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.

This is excellent and will likely sell well, and get lots of high ratings. It has ll the elements of a good story, and I stayed engaged throughout. This author has written a lot of short stories, and has created a very good long form tale. Recommended.

I really appreciate the free ARC for review!!

The Mountain in the Sea was a very well-plotted and interesting novel. Set in the near future, Ha goes to study a race of intelligent octopi on a secluded island. Nayler was not afraid to take risks with this book, such as snapping between points of view, some for extended periods of time and others for mere pages. In the same vein as Stories of Your Life/Arrival, Ha attempts to understand and communicate with the animals by studying their language. While the story didn't quite come together as well as I would've liked at the end, I still very much enjoyed the journey.

Thanks to MCD and Netgalley for the opportunity to read and review this title prior to publication. Sentient octopuses? Sign me up! I was really interested in this title after loving "Into the Drowning Deep" by Mira Grant last year. The setup is somewhat similar - short chapters interspersed with quotes from the scientist characters' writings on octopuses, being human, and artificial intelligence. Naylor's book is much more science fiction-based, and I could not stop turning the pages while trying to put the pieces together - what exactly was happening, and who was on the good side here? This one has themes of language, identity, consciousness, coupled with highly evocative writing. The pages turn fast, but you will want to pause and think throughout. Very well done.

My thanks to both NetGalley and the publishers Farrar, Strauss and Giroux for an advanced copy of this book that I hope will become one the big books in the pantheon.

I came to my love of science fiction through the usual path of comics, Star Wars and or Trek. I was looking to grow up in a town with a great library and even better great garage sales, so books were an addiction that was easy to get a fix for, and not cost alot. Occasionally my father would suggest a title, usually a boring looking book with sand on the cover, or a robot looking sad, not star ships or lasers or anything, and I think these were the books that slowly made me think hmm, there is something to this science fiction. Thoughtful books about the future, where humans might be going, what they were doing wrong, and what a future might be like. The big idea books. Knowing my father he would have loved this book, and pushed it on with a big smile. The Mountain of the Sea, by Ray Nayler is a book about the how we could communicate with alien life that has lived under our seas for thousands of years, and what they might think of us.

The book begins with a man relaying a story of a missing diver, to a person's whose identity is impossible to both see or detect, but seems quite interested in the story, and not having the man share it with others. The book moves to Con Dao Archipelago in Vietnam where we meet one of our main characters Dr. Ha Nguyen, author and known for her work with cephalopods, or octopuses. The area has been brought entirely by a large company, the population moved out because of rumors of what is happening under the sea. Ha's companions are the first android created by a company, and a bodyguard with a skill for drones and a history of battle. Ha's job is to make contact with the creatures under the sea, and figure out if they are intelligent, or even better something more. A lot of money is resting on what Ha discovers, and enemies are gathering all over the world trying to get a piece. But it might be danger from under the waters that they the most to fear.

A story that satisfies on every level. A great story, great writing, and ideas on every page with fascinating characters interacting and making everything seem real. Twenty- four hours have passed and I am still thinking about lines, or actions, or even ideas. Automatic fishing trawlers prowling the waves with a slave crew desperately trying to gather enough fish from soon to be dead waters to gain food. Animal communication. The world. The writing is so smooth, each character who narrates has a clear voice, and even in jumping locations, times, the story never loses focuses. Each character even minor ones are well thought out, and given moments in the sun, even if it is only to lead one character to another. I am underplaying the story, because the author has such a gift of revealing it I don't want to give anything away. A small bit of information carries over to bigger ramifications for others. Even the surprise moments are real surprises, not oh yeah that makes sense, these are oh I never thought of that, wow.

A book that I wanted to be longer, and one that I hope there will be many sequels too. Actually I will read anything by Ray Nayler, I really enjoyed the style and the way the story unfolded. I have been blessed to read a lot of very good books this year, but I think this is one if not the best I have read. So many ideas, so well executed. I can't wait to read more, and I know that my father would have felt the same.

