The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler
This is a science fiction novel about our inner space, the fantastic and unknowable parts of our existence here on earth.
It is not a spoiler to say that it is about octopus intelligence. It is a science fiction speculation based on things people have observed about the behavior of octopuses.
But there is so much more going on in this novel.
It is set sometime in the future. It doesn’t feel like a remote future, it could be 50 years from now. Ray Naylar doesn’t so much create a type of 360 complete world in this dystopian future, his is more of a chamber novel with few locations and characters, and about half of the characters are AI machines. But this does not diminish the scope of the book.
There is a palpable feeling of loneliness in the tone of the novel. This loneliness is amplified by the vast forces of power that the human characters must deal with. The scientists in the book are shown to have lonely childhoods. The main character, Ha, was frustrated by a love object that treated her coldly when she was a girl.
There is an AI humanoid, it has passed the Turing Test, but is also lonely and exiled being the only one and presumed dangerous.
There is a sort of remote viewer specialist, who can hack into AI minds without technological tools, just his brain. He is on a lonely mission in a type of work in which one must be suspicious of all others.
The loneliest sections involve a young man who went from the provinces to the big city, complete with the bulk of his parents savings in money and hope only to be captured and enslaved. This part of the story evoked the Death Ship is B Traven fine novel about forced labor of a ship. These parts don’t not top Traven’s horror voyage but in this novel the ship is on automatic. It is run by an AI brain that is encased in an impenetrable ship wheelhouse room. The only humans are the slave workers and the armed guards to keep them in line. The ship goes where it feels it will be able to pull more “protein” out of the depleted seas that it continues to roam.
The seas have been mostly depleted when we enter this world, and giant corporations with their AI technology are in control of the world. Most of the story takes place on an island in the Pacific that one of the corporations has set aside as a protected area of sea life, free from factory farming or the AI ships.
The lonely characters need connection and this is a novel about communication. It considers communication beyond talking and gestures of the moment. It looks at stored communications, like this text, that can carry knowledge or just data into future generations. It looks into how these communications can create a culture, as the humans have done with all the books, movies, machines, wars, variations in social structures that arise when communication can be recorded out of the moments of our lives and turned into systems of collective empowerment.
The question remains: what are all those other creatures doing?
