Welcome friend! Last year for a few months, I am diving into Artificial Intelligence and Ariel joined me in reading The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler. I am finally getting around to posting our discussion. 😀 A speculative fiction with lots of characters and a world not like ours, this book had an interesting format. We felt that it set out to do too much but had some good moments. Here is what it is about:
Ray Nayler | Goodreads
Humankind discovers intelligent life in an octopus species with its own language and culture, and sets off a high-stakes global competition to dominate the future.
Rumors begin to spread of a dangerous species of hyperintelligent octopus that may have developed its own language and culture. The marine biologist Dr. Ha Nguyen, who has spent her life researching cephalopod intelligence, will do anything for the chance to study them.
The transnational tech corporation DIANIMA has sealed off the remote Con Dao Archipelago, where the octopuses were discovered, from the rest of world. Dr. Nguyen travels to the islands to join DIANIMA’s team: a battle-scarred security agent and the world’s first android.
The octopuses hold the key to unprecedented breakthroughs in extrahuman intelligence. The stakes are high: there are vast fortunes to be made by whoever can take advantage of the octopuses’ advancements, and as Dr. Nguyen struggles to communicate with the newly discovered species, forces larger than DIANIMA close in to seize the octopuses for themselves.
But no one has yet asked the octopuses what they think. Or what they might do about it.
A near-future thriller about the nature of consciousness, Ray Nayler’s The Mountain in the Sea is a dazzling literary debut and a mind-blowing dive into the treasure and wreckage of humankind’s legacy.
The Mountain in the Sea – What the story is actually about
The Mountain in the Sea is a speculative fiction, set in a world that looks very different from ours. Technology has advanced many folds – we have augmented humans, new countries and territories as well as a prevalence of Artificial Intelligence (AI). The storytelling is a mixed style of being academic with excerpts from books written by scientists as well as fictional third-person narratives of a few characters. For a standalone book, the world is massive. There is so much history to know but at the same time, I loved how only what is relevant was revealed and I never felt overwhelmed. Instead, I felt caught up in a meditation about consciousness, AI, communication, language and survival.
The two main characters are Dr Ha Nguyen, a scientist who has studied octopus, and a self-conscious android named Evrim. Some of the academic text excerpts come from Dr Ha’s book, How Oceans Think, another academic style speculative text about evolution of culture amongst octopus. The second text whose experts we get to read is Building Minds by Dr Arnkatla Mínervudóttir-Chan, the scientist who created Evrim. Dr MC is one of the supporting characters in the book, along with Altantsetseg, a security specialist, Eiko and Son, people who are enslaved to work on a fishing vessel, and Rustam, an highly intelligent programmer who is one of the few people in the world who has an intuitive understanding of how the brain and AI networks work. There are also highly intelligent octopus that Dr Ha and Evrim are trying to communicate with. There is no shortage of brilliance in this book: the characters are smart and driven. They have their individual pains and pasts, ambitions and agendas, hopes and dreams.
The Mountain in the Sea – Discussion
Kriti: The synopsis of The Mountain in the Sea made it sound like it would be about communicating with octopus but that is not as big part of the plot as I had expected. What were your first impressions based on the synopsis, Ariel?
Ariel: Yes, my idea of the book was that there would be more exploration of the non-human/non-artificial intelligent communication. I’ve seen people compare this book with the film Arrival, which heavily centres the linguistic elements of beginning to communicate with a species where there are no common points of reference. I really liked the film Arrival, and I thought it was very compelling from a philosophy of language perspective, so my expectations were high going into The Mountain in the Sea.
Through a huge technologically advanced world and the many characters and their situations, I found this to be a fantastic speculative fiction to think about humanity and its relationship to AI, why we continue to build technology and how technological advances change us. In today’s public forums, it is common to talk about the emergence of AI whether it is ChatGPT or AI art engines. The Mountain in the Sea offered me a chance to see a world where those discussions are of the past. The future has arrived and we are living it. If Evrim exists then so do augmented humans, powerful droids, new laws and automatic systems for things that humans no longer need to do. So many layers of the world are revealed through the various characters. Evrim’s thoughts around being a conscious AI and how they used their impeccable memory and time was great to see in action. I also enjoyed Dr Ha’s thoughts as she worked with Evrim and came to learn from the mistakes she had made in the past.
Yes, I think there is a popular AI trope that is all about the “emergence” of AI. It makes me think of the series Westword or the book Robopocalypse by Daniel H. Wilson focuses on themes of the lack of agency that AI has and their fight to empowerment and choice. In many ways, this book explores agency and choice, but it seemed like there was more of a lean towards agency and choice of humans instead in this world (for example, Dr. Ha’s overall story arc and the character who is kidnapped and enslaved on an AI boat).