Naylor nails it! As if we needed proof there is so much more to learn about our own planet! Perhaps our human brains are just not quite advanced enough to anticipate what’s next to discover.

I'm always up for a good science fiction read. I love to see what possible futures there are and how an author with a good imagination can transport me into an entirely different world. Ray Nayler does just that with this book. It's a somewhat bleak future but very possible.

The world is now divided into super countries and transnational corporations are running amuck.. One such corporation, DIANIMA has taken over the Con Dao Archipelago, kicked out the inhabitants and sealed it off. But why? They hire noted marine biologist Dr. Ha Nguyen and together with the world's first android and a battle scarred security chief, Ha sets out to discover what's behind what the locals called a sea monster. What they find are octopuses which defy known behaviors: they display a super intelligence and have apparently achieved symbolic communication. They also don't appear friendly and Ha is determined to communicate with them and discover their secrets.

Meanwhile, on a slave fishing boat piloted by artificial intelligence, kidnapped victims Eiko and Son are thinking only of escape. The seas have been over fished almost to the point of extinction but the boat continues on its wayward journey in search of catch with tensions brewing among the slave crew.

The author does an excellent job of weaving these two story lines together into a novel that is a combination of science fiction and technothriller.. It does start off a bit slow as Ha and the android Evrim investigate the myths behind the so-called sea monsters but it quickly picks up and continues at a fast pace. I especially liked the writing. It is conveys a rather bleak future but given today's political climate, an entire plausible one. The interaction between Ha and Evrim was intriguing and I rooted for their success. If you like dystopian books, which I do, I think you'll enjoy this read.

What an amazing, original story! This thought provoking read will keep you engaged and thinking from the first page to the final paragraph. I can't recommend it enough!

Marine biologist Dr. Ha Nguyen has spent her professional life devoted to the study of cephalopod intelligence and their unique capabilities. Hired by the premier tech corporation, DIANIMA, who owns the archipelago, Con Dao, where a discovery has been made that an octopus is exhibiting signs of higher behavior including a type of language and culture, Dr. Nguyen thinks she had found her dream job. On the secluded and heavily protected island, Ha also is working with the Evrim, the world’s most sophisticated AI along with an unusual, battle-hardened security agent keeping them safe.

Outside forces are determined to either undermine or take over the island research station with a ruthless intensity which is demonstrated by the POVs of essentially a high-level hacker, and a man enslaved on one to the enormous fishing vessels that take everything making a desert of the world’s oceans. Controlling the new found information is all about money and power as usual; the scientist who built Evrim, Dr. Arnkatia Minervudottir-Chan, heads DIANIMA and has set some hard rules for Dr. Nguyen’s efforts and research.

This is a very complex story not only because of multiple POV’s but the implied outcome of finding intelligent life on our planet previously not understood and our propensity to use and abuse all the denizens of the sea. Not surprisingly, Ha Nguyen has a large learning curve to figure out what the octopus is trying to tell her especially since it and its companions are not so helpless as they would seem and can fight back with deadly effect. There is much discussion as well with Evrim about the objections and fear of AI minds becoming dominant and what they mean for the stability and survival of the human race.

Each chapter begins with a quote from books written by the scientists adding a layer of complexity and deeper thought. The author has mined well the available information about these clever and multifaceted animals to write an intense as well as thought-provoking story that will give the reader pause to note how much of it comes from real life. It is not a diatribe; however, rather a well-crafted story with relatable characters of how we humans often deal with a fresh scientific discovery that becomes a battle ground for ownership and exploitation. This story will also, I suspect, give readers a new interest into the fascinating life of the octopus and a greater appreciation of their part in our world.

**Thank you, Netgalley and publisher, for giving me an electronic ARC copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.**

I loved the worldbuilding and science in this story. Ha was my favorite character. I loved the archipelago and how protective of nature everyone was. I found myself really interested in the humanity conversations between Ha and Dr Mínervudóttir-Chan and I was interested in the octopuses and their world. However I felt that the plot was a bit slow at times with the other characters.

