In this series of posts, I will review these six novels:
- China Miéville, Embassytown
- Ann Leckie, Translation State
- Ray Nayler, The Mountain in the Sea–reviewed in this post
- Adrian Tchaikovsky, The Children of Time
- Cinxin Liu, The Three-Body Problem
- Ursula LeGuin, The Dispossessed
The Mountain in the Sea, Ray Nayler (2023)
Here’s an enthralling near-future SF novel of contact with another species, and it doesn’t need outer space to do so. Is there other intelligent life in the universe? The answer lies beneath our own oceans.
And don’t we already know that? We have yet to access that intelligence, though researchers around the world are on it (see, for example, THIS). Nayler’s enthralling novel of an intelligent octopus species won the 2023 Locus Award for Best First Novel. I reviewed it HERE. Nayler asks the big questions. How does one species with a specific physical presence, we human beings (bipedal, brain housed in knob at top, armature of bones, lungs breathing oxygen directly from the air) inhabiting one type of physical environment (land), ever hope to communicate with an utterly unlike species, the octopus, with a completely different physical presence (fluid and soft, multi-limbed, completely different respiratory system, distributed intelligence throughout the body), living in a completely different physical environment (the sea)? And anyway, how are we humans expected to communicate with a species that alien when we can’t even communicate well with each other? Or with ourselves, in the locked-in loneliness of our own skulls?
Nayler’s novel follows the progress of a human researcher, Dr. Ha Nguyen, brought to a remote island to study the octopus species there and attempt to communicate with it. She is assisted by Evrim, the only completely lifelike android ever created, and guarded by Altantsetseg, a Mongolian veteran of a brutal war. Outside forces keep trying to breach the island’s security barrier–local people whose livelihood depends on fishing the increasingly empty seas, commercial companies operating massive AI-driven fishing vessels crewed by human slaves, and perhaps too a mysterious outside organization that will resort to anything, including murder, to infiltrate the project. The enigmatic Dr. Arnkatla Mínervudóttir-Chan , creator of Evrim, keeps the project top-secret and the researchers on lock-down, because Ha’s success will be the breakthrough discovery of humanity–communication with an alien species–and bad actors await to either monetize it out of greed or destroy it out of fear. In fact, the fear surrounding Ha’s research is matched only by the fear of Evrim, the only android to pass the Turing test, uncannily intelligent, potentially very dangerous to humanity.
Into this intriguing mix, Nayler introduces two subplots. One involves a hapless man who is kidnapped and enslaved on one of the AI fishing vessels. By the end of the novel, this subplot connects to the main thrust of the story, but until that time, it’s interesting all on its own even though it seems only tangentially related. The other subplot is more directly connected all the way through: a hacker hired by an incognito organization (which we see, from the very beginning, as ruthless and unethical) to find a back-channel into Evrim’s mind.
The novel goes beyond the massive difficulties inherent in communicating with an alien species and into the problem of communication itself. How fiendishly difficult it is to decipher a new system of symbols without much to go on–no octopus Rosetta Stone to consult–yet knowing that language is inherently symbolic. And especially the mind/body problem that has caused philosophers through the ages a massive headache (I will resist jokes here) and spawned reams and reams of learned treatises. I have only a timid understanding of these matters, but Nayler’s novel helped me get a better feel for some of them. I refer you to this article in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, where you can take your investigation further by looking into the numerous sources cited in its bibliography. Nayler himself also refers to Peter Godfrey-Smith’s Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness. I have started reading that myself. It is very accessible, even to me, the non-scientist.
As a side note: some have accused Nayler’s novel of being too didactic and explainy. I think that’s unfair. Nayler is grappling with one of the thorniest problems we know, but he is writing a novel, not a treatise. However, each chapter is headed by a purported piece of writing by either Ha or Mínervudóttir-Chan. Those fictional representations of actual research questions and the difficult issues arising from them help us understand the characters and the plot. This is not a new technique. Just right off, I’m thinking of the quotations from fictional historical documents that head each chapter of Frank Herbert’s Dune; the hugely-important mixture of fictional and real footnotes in Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s Chain-Gang All-stars; the technique in Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao to use footnotes for little side-essays, personal recollections, and historical facts. Or perhaps Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels in its entirety, pretending to be a traveler’s real account of the strange lands he encounters. Any novel of ideas needs to do something of the kind to drive the story without turning the story into an illustrated lecture. Some are more successful than others. I account Nayler’s novel in the very successful category. (This leads us to: so why write a novel or a story instead of a treatise? I would love to address this, going back to Swift and Defoe and the origins of the novel, at least in English, but–lucky you–no time/space to do that here.)
We readers are kept wondering. Who is the true enemy here? How dangerous is Evrim? And above all, given the massive difficulties, the completely different sense apparatus and sensing of the environment, how will Ha reach out to the only other intelligent species on our planet that evolved separately from the line of mammal intelligence: the apex species of the ocean, the octopus. Nayler’s novel is superb. Ultimately it is about what it means to be conscious, what it means to be human, and the loneliness that haunts us all.
And so, for Day Two of my Speculative Fiction Advent Calendar of quotes, I give you:
NEXT UP: A fourth installment in my review of novels exploring alien communication, Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem. Sorry, next up is Adrian Tchaikovsky, The Children of Time AND a new quotation for the speculative fiction advent calendar.
Fantastes 
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