Book Review: The Mountain in the Sea, by Ray Nayler
Can sentient communication happen across physicality's boundaries?
In an oceanic nature preserve owned, controlled and protected by a corporation whose founder is obsessed with artificial intelligence and building sentient beings, a secret long suspected is not only true but turning out to be quite different from how people imagined. We have long known cephalopods to be intelligent, but what precisely do humans - or some humans - mean by “intelligence?” Sentience emerges from the physical reality of the being we perceive as sentient. Humans are terrestrial beings composed of bones and meat. Octopi are almost entirely boneless with brains that control or semi-control appendages, all in a three-dimensional underwater world. Can an intelligence emergent in one ecosystem ever understand one from the other?
On an Asian atoll, one group of humans is about to put their concepts of generalized, non-physically bounded intelligence to the test.
The founding CEO of the corporation that operates the nature preserve, Dr. Arnkatla Minervudottir-Chan, put her motivations best in her book Building Minds:
One of the greatest tragedies of science is that the increase in its complexity has made most scientists into little more than technicians, driving them into the tunnels of specialized disciplines. The further the scientist progresses down into the mine of knowledge, the less she can see the world into which that knowledge fits.
I never wanted to be a specialist: I wanted to be a scientist in the heroic sense, bringing new forms into the world. From the first moment, I have wanted greatness.
Mr. Nayler has done a vivid and effective job of creating a wholly reasonable near-future. His experience in the Foreign Service and his knowledge and love of the ocean merge seamlessly in this novel about a future interaction between the 3rd and 4th most intelligent species on our planet. I especially loved the role played by the Buddhist Republic of Tibet and their crazy wealth built on…. I won’t spoil it, but it’s a bang-on deductive prediction.
One of the stars of his work - I hesitate to label her protagonist or antagonist - Dr. Ha Nguyen wrote a scientific work for a popular audience called How Oceans Think, an homage an astute reader will discern to Eduardo Kohn’s How Forests Think. Her musings reminded me greatly of Edward O. Wilson’s conception of sociobiology and the kinds of communication generated amongst ant colonies.
We are treated throughout the story to selections of Ha’s musings apropos to the plot’s development.
Every octopus we encounter has survived adventures and trials unimaginable to us. The octopus who has lived to adulthood in the dangers of the sea will be an Odysseus, a “man of twists and turns,” a heroically clever artist of battle and escape. how many arms will it have lost and regrown? How many forms will it have taken on to hide and stalk its prey? How many deaths will it have escaped?
And what will it know of us, this hero of the sea? Has it hidden in a nineteenth-century diving helmet lost by our early explorers of the deep? Slipped from a fisherman’s net? Peered at us from the edge of its home as we walk on its beaches? Handled the skulls drowned in our submarines?
What will we be to it? Gods? Monsters? Or nothing that can signify to it at all?
Ha and her colleagues - I will not spoil your delight in meeting them in their wondrous uniqueness - are being given a chance to find out. There is no safety in initiating cross-species communication, especially when one of the species has been hunting, eating and destroying the homes of the other.
Find a comfortable seat and a refreshing beverage and dive into the world Mr. Nayler has been kind enough to create for us.
As someone who has enjoyed free diving with octopi, including the adorable and deadly blue-ringed octopus which swarms along Sydney’s beaches, I have been forever mesmerized by our clever, boneless co-sentients. Mr. Nayler’s treatise on a complex human-octopus interaction involving money, politics, human slavery and a world full of omnipresent surveillance by parties public, private and indeterminate drew me in, kept me there and will have me dreaming in bubbles for a long time to come.
I wish I could say my preoccupation with their clear intelligence has stopped me from ordering tako with shiso leaf handrolls at my favorite sushi bar or cooking them at home on the grill. But they are too damned delicious.
What does that say about me or humans in general?