The Mountain in the Sea: Winner of the Locus Best First Novel Award

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This is very much Arrival, in that the core story is a scientist brought on board to try and understand and communicate with a hyperintelligent alien species. It just so happens that the "alien" species is a newly discovered, hyper-evolved community of octopi living in an archipelago off of Vietnam who are displaying a newly developed use of language. There are a LOT of octopus facts here and it's all incredibly interesting (and also seemingly part of a larger trend of octopi in movies/tv/books of late). Nayler himself is the international advisor to the Office of National Marine Sanctuaries at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. He knows his stuff and has clearly thought about this a lot, which really shows (to the book's benefit).

First off, I don’t think this is science fiction. It reads like fantasy. The “science” is basically all faux blabbering about AI and ridiculous tech, to an extent that I can’t even tell which parts of the blabbering relating to octopus intelligence are actually real science. Which is a shame, because octopuses are awesome in real life too. It might seem that I didn't like the book with all the complaints above, but I did. I love octopuses, they are fascinating, and I do think their inteligence is not far from how it was described here. The characters are well developed, and I couldn't help but root for all involved.

Despite these caveats, the characters were interesting and well-developed, particularly the villain, a militant environmental protection group, very much anti-humanity and that's why I kept reading. También queda claro que conocen muy bien a los humanos, tienen opiniones muy firmes sobre ellos. Vamos, lo que nos hemos buscado. The Mountain in the Sea is a first-rate speculative thriller, by turns fascinating, brutal, powerful, and redemptive. The book poses profound questions about artificial and nonhuman intelligence, and its answers are tantalizing and provocative.” Whether you're new to Ray Nayler's work or a longtime reader, this book will keep you trying to work through its puzzle-box nature. If that does not sound like a particularly gentle or entertaining read, fear not: This is a no holds barred thriller, intertwining several narrative strands that eventually converge, rather violently, at the end.

En la isla se lleva a cabo una investigación secreta, a cargo de la Doctora Ha (bióloga especialista en cefalópodos), Altantsetseg (especialista en sistemas) y Evrim (un androide que es el mayor éxito de la empresa, un hito en tecnología, cuasi humano y cuya creación ha generado mucha polémica a nivel mundial). Ha Nguyen, una bióloga marina que ha dedicado la vida a investigar el cerebro de los cefalópodos, hará lo posible para estudiarlos. Y si una nueva especie de pulpos hiperinteligentes tuviera la clave para el futuro de la humanidad? Inside, it was upgraded for comfort. The passenger cabin was padded to dampen the noise and jolt of armor. The car’s fuel-cell engine ran silent enough, but the transmission whined and sent weird vibrations through the compartment. Ha dimmed the cabin lights.También hay algunos paralelismos fascinantes con aspectos como la forma en que el operador de drones, Altantsetseg, un curioso personaje usa su flota de drones, pasando por la forma en que la corporación opera en comparación con la propia inteligencia del pulpo.

This problem is beyond me. This problem is beyond you. But there’s a chance it might not be beyond US.” On the surface, it's a hard-science thriller set in a reshaped geopolitical environment, where humankind's aggressive harvesting of the oceans for protein may have put evolutionary pressure on octopuses to develop a civilization of comparable intelligence as ours. But the story doesn't go in the cosmic-horror or man-against-nature direction you might expect. The octopuses are still quite mysterious by the book's end...but no more or less mysterious than we are to one another. The whole place used to be a prison. The graveyards are filled with generations of dissidents tortured to death by one government after another. A bad place to start a business, right? Maybe. But it was a good place if you just wanted to get by, to live. Sure, it had its problems—lots of them. Technically, the Global Conservation Park covered the entire archipelago, both land and water. Zero fishing or hunting allowed. There was even a UN watchdog organization that would show up once a year, write a report. But the reality was, there were always fishing boats coming in, tangling trawling nets in the reefs, using cyanide and dynamite. And the park rangers were all corrupt. How could they not be, with the salaries they were being paid? They sold turtle eggs, reef fish, whatever they could get their hands on. The locals were in on it—spearfishing, free diving for shellfish. Son, my assistant, had been a free diver.” In the daylight the deserted town would be composed of scabrous, peeling pastel tones. Ficus trees, their trunks painted a fading white, lined streets scattered with vegetal debris—leaves, fallen branches, seedpods, and fruit.As always, I find that when I am unable or unwilling to update my reading status with excerpts from a book, I'm just not into it. I want to stress that science fiction fans--who have reviewed The Mountain in the Sea very well--might love this. Nayler, who has written short stories for many years, has a CV that seems fit for one of the first humans living and working in an undersea habitat. The cover design by Abby Kagan is beautiful, from the typeface to the symbols to the color, and truly magnificent. I'll keep my autographed copy on my bookshelf for years to come.

Make all your characters vehicles for plot, synopses of aforementioned octopus facts, or philosophizing about sentience and semiotics. Me parece fascinante la inmersión del autor en las IA. Por no hablar de los pulpos que es lo que más me ha gustado. But this book isn't a dense, philosophical treatise. It's intensely tactile, too. It creates and lives within its own world. It draws you in. You can feel the rough corals, taste the salty spray, smell the coppery blood of many characters who come to some pretty rough ends. MAYBE. Walking away from the café in the rain, Lawrence wasn’t so sure. The tamarind trees hissed in the wind. His poncho had a tear in the side of it, and he could feel a damp spot spreading through his clothes, cold on his skin. Like I said, none of countries we know today still seem to exist, and instead we get tons of random city state “Republics”, high tech paradise Tibet, and the “Chinese-Mongolian winter war”. Seriously man? A geopolitical shakeup this drastic either would take a lot more time or, like, atomic conflict. My point is, you can’t just drop these names in there and then apparently not think about how we got to a point where Ho Chi Minh City is now an autonomous rich af trade zone.This is a near future of many pleasing inventions, from the witty to the horrific. Hatchling sea turtles are helped from beach to water by a tribe of robotic Automonks from Tibet, now a hi-tech power. People can buy AI romantic partners to be their “point five”, only half the fuss of a real human relationship. Some mysterious characters wear “identity shields”, obscuring their real faces with changing electronic ones, to avoid ubiquitous surveillance. And in the depleted oceans, ravenous AI-piloted fishing vessels use crews of abducted human slaves to process their dwindling catches. I loved this novel’s brain and heart, its hidden traps, sheer propulsion, ingenious world-building, and purity of commitment to luminous ideas.” At a basic level, MITS is about a human scientist working with the world's only android assistant on a protected island, both of them attempting to study and understand a new species of octopus. As introduced to us, the scientist is a recluse, the android is socio-political exile, and the octopuses are a local myth.