The Mountain in the Sea: Winner of the Locus Best First Novel Award

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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. That's because the information is always presented through its effects on characters we are made to care about. Could provide plenty of fodder for a very particular sort of book discussion group, but I do wonder about its broader appeal. The book poses profound questions about artificial and nonhuman intelligence, and its answers are tantalizing and provocative.

Readers also will feel for the autonomous AI Evrim, who has been exiled to the remote Con Dao Archipelago both to help with the work there and to protect him from violence taking place against AIs as possible competitors to homo sapiens. Eiko saw , then, the dark array of hexagonal light receptors where eyes should have been in the automonk’s face. 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. I expected more than two or three characters to be part of the team to contact civilized cephalopods and for this to be the focus of the book, like contact with the intelligence aboard the crashed spacecraft in Michael Crichton's Sphere was the focus of that book. You might think your fingers are formed by the division of cells in the womb, but that’s not the case.To use another movie reference, it's a lot like Her, where things are very much the same in the near future but with lots of clever gadgets and tech that seems to make a lot of sense. To me, the book works as a cross between the 2016 film Arrival and the more metaphysical moments of the classic novel Stranger in a Strange Land. It can be confusing to read at times, and that’s not to speak of the fact that a character is introduced at the very beginning of the work that we never hear from again. I mused at one point whether I had ever felt sorry for an AI before; I certainly ached for what Evrim experienced.

It’s multi-layered: plot, action, and mystery intertwine with philosophy and a detailed look at believable interspecies communication. As introduced to us, the scientist is a recluse, the android is socio-political exile, and the octopuses are a local myth. Yay, we all remembered that rest of the world can do science in their native lands and thank you Ray Nayler for reminding that to people. Additionally, each chapter opens with an excerpt from one of two books written by two of the characters: Dr. Kicks off from first contact with an intelligent octopus species and the exploration of its language and culture to a broader reflection on intelligence, consciousness, and self.One day, they can no longer deny the existance of another intelligent species on this planet, however: octopuses. These cookies help provide information on metrics the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc. Future tech like abglanz, drone hexcopters and auto monks kept me from embracing the story, while developments like environmental calamity, collapse of world governments and the rise of tech companies that seem to be either enslaving people or assassinating them with impunity made for a downbeat read.

Ha Nguyen goes to investigate the possibility that a species of octopus may have developed its own language and culture, but she is not the only one interested in the new discovery. At its heart, though, MITS is a book about communication and loneliness, and this is the emotional soul of the novel that draws me in. It has been written of octopuses that they are the nearest thing to intelligent alien life that we can meet on this planet, and this book runs with this idea.Ray Nayler is slavishly faithful to the available information on these enigmatic and astonishing animals, but the result is curiously lifeless, a philosophical thought experiment rather than red (or green! At one trip to the Monterey Bay Aquarium, I stopped by the giant pacific octopus tank while I was wearing a hat, and it unfurled itself over to check out my funny-shaped head.