5/5 stars—this book is one of my favorite reads of the year so far. The Mountain in the Sea takes place in a future not too far removed from our own world, where overfishing and pollution have drastically affected the world’s oceans. Multinational corporations vie with governments for power, and ships run by AI carrying human slaves trawl the oceans for what food is left.

Dr. Ha Nguyen arrives on a remote island at the behest of the DIANIMA corporation, investigating rumors of a species of octopus that has developed its own culture and language. Working alongside a mercenary and the world’s only android to pass the Turing Test, she must decide if the octopi are real and, if they are, how the humans might speak to them. The novel follows two other characters—a computer hacker and a young immigrant—whose plotlines inevitably intersect with Ha’s.

I loved this book—rich characterization, a plot full of surprises, and a deft treatment of heavy philosophical problems. How do you make yourself understood to an a species whose entire way of understanding the world is foreign to your own? Can humans alter the damage done to the natural world? What do we owe one another, and the animals inhabiting this planet? Nayler offers no easy or trite answers, but I left this book feeling hopeful and determined. And as a bonus, he cites his sources in his afterword, giving interested readers a chance to follow along with some of his research.

Thanks to the publisher and to NetGalley for an early copy of this book.

I was instantly sold on picking up this book after reading the synopsis. First contact with an intelligent species of Octopi (Octopus.... octopuses....?) on a near-future earth. Sign me up! This was such a plausible and captivating presence for an earth-based sci-fi novel and the perfect way to kick off my sci-fi September reading plans. Cephalopods are already so alien from our own anatomical existence and signs of their intelligence are already blowing me away.

The Mountain in the Sea was such a solid debut novel from Ray Naylor and so much more than the premise would lead you to believe. To the point that early in my reading I got a little frustrated. Why are we exploring so many other characters when I want to be with Ha and the sign singer?!

The global web of characters that Naylor weaves throughout the story is more than just place setting and world building and the moment I grasped the why of his structure it all clicked into place. An octopus senses the world around it with 8 limbs, perhaps even 8 independent but connected minds. The author built this world and story for us to explore the same way that an Octopus would. Such an exciting and compelling aha moment for me.

Another through-line in this narrative that felt custom-designed to draw me in was the Frankenstein through-line. No, I'm not talking the horror interpretations of the modern era, but the original speculative exploration of consciousness and personhood. Like the monster in this classic Feminist masterpiece, we have an AI grappling with his own existence and place in a world that rejects it for being too similar and too other at the same time.

This book ends with a bang, with many of the characters we have followed across the earth coming together for the first time, and a big reveal or two. It felt like the end of a season of television when you aren't sure if its getting renewed, and it ends on something that feels like a cliffhanger but an ending in equal turn. "But wait, I was watching that... Is there any more?"

There were some weaker places, some rambling moments that lose a bit of punch and kept this from being a 5 star for me. That said this is such a solid, well researched, unique debut from an author that I will be following closely in the future. I cannot wait to see what he comes up with next. Honestly, I was left with so many questions at the end of The Mountain in the Sea, I would be thrilled to revisit this world again!

I wanted to love this book, but it ended up falling short for me mainly because I wanted it to focus on different things. I wanted to know more about the octopuses and how communication with humans could develop. I felt like the author spent a lot of time on philosophical ideas and less on the story. I wish the two could have been intertwined more effectively as I found many of the ideas in the book to be interesting. At the end, I was left wanting more than I got thought.

I enjoyed this book and appreciated that it was a bit more cerebral than I expected from a novel. You are able to get lost in the story, but it's written in a way that makes you slow down and pay attention. This book was received as an advanced reader copy in exchange for my opinion. I am definitely more interested in this author and would read and seek out more of their books.

This is a wonderful book, and I'm pleased to give it a 5-star review (a rarity for me; see my review guidelines at the bottom of this review).