Learning about the point fives was one of my favorites parts of the book: mental health AI-based technology that will take away a person’s loneliness, sometimes trapping them in their own minds. I saw this concept of therap bots briefly explored in Emily Eternal and I expect to see it more in other AI books.
I thought about specializing in Artificial Intelligence when I first looked into doing my Masters in Computing Science. It is not what I ended up doing but AI continues to be a topic close to my heart that I have explored on and off over the years. The one book that stands out is The Mother Code but that was a post-apocalyptic scenario. The Mountain in the Sea is not that and maybe that is why I enjoyed it for its unique take. Ariel, you had mentioned in our private conversations how some of the ideas of this book seem similar to the canon. Great works are built on older great works. I don’t believe most of us can just imagine something brand new without coming across other ideas first. What are some books that you were reminded of?
Yep, I immediately felt like this book was founded on older Sci Fi literary canon such as I, Robot by Isaac Asimov or Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Phillip K. Dick. Books like those often explore a philosophical take on the human condition, and explore humanity’s worth and ability for empathy and agency in times where other android intelligence can threaten those big existential questions. I feel like each author puts in their own idea of what humanity’s hubris entails when they are faced with their creations seeking their own agency. Even The Matrix films touch on some of these themes. While I don’t feel qualified enough as a sci fi expert to say whether or not anything new is added to the literary canon with this book, at the very least it is a continuation of these conversations. Plus, everyone can definitely make their own judgement for themselves based on their own reading journeys!
I studied neural networks and I hated programming them. In that sense, it is probably a good thing that I did not specialize in AI. Reading about connectodomes, brain maps and the unique way in which the Buddhist Republic of Tibet was creating its technology was mind blowing to me. It made sense and I have no clue when we will get there. I generally ask how most SciFi but this one, I was willing to be swept away by the ideas, leaving the hows behind.
I recently read a book about Tibet, We Measure the Earth with Our Bodies. Knowing their historical and current situation, I found it very interesting that Buddhism and Tibet were the emergent big things in this world of The Mountain in the Sea. The United Nations still exists and though it does seem to have power, the superpower countries of our time did not get a mention in this book at all. Kind of refreshing in my opinion. There is mention of a Winter War a few times which points to there being big changes in power structure. Primarily, the setting was Vietnam (Ho Chi Min) and Istanbul. There was mention of Beijing and Moscow. What did you think about the world building?
Yes, I think that to accept the geopolitical sphere of the world in this book we have to “leave the hows behind,” like you said in reference to AI. There are snippets and brief mentions of large human events with little to no detail, and the world even with some familiar elements was mostly changed in drastic ways. To be quite honest, I found it distracting from the overall other themes. Between AI and other-species intelligence and the handful of POV’s, this felt like one too many things in an overly-ambitious story.
I read the author’s note at the end of the book and it shines through the storytelling how much research went into writing such a work of speculative fiction. Octopus may not be a huge part of the story but those characters had very thorough and intimate knowledge of them and the sea, AI and evolution would be needed to write these excerpts. I had mixed feelings about them when we first started reading but as I adjusted to them, I started to enjoy the extra context they added to the upcoming chapter. I also found so many favorites! What did you think of How Oceans Think and Building Minds, and their placement throughout the book?
At the start, I quite liked them. I felt like they were foreshadowing a larger portion of the octopus’ role. Throughout the book I realized their more meta roles in the book as a vehicle to highlight themes, and overall they do help the book tie its many themes together.
Thoughts on the pace and writing of this book?
For as ambitious as this book is and all it tries to be, the pacing seemed extremely slow towards the start. Like all books that have a large learning curve, there’s that tendency to info-dump and have so much thrown at the reader at once. In my favorite books, I can accommodate the info-dumping due to the payoff of the story later on. Truly, I’m just not certain if the payoff was enough for me. I really liked the octopus elements and whenever there was conversation and plot around the symbols and communicating I was extremely interested. However, some of those parts felt rushed in order to make more time for the other handful of things that was going on. It was overall an interesting enough read that I wanted to see how things ended and I’m very happy to have read this with you! 🙂
That’s fair and as you have mentioned a few times above, our prior reading experiences contribute to how we engage with a book. It’s neat to have read The Mountain in the Sea together and gotten different things out of it. For me, it isn’t a perfect book. I wanted to read it and I read it. As an AI theme book written recently, it fits well and builds on concepts that are already prevalent in existing literature. Thanks for joining me in this read and discussing it with me! 🙂
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Thanks for reading our discussion! Let us know what you think of this book!
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