Book of the Month: The Mountain in the Sea

This was an impulse purchase in a TK Maxx earlier this year, because, well, octopuses.

It's a slice of speculative fiction set in the near future. Political entities and alliances have shifted, big tech companies run the world, and the boundary between human and machine intelligence has broken down. In the middle of all that a scientist fascinated by octopuses is invited to study a mysterious new species that may be sapient.

The scientist is aided by the first true android who may, or may not, be a conscious being. It is the subject of fearful hate and has been banned from most territories on Earth, so is working on the octopus project on a remote island atoll to keep it out of harm's way. Other forces are seeking to access the islands - one for the mysterious octopuses, and one just to harvest the fish that live in the protected zone.

As a 'first contact' story between two species that think very differently, this works pretty well. But there are some other story threads interwoven which are distracting.  I felt the storyline about a human crew enslaved on a fishing boat captained by an AI was horribly feasible but was superfluous to the overall plot. 

There are several conversations that act as exposition. Mini-monologues that explain certain things that, in-world, probably wouldn't need explaining. But generally that's my only real gripe and the exposition moves the story along rather than holding it up.

This is a very grounded science-fiction book, based on what we currently know about octopuses and the fascinating way their brains work. I felt like I already knew some of that from reading Children of Ruin by Adrian Tchaiskovsky, but this went into it in more detail. In the acknowledgements, the author, Ray Naylor, outlines his impressive background reading. He successfully weaves this into the story without showing off about his research.

To conclude, then, as far as speculative fiction goes, this was reasonably believable. Society is changing unpredictable and technology is changing quickly, making the wider human world in this book feel realistic. And octopuses are wonderful clever creatures. If we ever did find ones that could communicate, our inter-species conversations might look a lot like this.