Here is a book that uses a fictional scenario involving octopuses and an android AI to write very thought provoking inquiries into basic questions about what constitutes humanity and consciousness.

The book sticks to a few key elements: An exciting story (though it takes about 1/3 the book before it gets exciting), a very small cast of characters that are likable, interesting and unique (not just within the book but across the genre), and both dialog & interstitial writing that is gorgeous, thought-provoking, and advances - nay, accelerates - the story.

In fact, I may feel like the interstitial writing - the faceplates for each chapter (I'm sure there's a correct term for this, but I can't recall it) may be my favorite parts of the book. Instead of being quotes by various famous authors, this book uses quotes from books-within-books ostensibly written by the characters in the book - which allows the author to shed light on the book's themes, thoughts, and philosophies without having to figure out a way to weave it into the story. Here's an example of a chapter intro written by a story character:

"What does it mean to be a self? I think, more than anything else, it means the ability to select different possible outcomes in order to direct oneself toward a desired outcome: To be future-oriented. When every day is the same, when we are not presented with the necessity to choose between different possibilities, we say we don't "feel alive" - and here I think we guess at what being alive actually is. It is the ability to choose. We live in choices."

Or:

"Not only do we not agree on how to measure or recognize consciousness in others, but we are also unable to even "prove" it exists in ourselves. Science often dismisses our individual experiences - what it feels like to smell an orange, or to be in love - as qualia. We are left with theories and metaphors for consciousness. A stream of experience. A self-referential loop. Something out of nothing. None of these are satisfactory. Definition eludes us."

These would be simply philosophical musings if they weren't surrounded by a compelling story that has characters that force us to deal with these kinds of musings or questions or philosophies in order to follow the characters.

And the two characters used as foils for asking these questions couldn't be more different - yet more the same. On one hand we have an android-based artificial intelligence that is claimed to be so advanced that it forces us to address these questions relative to that character. This isn't new; many books have tried to do this. But on the other hand is the octopus - an existing earth animal whose nervous system is both so massive, and yet works so differently from ours; nevertheless we are forced to ask similar questions - but make our answers in an entirely different way. As I write this, it occurs to me that the author used the well-worn trope of the "conscious machine" simply as the "starter" to put our minds in a place to consider how we might relate to "minds" that are structured dramatically different from ours - or the standard AI.

It all works wonderfully. And not only was it such a good book in itself,, it made me love octopuses enough to immediately start reading one of the books cited in his bibliography of books that helped shape this book.

I cannot recommend this book more highly - 5 stars using this rating system:
- Five stars is when you read a book to the end, put it down, take a deep breath, pick it up and start reading it all over again - or you would if you weren't so anxious to read the next book in a multi-book series. Or, it's simply really good.
- Four stars is when you tell yourself : ”This is good, this is well-written, this is full of interesting ideas/characters/plot points”, but you know you will never read it again.
- Three stars is when you read it to the end, put it down and proceed to forget all about it in the next instant.
- Two stars when it's so bad that it makes you laugh, or sigh, and want to write a review, but you can't remember the name of the book or dislike it so much that you don't.
- One star when you can't read past chapter 3, even as penance for your sins.

From the publisher: 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.

The Mountain in the Sea is a slow-moving, melancholy dystopian sci-fi novel mostly about humans and somewhat about octopuses. It’s set in the near future, after a big war. Technology of many kinds is everywhere. Humans have all but used up the planet. How do we react when we realize there is an octopus species with an intelligence that rivals our own? Spoiler hint: not well.

This is a very smart and complex book. It made me think. It did move a little slower than I would have liked. Each chapter opens with a quotation from one of the characters, and I mostly found them not very interesting or necessary to the narrative. The story spotlights only a few characters, including two scientists, an artificial being, a war-scarred veteran, a slave, and a hacker. Their stories feel very personal, as they all try to find their way in a very messed up world. An environmental struggle of epic proportions is taking place.

