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

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The Mountain in the Sea does the unforgivable thing of making its cephalopod subjects less interesting than they really are.

The contact with the octopuses had an eerie grandeur that I enjoyed, but so much of this story involves Ha's philosophical conversations with an android. My heart already wants a sequel to The Mountain in the Sea, but my head says that maybe it's better as a stand-alone. Unfortunately, their genetics, aggressive behavior, and short life spans don’t allow them to build a culture or pass on knowledge. Ray Nayler's first book feels like both the entrance to- and the capstone of many themes and subjects he has written about over time.For fans of Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt and The Soul of an Octopus; a surprising exploration into the wonder of consciousness by Sy Montgomery. It’s the baffling insistence of the author to create a bizarro world where no currently existing country appears to still be in existence. There's certainly easy applications here to our current climate change situation, but I think it aims beyond that; to the larger core reason of humankind's general lack of empathy. As you might guess from the well done details described above, the writing style is impressive, too. To me, the book works as a cross between the 2016 film Arrival and the more metaphysical moments of the classic novel Stranger in a Strange Land.

The other part of the book's approach is that it's very much a near-future sci-fi book, with world building that isn't particularly surprising or out of the ordinary, but it's all so incredibly well considered and plausible.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. How starkly the author speaks to us, through a mirror darkly - fictional words attributed to a fictional character, folded inside a fictional story. Reflexiones sobre el hombre, la sociedad, la ecología y el futuro se imbrican en todas y cada una de las líneas de la novela. Hatchling sea turtles are helped from beach to water by a tribe of robotic Automonks from Tibet, now a hi-tech power.