching your head or re-reading the same page multiple times.

What I loved most is how it is told by three main POV’s from vastly different characters. While this is classified as a sci-fi read, it also touches upon categories like philosophy, consciousness, espionage, etc

I couldn’t help but think of Arrival while reading this book, and that is a compliment (as it is one of my favourite movies)!

Thank you to Netgalley and the publishers for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I never should have anticipated any 2022 releases. They've literally all been massive disappointments

Octopi are such intriguing creatures. So is it a super big surprise that I loved this Sci-Fi involving humankind discovering intelligent life in an octopus species with its own language and culture?
Marine biologist Ha Nguyen gets an incredible job opportunity to investigate a potentially intelligent species of octopus alongside Evrim, the only conscious android to ever be created.
I honestly wasn't expecting how deep this book went! It delved into philosophical realms of personhood, sapience, consciousness, first contact, AI, capitalism so well. The glimpses into the near future world Nayler set up was really cool, and his real world knowledge really shone. I appreciated the only singular Turkish 3rd person pronoun "O" being mentioned here, it's gender neutral and it's a feature of Turkish I really like.
While fascinating, the book is on the slower side and I would have been ok with more things happening especially where the side stories were concerned. I also listened to parts of this on audio and I thought the narrator was great (but I can't help being picky about Turkish pronunciations).
Thank you Macmillan Audio for the ALC and MCDxFSG and NetGalley for the ARC.

I really wanted to get into this one but something didn’t sit right with me. I’m not sure if it was the writing or the characters or what. The blurb and subject sounded interesting in theory but the execution just couldn’t keep my attention long enough.

A solid 4.5 rounded up on merit to 5!

Personally, I think the most human genre being written today is the truly reflective Science Fiction story... think of Heinline, Chiang, Asimov and Liu.... even Roddenberry. They project, not just technology and otherworldly encounters, but cultural and philosophical interactions pointing the direction society is heading.

Nayler does a fantastic job of contributing to this important conversation in The Mountain In the Sea. Set in the not-to-distant future... disturbingly recognizable... humans find a species of Octopus that have developed intelligence, society and communication. The question is, what will win out? The decency of preserving an alien race (aka the prime directive), or a bid to use the discovery to discover a breakthru in hyper-intelligence?

And did anyone ask the octopus what they wanted?

I enjoyed the setting, plot and characters, though I would have enjoyed some more growth. Otherwise, this was a wild ride and a great window into the human mindset!

My thanks to NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for an honest review!

I love octopuses so I was excited for this one. It was a little too scientific for me and I kept losing interest in the beginning with all the science details. I think true science fiction fans will enjoy this one. For me it was too heavy on the science.

This is a nice hard science fiction story. Unfortunately, I had a hard time getting into it. It was a very slow pace for me. Once I got used to the author's style it did improve, but I found myself skimming some of the pages unfortunately. I will give this author another chance, but this one wasn't for me.

A scientist studies an advanced species of octopus in collaboration with the world's first sentient android; a slave works on a robotic ship extracting marine protein from the sea; a hacker is employed by a shadowy entity to crack an advanced information network. Simultaneously gripping and thought-provoking, The Mountain in the Sea addresses themes of sentience, interdependence, and memory while telling a great story.

The novel's point of view switches among its three main characters, whose storylines are largely independent. Usually in this type of book, some of the plotlines are more interesting or well-written than others - but in The Mountain in the Sea, all are equally excellent. Nayler has mastered the trick of elevating the story with well-researched science and philosophy, while still maintaining a fast-paced plot and even (by the standards of this genre) a good amount of character development. I would recommend The Mountain in the Sea to all readers of science fiction and to anyone interested in non-human intelligence.

Ray Nayler’s new science fiction novel The Mountain in the Sea is a dazzling exploration of the prospects for nonhuman sentience, and of the difficulties we would have in understanding it and relating to it. The main premise (or science-fictional novum) of the book is that a species of octopus has attained a human level of intelligence and consciousness. The octopuses have a language (expressed in varying chromatophore patterns running across their bodies); and together with this basic linguistic ability comes a social structure, a culture with practices preserved across generations, an ability to fix linguistic statements in material media (i.e. forms of writing and what seems to be artistic and/or religious expression), and an ability for both individuals and groups to form and carry out projects over extended periods of time. All of these other abilities are made possible by language. The existence of sapient octopuses is not all that big an extrapolation from actuality, since octopuses are already known to be the smartest invertebrates, with an intelligence level seemingly equal to that of many mammals and birds; and octopuses already use their ability to change color for purposes of simple communication, as well as for camouflage.

