Yeah I know Naylor wanted to go off about sentience and intelligence and all that, but compared to the first contact plot it seemed… I don’t know. Nguyen struggles to communicate with the newly discovered species, forces larger than DIANIMA close in to seize the octopuses for themselves.

I won't say too much more about The Mountain in the Sea, except for, if you're a sci-fi fan, I think you'll enjoy this one, and maybe think about humanity and our world differently. The chapters are broken by two articles/essays; one written by a main character and the other by an important secondary character. Nayler's masterful debut combines fascinating science and well-wrought characters to deliver a deep dive into the nature of intelligent life . Recap every available octopus video (have you seen that one of the octopus walking across tidepools?Ray Nayler, you know how to describe a good kahvalti (breakfast) and Turkish coffee, and I couldn't appreciate you enough for that. Some mysterious characters wear “identity shields”, obscuring their real faces with changing electronic ones, to avoid ubiquitous surveillance. As always, I find that when I am unable or unwilling to update my reading status with excerpts from a book, I'm just not into it. However, between all the philosophizing, there is the odd smattering of an action-adventure novel at work here as characters get double-crossed and sometimes thrown into harm’s way. But if you want a great fictional exploration of the issues facing the world now in terms of technological and social disruption, this is the novel for you.

On the surface, it's a hard-science thriller set in a reshaped geopolitical environment, where humankind's aggressive harvesting of the oceans for protein may have put evolutionary pressure on octopuses to develop a civilization of comparable intelligence as ours. This book has a confusing structure, but it deals with very interesting questions: what is consciousness, what does it mean to be human, what do humans owe other forms of life, etc. In the outside world there is a young man, Rustem, who is a genius freelance hacker, much like the heroes of William Gibson’s early cyberpunk novels.The Mountain in the Sea is a novel best meant for fans of VanderMeer for sure and anyone interested in the intersection of marine biology and linguistics. Some characters can control insect-sized assassination drones, rather like the knife missiles in the novels of Iain M Banks. The near-future-ed-ness of the story makes our current crisis seem both more dire, and more restorable. Rumors begin to spread of a species of hyperintelligent, dangerous octopus that may have developed its own language and culture.

This was a story told in three points of view; firstly that of Ha Nyugen, scientist on a mission to study some unique marine life off the coast of an island steeped in lore and mystery. However, here this device didn't work as well as hoped, as the listener isn't given any warning: Which is narrative for the novel? The transnational tech corporation DIANIMA has sealed the remote Con Dao Archipelago, where the octopuses were discovered, off from the world. Minor spoiler, but it shouldn’t decrease your enjoyment of the story: octopuses don’t have spines, and their shape is more malleable than a human one. It packs in the discussion of many modern and relevant issues such as AI, human treatment of animals and other humans, communication, and the nature of consciousness, and while there is little new or deep in those discussions, they do stimulate.I was attracted to Ray Nayler’s impressive The Mountain in the Sea — which goes into trade paperback at the end of May 2023 — by the fact that the work had been blurbed by two science-fiction authors whose work I greatly appreciate and admire: Jeff VanderMeer and Charlie Jane Anders. I enjoyed the sections dealing with the octopuses, and appreciated that the author made the hacking storyline not attempt to explain the semantics of it all but rather focus on character development. Could provide plenty of fodder for a very particular sort of book discussion group, but I do wonder about its broader appeal.