Book Review: The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler

 

The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler

450 pages, Hardcover

October 2022, Published MCD

Nebula Award Nominee for Best Novel (2022), The Kitschies Nominee for Golden Tentacle (Debut) (2023), RUSA CODES Reading List Nominee for Science Fiction (2023) 

I am prone to hyperbole when I like a thing, but in the case of this book, I figure I need to warn you that hyperbole is coming. Not only is it coming but it is serious and earned.

I admit I had not heard of Ray Nayler before all the buzz started on this book. I put it on hold at the library and forgot about it until it was sitting on the hold shelf. I went in not remembering why I was interested. Coming in cold made for an interesting read but I don't think this book can be ruined. But if it is enough that I call a book a masterpiece to sell you then by all means I will suggest you read it and come back because you will be thinking about it.

In the late 90s, there was a book called Ishmael by Daniel Quinn. If you were not there this story will feel silly but let me tell you a little about it. The book is about a dude whose teacher is a talking gorilla that patiently explains over the course of the book his philosophy. I am going to shorthand it, but this gorilla Ishmael explains how the world works, outside of the anthropocentric mode we are all used to. The punk rock subculture I grew up in (the militant Vegan straight-edge scene of the 90s) was filled with environmental and animal rights activism. These causes are still central to who I am. In the 90s scene, Ishmael became the IT book.

Folks were getting tattoos, bands were recording concept albums, language was adopted from this book, and a whole radical subculture for a few years was treating this book (and the loose sequel The Story of B) like a religious text. Ishmael is not a good novel, but as a vessel of powerful thought-provoking ideas, it was awesome.  I thought of it often when reading The Mountain in the Sea.   

Ray Nayler has created an equally thought-provoking piece of science fiction but unlike Quinn’s book The Mountain in the Sea is a masterpiece of Science Fiction that is equally powerful as a narrative as it is a carrier of many powerful messages. My jaw dropped at the quality of this book often and in the ultimate sign of respect, I was jealous of Nayler’s ability to pull off this book. Like all the best works of modern fiction, only this one fucking person could write it. Nayler’s combination of SF fandom, knowledge of science, and intergovernmental experience created a literary unicorn. One unbelievable alchemy of thought and talent spit out this incredible masterpiece that shook me to my core.

The Mountain in the Sea was preaching to the choir with me, I already shared many of the views that came across, but it was a beautiful feeling to read it. A science fiction novel that had so much to say is not rare but one that does it with skill, style, and heart in equal measure is a pretty special treat.

Set in the near future the story is told from many points of view but the primary one is Marine biologist Dr. Ha Nguyen. She is brought in to investigate the incidents of violence that have been cropping up around the ocean of Octopuses that kill humans. Nguyen has spent her career trying to communicate with cephalopods and the Ocean in general. Much of the novel is set up by quotes from the book that it is implied that she wrote after these events called How Oceans Think.  After the first chapter I thought this was a real book and was upset I could not add it to my Good reads “to be read” shelf.

There are a few other plots that Nayler weaves in the main one is an AI-driven automatic fishing vessel that is attacked by the Octopuses. There are a few human crew members and a couple of stowaways. This storyline and one involving automatic monks explore the possible consciousness of machines. This is the best exploration of those concepts I have read besides perhaps S.B. Divya’s Machinehood and Meru, very serious books, and the angry yet funny satire of Rudy Rucker’s Juicy Ghosts.  

Again I am giving you a chance to bail without getting details, but it is massive environmental pressures force the Octopus to evolve.  Dr.Nguyen is forced to confront these evolving octopuses who use symbols and sprays to communicate. Nayler lays out this communication through thrilling but patient scenes.

“The Octopus was standing, the tips of its arms the only things in contact with the floor of the chamber. As in the video before, it was in the full “Nosferatu pose – tall, its mantle vertical above its head, its arms, and web spread. The threat pose.  And like before, the octopus, easily as tall as a human being was almost white.
Speak to me.”

The book design highlights these symbols that make up their attempts to explain to the human race.  We are here and we are trying to communicate. This will invite positive Arrival comparisons.  The comparisons to The Abyss are for ocean reasons but we are not talking to aliens, but desperate Earthlings trying to warn us. Stop killing us for we will start fighting back.  There is a version of this story that is like an ocean strikes back Roland Emmerich-style action disaster movie. In that AI-generated story, Dr. Nguyen would have to translate the message in time to save her estranged child.  

Thankfully Nayler is not interested in the action, he is interested in nudging your thoughts.  This book is exciting because the story takes you to places that force you to think about our relationship to this massive part of the planet, we depend upon to live. The book is opinionated but not preachy and with the Orcas sabotaging boats and ships off the coast of Spain, it seems prophetic.