This involves issues of both ontology and epistemology. An octopus will experience the world in a vastly different way from how a human being does. “What is it like to be an octopus?” is a much more difficult question than Thomas Nagel’s “what is it like to be a bat?” Octopuses live in the water, rather than on land in an atmosphere; due to their water environment they do not experience the pull of gravity in the same way that we do; they have flexible bodies, without the backbone and skeleton of human beings and other vertebrates; both human beings and octopuses have strong senses of sight, but the other sensory modalities are quite different; octopuses do not have their neural networks centered in their heads in the way human beings and other vertebrates do, but rather their ‘brain’ is decentered, stretched through their entire bodies, with significant concentrations of neurons in their eight arms. For all these reasons, octopuses do not think the way human beings do, and would not have a language easily translatable into human terms. Nayler’s octopuses are aliens, in science fictional terms; we would be wrong to assume either that they lack our mental complexity, or that such complexity can be mapped out in terms of human understanding. The novel shows how difficult understanding an alien intelligence can be. It is a matter of embodiment and emotion, as well as of ideas and “conceptual schemes.” Human beings will not be able to understand such a different sort of intelligence by mere objective scientific observation alone.

The Mountain in the Sea is about the wondrousness of discovering (and potentially contacting) another sentient species, but it is also about the difficulties involved in such a discovery. The novel’s protagonist, Dr. Ha Nguyen, is a scientist specializing in cephalopod intelligence. She comes to a small archipelago off the coast of Vietnam, in whose waters the sapient octopus colony has been found. The archipelago is an oceanic wildlife preserve; all the human inhabitants have been relocated elsewhere, and fishing vessels are not allowed to come near. Ha’s only companions on the islands are Altantsetseg, an ex-military woman in charge of security, and Evrim (pronouns they/them), a genderless android who is the world’s only AI with fully human-level (or higher) intelligence. There is also a Buddhist monastery on the main island, inhabited by robot monks. Over the course of the novel, Dr. Ha attempts to establish contact with the octopuses; she doesn’t want to just decipher their language and map the structure of their society, but most importantly to communicate with them. Indeed, the novel strongly makes the point that understanding, without communication and empathy, is impossible.

The novel is not just about scientific research, however, because such research is never independent from the rest of the world. The archipelago is maintained as a nature reserve by the corporation that owns it, DIANIMA, a multinational primarily involved in the manufacture and improvement of artificial intelligence. Dr. Ha rightly worries that DIANIMA has less than benevolent motives; it wants to study this new form of intelligence in order to profit from it, by transferring its lessons to AI design and construction. For now, the octopuses are under the corporation’s protection; but Dr. Ha worries that at some point DIANIMA will want to vivisect them in order to understand the neural basis of their cognition. For that matter, Evrim is an entirely unique entity, confined exclusively to the archipelago, because their sheer existence has resulted in laws against making any more AIs with a humanlike or human-exceeding degree of cognitive power. Neither the corporation that manufactured Evrim, nor the authorities and populations that fear them, is able to grasp that Evrim themself is an embodied entity with emotions and desires, just as human beings, sapient octopuses, and indeed all other living entities are.

In exploring all these entanglements, the novel considers multiple forms and degrees of sentience and intelligence. Evrim speaks English, but Dr. Ha still must concern herself with their otherness as well as with that of the octopuses. Other, subsidiary plot stands bring in additional complications. DIANIMA also sells other sorts of artificial minds (both embodied and not) with varying capacities. One of their products is virtual companions, known as “point fives” (or halfs), who are tailored to the needs of the particular people who purchase them. You get a sort of friend or partner, who you can make visible whenever you want via 3D projection, who looks and sounds human, and who is smart enough that you can confide in them and discuss problems with them. It’s just like having an intimate partner, except that they never have demands and desires that contradict, or exist independently of, yours. Then there are economically motivated AI systems, that again can understand spoken language, and that run things like factories and fishing ships. One subsidiary thread of the novel concerns Eiko, who has been kidnapped by human traffickers and set to work as a slave on an AI-controlled fishing vessel. Even if you successfully rebel against your human oppressors, you may well still be stuck under the control of such an AI. Another thread of the novel concerns Rustem, a hacker who is skilled at breaking into AI systems; he is hired by mysterious forces who want to hack into and take over Evrim. His work is premised on the idea that AI systems, no matter how organized, intelligent, and advanced, are always programmed with “portals” or backdoors that allow them to be taken over and controlled — any sense of freedom is just an illusion.

