The Mountain in the Sea
By Ray Nayler
- Genre
- Science Fiction & Speculative Fiction
- Publisher
- MCD / Farrar, Straus and Giroux (Macmillan)
- Publication year
- 2022
- ISBN
- 9780374605957
In the near future, a species of highly intelligent octopus is discovered off a remote Vietnamese archipelago, and a marooned marine biologist is sent to make contact. Around her, a tech conglomerate, a hacked AI and the world's first android pursue their own aims. Ray Nayler's debut novel won...
On a depopulated archipelago off the Vietnamese coast, a species of octopus appears to have developed symbols, culture and a mind - and Dr. 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. For readers drawn to speculative fiction about minds, machines and other-than-human life - Ted Chiang, Peter Watts - it is a rich, rewarding, prize-winning debut.