“We came from the ocean, and we only survive by carrying salt water with us all our lives—in our blood, in our cells. The sea is our true home. This is why we find the shore so calming: we stand where the waves break, like exiles returning home.”
 
It is impossible to talk about the other themes of the novel as I see them without spoiling some elements. Dr.Nguyen has a friend who she communicates through the majority of the book. I just assumed this character was human. At a certain point, it was clear to me that the “Friend” was an AI.  I think each reader will have a different moment when they realize that. I am sure there were clues but I didn’t figure that out until deep into the book.

Robotic monks, automatic fishing vessels, and a character who is the Elon Musk of AI, Nayler wrote this book long before AI  became one of the dominant issues we as a culture were dealing with. Paul Trembly didn’t know when he wrote Survivor Song that his pandemic novel due to be released in 2020 was timely. Nayler’s novel about what it means to think, be aware and communicate is a Science fiction novel set in the future about now. A dying world (from a human sustainability standpoint) with our cultures trying to figure out how to handle machines designed to think.  I mean WGA members striking to ensure AI don’t take their jobs had to skip the picket line today because the skyline looked like Blade Runner 2049.

“But what could be more illusory than the world we see? After all, in the darkness inside our skulls, nothing reaches us. There is no light, no sound—nothing. The brain dwells there alone, in a blackness as total as any cave’s, receiving only translations from outside, fed to it through its sensory apparatus.”
 
This is a novel about thought. The learning of the language of Octopus characters is at the heart of the discovery Nayler is asking you to go on. We have been taught this illusion that our humanity is a singular existence. It leads many to direct their lives toward consumption and happiness of oneself above all other motivations.

The life in the ocean doesn’t have motivations we recognize and if we started to be able to understand each other it would not make us feel great. Consider this quote from the book inside the book.

“Think what we fear most about finding a mind equal to our own, but of another species, is that they will truly see us—and find us lacking, and turn away from us in disgust. That contact with another mind will puncture our species’ self-satisfied feeling of worth. We will have to confront, finally, what we truly are, and the damage we have done to our home. But that confrontation, perhaps, is the only thing that will save us. The only thing that will allow us to look our short-sightedness, our brutality, and our stupidity in the face, and change. —Dr. Ha Nguyen, How Oceans Think”
 
This is nothing new for folks like me. 30 years of questioning the anthropocentric authority resulted in three decades of veganism and life with all kinds of harsh truths. Every day the millions and millions of living, breathing, and feeling animals that are used for their flesh hurts my soul. I have to live with the fact that I live in a sense behind enemy lines. Our culture is violent and self-destructive and it was nice that a character in this novel expressed feelings all to common for me.

“The man sipped his tea. “This feeling I have, of disgust and hatred, when I hear of what was done to the dogs— in some people, this feeling is multiplied a hundredfold. In some people, this feeling of disgust at what humans are doing to the world becomes everything for them. They cannot stop thinking of such things—of the terrible cruelties we continue to inflict on the animals unlucky enough to share this planet with us. They feel the need to intervene: to do something to stop the suffering. They have to act: their rage will not allow them any other course of action.”

Everyone who has read my reviews knows I think the key to storytelling is parallels and reversals, what this lacks in huge action it makes up with these fundamentals. They are all over this novel. Humans investigate what they think are monstrous actions of the Octopus but learn to communicate and thus…

“We’re monsters to the Octopuses: hunters, destroyers, killing their relatives and laying waste to their world. And they are monsters to us: their motivations inexplicable, their minds totally alien.”
 

The AI helps the human characters to understand the flaws their creators couldn’t engineer in them.

 “We are so ashamed of what we have done as a species that we have done as a species that we have made up a monster to destroy ourselves with. We aren’t afraid it will happen: We hope it will. We long for it. Someone needs to make us pay the price for what we have done. Someone needs to take this planet away from us before we destroy it once and for all. And if the robots don’t rise up, if our creations don’t come to life and take the power we have used so badly for so long away from us who will? What we fear isn’t that AI will destroy us- we fear it won’t.”

When Stranger in a Strange Land came out it weirdly became a hippie sensation. Good thing most of those folks didn’t Grok Starship Troopers. Decades later anarchist bookstores in fiction and real life are named after elements of Leguin’s The Dispossessed. I am all for Science Fiction having this effect. In a better world, political leaders would be combating climate change and plastic land masses in the ocean with a copy of The Mountain in the Sea in their backpacks or on their shelves.  It is like Ray Nayler has pointed a telescope at the ocean.  A picture is worth a thousand words, but this collection of words is priceless. A masterpiece of Science Fiction worthy of all the awards.