The Mountain in the Sea

Ha Nguyen is sent to the guarded island to try to talk with it. Ray Nayler's award-winning debut braids her first-contact story with a hacked autonomous ship, a corporate scramble to own the discovery, and the world's first true android, into a thoughtful near-future thriller about consciousness itself.

The Mountain in the Sea is cerebral science fiction in the classic mold, studded with epigraphs from an invented treatise on how minds arise, and it is less interested in action than in the genuinely vertiginous question of how we might recognize an intelligence utterly unlike our own. Nayler writes with cool clarity and evident scientific curiosity, and though the ideas sometimes outpace the characters, the ideas are superb.