The Mountain in the Sea

An interesting near-future thriller mainly set on the Con Dao archipelago in Vietnam, where a species of intelligent, communicative octopus have been discovered. To try to communicate with them, a specialist in octopus has been called in, and she will have to work alongside an android, which may be the first sentient AI created, and a security officer who is deadly serious in protecting the area from all intruders.

The attempts at communication with the octopus is the main basis for the story. But layered upon it are philosophical discussions over the nature of the octopus itself, how they may see the world and how you approach and communicate with sentient beings that don't share the same senses or even a brain network with us: octopus limbs can operate independently of the brain, and they send messages by changing the patterns on their skin.

Subplots in the story focus on a hacker who has been asked to hack into an extremely sophisticated neural network, and on a slave crew on an AI controlled ship hunting for fish in a world where predatory fishing companies have overfished the oceans and are eager to exploit the remaining places with fish. They serve to flesh out this world where wars have been fought, and new regional nations have risen, eager to make their mark on the world. AI technology has also matured and taken over many jobs, while people feel more isolated in a world where AI mediated communications is the norm.

At the end, various parts come together to show that the octopuses have their own ideas on communicating and dealing with humans, leaving the future open for further interactions, but on the octopuses terms.

If this were a nonfiction essay, it would be about the concept of understanding consciousness not our own. What stands in the way: much of consciousness is language, but language is dependent on culture and context---what would it mean to have the upper hand if you didn't have hands? Thomas Nagel is cited in this book as asking "What is it like to be a bat?", to make the point that putting ourselves in the shoes of a bat is impossible when we don't have wings, we have nothing like sonar, but we do have feet and wear shoes.

The book is from 2023 because there is now artificial intelligence in everything. A key character in the book is a boat, and some characters have a key problem of determining how to communicate and influence it (see below). We haven't been able to understand octopodes---even other people---so how are we to understand the more sci-fi personalities like robots or aliens, the book asks.

It draws no solid conclusions, which is good because there aren't really conclusions to be drawn, beyond noting all the traps we need to avoid.

Fiction-wise, this is what cyberpunk looks like in 2023, with the usual characters: the hacker who enters a colorful, structured abstract world via terminal, the mega-corporation with sinister intent, the sentient robot, the criminal enterprises taking slaves and destroying the planet. Some but not all of the characters were interesting to me, and I wanted to know what the author was going to do with them. Others were there to teach us about octopodes and sentience, and that's OK.

What does a boat want? There's a jump here, from a robot being able to make decisions via optimization algorithms and a robot wanting. Like the rest of us, the characters readily make the jump without thinking about it. But for fiction, the question is essential! A story is driven by conflict between what characters want, so every character has to have motivation and need. For a few of the characters (we recognize the boat is not really a character), including both a robot and the researcher (Ha) who is more-or-less the lead character, what they want is somewhat amorphous. She wants to learn and protect the environment, but her more social needs are never fully explained beyond a generalized desire for human connection.

So much to love about this book, how it weaves together unanswerable questions about consciousness and computation, together with a much more didactic message about humans' consumptive relationships with, well, everything including each other, and enough of a mystery story to keep the plot moving along. Also some great evocations of places (ahhh, multiple key scenes on Istanbul ferries), and of the ways peoples' reputations misrepresent their selves.

It's not a strongly character driven book - every character that is fleshed out seems to be a variant of "loner who wishes for connection" and largely a vehicle for the author's ideas - but there's enough depth to the characters to keep me reading. My one real criticism is that the ending felt a bit rushed. Not in the sort of too convenient, story-undermining way, but not quite satisfying either. It doesn't feel like a set up for a sequel, but I kind of want Nayler to write a few short stories filling out the characters a bit more and picking up some of the loose ends - perhaps something like Sofia Samatar did with The Winged Histories.