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The Mountain in the Sea: Winner of the Locus Best First Novel Award
£8.10£9.50 (-15%)
Additional information
| Publisher | W&N (11 Jan. 2024) |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Paperback | 464 pages |
| ISBN-10 | 1399600486 |
| ISBN-13 | 978-1399600484 |
| Dimensions | 20.3 x 25.4 x 4.7 cm |
by Crazyfrog
Wow… what a read!
An exceptionally well-researched, deep thriller that pulls together elements of biology, environment and consciousness to produce an engaging sci-fi story founded on today’s emerging technologies and scientific facts. It will leave you pondering over what it means to be sentient and how our species fits into this world.
The plot is gripping and chapters are short, a combination that makes the book difficult to put down. Chapters are also tailed by short quotes from the characters’ (fictional) written works, and some might leave you thinking about their implications well into the night.
This is intelligent science fiction at its best. If you like to philosophise about consciousness and the “reality” we perceive then I can’t recommend the book enough. For those who don’t, it’s still a great read and might well whet your appetite.
by Cadet
I loved this story, it’s well written and thought provoking. If you’ve read Other Minds (factual, Godfrey-Smith) then this feels like a fictional equivalent. The premise is that alien intelligence is already here in the guise of a species of octopus; but how do we recognise intelligence and communicate with something so different? It’s set in a near future where AI has become ubiquitous and may also be conscious? So these themes intertwine as time runs out for the protagonists and the world. It’s hard to write a review to do this book justice, I’d rate it near the top of my best ever sci-fi reads; and in spite of being a neuroscientist I was rarely offended by the science.
by Mrs. K. S. Cullum-hanshaw
This was an interesting and thought provoking book. Sometimes a book comes along and tips your thought processes on their heads, this is one of those. Be prepared to change the way you look at aspects of our current lives and possible futures.
by Amazon Customer
Has a lover of all things octopus. This book peaked my interest but went beyond that with its fascinating storylines and creative characters.
Highly recommended, and I hope there is a sequel ????
by LF Clayton
It’s a decent read, recommended, but I think each of the individual threads would make better stand alone stories. It feels like the author has combined a few short story ideas into one book, and I’m not sure they’re all resolved by the end of the book. Another issue is the names he’s opted for for the characters, they’re necessarily distracting, as is the use of gender neutral pronouns, stops you mid sentence forcing you to re-read it to try and make sense of it. Overall I enjoyed it, but it could have been much better.
by Logan Mountstuart
I don’t normally read science fiction and I can’t remember how this was brought to my attention, but glad it was. I think all of us, at one time or another, think we could write a novel, but now and again I read a book that is so well written and painstakingly researched that I know it is well beyond me and probably most others too. This is the feeling I had reading this book and I love reading books like that.
by Lisa
A beautifully written novel, it felt very real and set in a future world where AI and environmental concerns have coalesced into a world no longer controlled by humans. The characters relatable and interesting, the complex themes of communication and consciousness explored naturally in a really exciting story.
by Brian Clegg
I’m giving this book four stars despite some irritations, because it’s engaging and does inspire some thought about the nature of consciousness, though I think it could have been better as a science fiction novel.
As has become something of a clichéd structure, Ray Nayler switches between three narratives that initially seem unconnected but eventually come together. The central one involves marine biologist Dr Ha Nguyen, who arrives on the Con Dao archipelago, which has been bought by a corporation that evacuated the inhabitants, apparently to make it a wildlife reserve. The only other people present are a military specialist, who defends the location against attacks, and an AI-driven android. Ha is there to observe the local octopuses – but nothing is quite what it seems.
In the other two threads, a robotic trawler is manned by slave labour to process the fish it catches, and an AI specialist is attempting a particularly difficult exploration of a neural network. As the plot draws together, we flip between periods of philosophical discussion and action sequences, usually involving deaths. As mentioned above, there is plenty of consideration of the nature of consciousness, both from observation of the octopuses, which seem to have developed symbolic language and of various AI constructs – and this is where Ray Nayler succeeds in making this an intriguing read (though I wouldn’t describe it as a thriller, as one of the quotes on the jacket does).
The negative aspects start with what sounds like a niggle, but proved a real pain. Because the central character’s name is Ha, we get sentences starts such as ‘Ha heard the insect cacophony from the jungle…’ – and every time I read that as ‘He’, wondered for a moment who this new male character was and then realised. From the science viewpoint, the ability of the AI specialist to explore neural networks was more a matter of magic than programming skills. And having just read Stephen Baxter’s Time with its chromophore talking squids, having chromophore talking octopuses brought on a feeling of déjà vu. It didn’t help that I’d also recently read Nicholas Humprey’s Sentience, which provides real scientific doubts on the validity of cephalopods being sentient.
Not only am I a little fed up of multiple-threaded narratives, although the automated trawler with its rebelling slaves was visceral in its impact, it added very little to the overall thrust of the book – whenever we were on the ship, I just wanted to get back to the rest. And perhaps most irritating of all, each chapter began with an extract from either a book by Ha or by the scientist behind both the android and the corporation that took over the archipelago. These were heavy handedly portentous, sometimes verging on the kind of parody pompous language you’d find in Private Eye. In the end I stopped reading them.
Some issues, definitely for me – though I accept that they might not worry others – but I’m still glad I read it because of the opportunity to think a little more about what it is to be a sentient being.