I wondered about the title but some Googling steered me in the right direction I think. I believe it’s a reference to the poem Song of the Whale by Kit Wright. (Go look it up, it’s very sad.) This quotation does a good job of summing up one of the key themes of the book:

“Someone needs to make us pay the price for what we have done. Someone needs to take this planet away from us before we destroy it once and for all. And if the robots don’t rise up, if our creations don’t come to life and take the power we have used so badly for so long away from us, who will? What we fear isn’t that AI will destroy us – we fear it won’t. We fear we will continue to degrade life on this planet until we destroy ourselves. And we will have no one to blame for what we have done but ourselves.” (chapter 31 of the advance reader copy)

This novel reminded me a lot of the movie Arrival (which I loved). I wish there had been more about the octopuses though. If The Mountain in the Sea is made into a movie, maybe we’ll get more about the octopuses. I read an advance reader copy of The Mountain in the Sea from Netgalley. It is scheduled to be published in early October 2022, and the Galesburg Public Library will own it in print and as an ebook.

Thank you Netgalley and the publisher for providing this upcoming science fiction title. This was a very good book, the only reason I’m not giving it 5 stars is that I felt the ending was a bit rushed compared to the slower pace of the rest of the book (at about 90%, I kept wondering if they were setting up for a cliffhanger and sequel because I couldn’t see how it could wrapped up quickly, but it was). Fascinating subjects including artificial intelligence, inter species communication, corporate greed, environmental justice, it really hit all the marks. If you enjoyed things like Station Eleven or the movie Arrival, this should be a good fit for you.

A sure-fire Hugo contender (and probable winner)!
No matter what you are looking for in a novel, The Mountain in the Sea is a real winner. You do not have to be a science-fiction fan to love it. The plot is gripping, with various groups in fierce competition as humans explore the nature of minds and consciousness and take actions that will be crucial to the future of humans and other life. The characters are fully developed, and I believed in and cared about them. I sympathized with Ha Nguyen and her strong sense of responsibility for everything she is involved in. Readers also will feel for the autonomous AI Evrim, who has been exiled to the remote Con Dao Archipelago both to help with the work there and to protect him from violence taking place against a possible competitor to homo sapiens. I mused at one point whether I had ever felt sorry for an AI before; I certainly ached for what Evrim experienced. Other supporting characters were also intriguing.
The setting is well done in two ways. It was fun to read about future tech like the abglanz identity shield that helps protect privacy and identity and the various uses of drones that seem very likely. Other aspects were much more daring, like the technique used to create Evrim . The physical setting in southeast Asia was also unusual and interesting, as was the structure that the author imagined for future governments around the world. Ray Nayler is well prepared to write about this, having spent most of his career working outside the US, including in Ho Chi Minh City.
As you might guess from the well done details described above, the writing is also impressive. The little details were carefully crafted, like the simple description of a café in Astrakhan where the owner “made Turkish coffee so thick a water buffalo would float in it.”
Good science fiction is imaginative entertainment, and The Mountain in the Sea certainly is entertaining. You CAN read it just for fun. The best science fiction also makes you think, though , and that is where the book really excels. Each chapter begins with a quote from one of two books, How Oceans Think by Dr. Ha Nguyen or Building Minds by Dr. Arnkatia Minervudottir-Chan. These experts, who both are prominent characters in the book, present ideas about the nature of minds, consciousness, and culture that are the basis of the whole book. Ha does research on a possible octopus culture and what that means about their minds, but the ideas presented include the nature of minds of all sorts: human, animal, artificial, and augmented human .
The Mountain in the Sea is speculative fiction, but it is also credible due to the author’s knowledge and extensive research. He works in the marine biology field for NOAA, so he can thoughtfully think about nonhuman minds. He also has read a lot of research and cites a number of references about the connectome, biosemiotics, and the philosophy of mind.
I enjoyed the story, but for me, this was not a book to zoom through.It reminds me of classic works from authors like Isaac Asimov and David Brin. I kept stopping to muse about what was just said, and I am looking forward to recommending it to my science fiction book group so that I will have an excuse to read it again.