The Mountain in the Sea does not answer all the dilemmas that it poses; it is all about probing the questions it asks as fully as possible, and also about the limits of our ability both to understand and to act. It is also about the extent and the limits of empathy, and how it can survive against the background of a human society still dominated by greed and by severe power imbalances. Have human beings ever encounter a different society that they did not destroy, or at least subsume? If Europeans have done this to other human ethnic groups, the what can we expect in the case of an encounter with an intelligence, and a collective society, that is not human at all? All the narrative strands are woven together, and the novel reaches a point of narrative culmination and conclusion — if not an intellectual conclusion to complex issues that it works hard to keep open. The novel is quite lucid, and at the same time beautiful and strange. It demonstrates the point that I first learned from Seo-Young Chu’s important book Do Metaphors Dream of Literal Sleep?: that the “cognitive estrangement” central to science fiction is a matter of content, rather than one of form. The Mountain in the Sea is emotionally compelling, but its ideas continue to reverberate in your mind after you have finished reading it.

A couple months back, when I saw Ray Nayler’s debut novel pop up on NetGalley, the “philosophical thriller about the nature of consciousness” description caught my eye. I’m quite intrigued by philosophical sci-fi that digs into non-human minds, but the thriller tag kept me from immediately putting in a request. Then I read some of Nayler’s short fiction, with a piece he wrote showing up on my July favorites list and a piece he translated on my August favorites. And I was sufficiently impressed to go back and request that ARC for The Mountain in the Sea. And I’m very glad I did.

The Mountain in the Sea features a handful of mostly-disparate storylines that explore different aspects of the theme, with just enough overlap in character or setting to hint at convergence in the climax. The main story follows Dr. Ha Nguyen, who is brought to a private island by the DIANIMA corporation to work alongside an android studying the local octopus population, trying to determine whether they have achieved sentience, and if so, how to communicate with them. Meanwhile, a mysterious masked woman is interviewing people who lived on the island before DIANIMA acquired it, as well as soliciting the services of an elite Russian hacker on an ambitious secret project. Yet a third subplot follows a young Japanese professional kidnapped to serve on an AI-run slave ship to squeeze value out of increasingly overfished waters.

If it sounds like a sci-fi thriller setup worthy of Michael Crichton, perhaps the marketing as a philosophical thriller can be forgiven. But while the pieces are all there for a thriller plot, The Mountain in the Sea has the feel of something very different, somewhere in between classic first contact and literary fiction. It’s not that there aren’t disparate plotlines converging for a satisfying conclusion—there absolutely are. But Nayler’s debut eschews the thriller’s galloping momentum in favor of storytelling that encourages contemplation of the challenges facing each character and their situation in the broader story of humanity and its uncomfortable relationship with other minds.

And the “philosophical” tag here is serious. We see in-story discussion of Thomas Nagel’s “What is it Like to Be a Bat,” along with plenty of meditation on what it would take to declare another species or an artificial intelligence to be truly sentient. And as a reader with a graduate degree in philosophy, perhaps that’s especially appealing to me. But I don’t think it’s uniquely appealing to me. These are deeply human themes, and Nayler neatly parallels the questions about AI and other species with humanity’s treatment of each other, with Ha in particular haunted by memories of the disastrous consequences of a simple failure to recognize the perspectives of those around her. The effect is to ask big questions in a way that has immediate emotional impact. And while it may not drive the plot quickly forward, it deepens the characters while integrating the philosophical musings into the story, making for some fascinating quiet passages worth lingering over.

If I have any complaint, it’s that the subplots were so immersive that it was easy to miss the forest for the trees. Make no mistake, the disparate subplots tied together into a satisfying whole, one that provided closure when necessary while leaving other big questions open. But much of the theorizing was messy and contradictory. And while I believe some of that contradiction was intentional—and appropriate to the difficulty of the subject—there were other passages that I had trouble squaring. Perhaps that’s on me as a reader, and I should learn to be more comfortable with contradiction. But while I enjoyed the blend of resolution and uncertainty in the conclusion, I felt a little more uncertain than I believe was intended.

Overall, this is a book that’s a pleasure to read and will encourage deep reflection on consciousness and the common human failure to accept the other. It’s one of the few where I’ve gone back and raised my initial rating after spending more time thinking about it. And it’s only aided by comparison to another novel I recently read about contact with an octopus society—the Hugo-longlisted Children of Ruin by Adrian Tchaikovsky—with The Mountain in the Sea featuring much more interesting human characters and a less predictable ending, along with more focus on the fascinating difficulties around what it would take for an octopus society to get started in the first place. Not everyone will resonate with the pacing and the theorizing, but I enjoyed it enough to finish in a long weekend, and it’s only improving upon further reflection. For those who enjoy theorizing in their first contact and literary-adjacent sci-fi, it carries my strong recommendation.

Recommended if you like: first contact, literary-leaning sci-fi, philosophical sci-fi, thematic depth.

Overall rating: 18 of Tar Vol’s 20. Five stars on Goodreads.