The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux/MCD on October 4, 2022

Do you think you are smarter than an octopus? The octopus might disagree. You might be smart in the way that humans can be smart, but the octopus is smart in the way that octopi are smart. There is little basis for comparison because exploring and surviving in an underwater environment requires a different intelligence than exploring and surviving on land. All I can tell you is that, after reading The Mountain in the Sea, I might never eat octopus again. And I certainly don’t want to piss one off.

The Mountain in the Sea imagines that most of the oceans’ natural resources — in particular, their aquatic life — have been depleted. Automated fishing ships nevertheless continue to harvest as many fish as they can find. Some ships are staffed with slaves because robots that gut and freeze fish are difficult to maintain, while humans are expendable.

Con Dao, an archipelago in Vietnam, was acquired by DIANIMA, an international tech company. Con Dao has served as a tourism destination favored by divers, and as a prison destination for dissidents. DIANIMA evacuated the locals and tourists to preserve Con Dao in its natural state, although automated monks from Tibet were allowed to stand guard over their turtle sanctuary.

DIANIMA supposedly intends to protect ocean life (with armed drones that attack automated fishing ships if they come too near) but its true purpose is likely more nefarious. The world’s only advanced android (named Evrim) was developed by DIANIMA and resides in Con Dao because its existence is illegal everywhere else. Evim’s smile is “like the shadow of your own death.”

Ha Nguyen is a scientist who studies octopi in Con Dao. She wonders about the extent of their evolutionary development. Do they communicate with a form of language? Do they have writing? Have they developed a cosmology? Do they regard humans as gods or demons? Much of the novel follows Ha as she tries to communicate with octopi and to understand their (and her own) place in the universe.

The other critical branch of the novel follows Eiko, who was kidnapped into slavery after taking the wrong taxi on his way to a new job with DIANIMA. That plot thread follows a small band of captives who plot a way to defeat the artificial intelligence that runs the slave ship. Or does Eiko misunderstand the true nature of a fellow captive’s plan for freedom?

Eiko’s story gives the novel most of its action, while Ha’s is more contemplative. Yet both stories create tension as the protagonists encounter and cope with different kinds of threats. (A third subplot involving a Russian hacker named Rustem is less successful.) The elements of a thriller hold The Mountain in the Sea together, but this is less an action novel than a cerebral thought experiment that brings together natural evolution, human intervention in species development, and environmental crisis.

In addition to the difficulty of communication with nonhumans, consciousness is a theme that pervades Ha’s thoughts and the novel as a whole. What does it mean? Is Evrim conscious? What about the automated monks? Or the slave ship that threatens to starve humans to death if they stop gutting and freezing fish? Or the octopi? They all seem self-aware, but does consciousness require more than that? The automonks and Evrim have been programmed to be self-aware, but isn’t that also true of humans, who are programmed by evolution and the DNA it produces? At the same time, are we hardwired to fear any consciousness that might compete with our own?

The evolutionary development of a species of octopus that uses symbolic communication, that overcomes the short life span that is common to octopi, that raises families, protects its elders, and is cautious but curious in interactions with humans, is explained with sufficient scientific detail to give the novel credibility without bogging down the story. Chapters are separated by passages from two books (one about oceans, one about artificial intelligence) that treat the reader to interesting facts and bold opinions.

Science fiction stories that explore consciousness in artificial beings have been around for decades, as have stories about the difficulty of communicating with aliens. Stories that explore communication with non-human life on Earth are less common. The Mountain in the Sea succeeds by inviting the reader to imagine the possibility of awakening human consciousness as we connect to species that are different from humans yet similar in important ways.

RECOMMENDED