One of my favourite old SF authors, Sir Arthur C Clarke, once said “How inappropriate to call this planet “Earth,” when it is clearly “Ocean”. And it is an old maxim that we perhaps know more about the surface of the Moon than the depths of the oceans on our planet.
I was reminded of this when I started reading this novel by Ray Nayler. You may not recognise the name, but Ray is one of those authors quietly producing quality for a while now. Although he has been publishing short stories and poetry since 1996, his first SF short story was published in Asimov’s Magazine in 2015. Since then, he has also been published in Clarkesworld, Analog, The Magazine of Fantasy & SF, Lightspeed and Nightmare, as well as in several Locus Recommended Reading lists and “Best of the Year” anthologies. He was championed by Gardner Dozois and others.
This is his first novel. And it’s impressive, dealing with both sentience and intelligence.
The Mountain in the Sea is a near-future novel that draws on world events now to create a compelling read. We have a near-future story with elements of climate change, overfished oceans, AI, Killer drones, shady corporate deals and espionage – not to mention a study of intelligence and what it is to be human.
The plot really runs in three strands. In the main plot, Ha Nguyen is a marine biologist who has recently accepted a role to observe and examine an octopus colony around the archipelago of Con Dao (or Dao Con in English) in Vietnam. There have been rumours of strange things happening on the shore. Ha’s interest in the marine biology overrides her concern about who she is working for, because the whole archipelago as a reserve has been bought by corporate tech giant DIANIMA and the area cleared of its residents for this study.
Ha finds herself on the archipelago with two unusual comrades. One of them is Altantsetseg, a Mongolian soldier and bodyguard there to look after Na and the other the genderless Evrim. Evrim is the world’s first – and only – android, on the archipelago for they’s own protection.
In the second, we meet Rustem, a Russian cyberhacker who takes on a covert job to infiltrate a uniquely intense neural network. Rustem appreciates the money and the challenge, but finds himself involved in shady dealings with mysterious clients in a plot worthy of William Gibson’s cyber-mechanations.
In the third plot line we meet Eiko, someone due to start a new job for DIANIMA in Ho Chi Minh Autonomous Trade Zone, but before that happens, he is pressganged and finds himself a slave on an AI-run fishing boat, struggling to survive the extreme conditions he has to work in, as well as the beatings and abuse given to him and others by armed guards.
These initially disparate threads intertwine until by the end all is connected.
The Mountain in the Sea is intelligent, ambitious and thought-provoking. My abiding thought at the end was that with our focus and efforts on “what’s out there”, we may be spending less time than we should on what’s near or around us. The Mountain in the Sea readdresses that. Never mind “squids in space”, it’s perhaps “octopuses in oceans” we should be looking at more closely, something that Sir Arthur often espoused. If nothing else, The Mountain in the Sea should give you a respect for our environment and a realisation that alien intelligence may be nearer than we think. (I’m also pretty sure that if you have eaten octopus or even calamari before, you may think twice after reading this novel.)
There is a moment at the book’s climax that I found awe-inspiring, a culmination of everything before to that point, which had an effect on me I’ve not had from a book since reading of spiders in Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time.
At the same time, The Mountain in the Sea made me feel ashamed. One of the key themes throughout the book is that even with growing species sophistication, intelligence and the technology to ensure progress, humans keep messing it up through corporate greed, politics and a disinterest in our environment for all sorts of reasons. I even found that many of the book’s key ideas made me angry, that that we could misuse intelligent creatures in the ways we do, of Mankind’s inhumanity to the world we live on, of the lost opportunities and potential that the human race has had and yet that we have squandered. There is a positive element to the story at the end, although some of the events up to that point give a rather bleak overview.
The Mountain in the Sea stayed with me after I had finished it. It may take a little while to weave its spell but by the end I was (*cough*) hooked. (There – I said it.) For its thoughtful depth, its dealing with big ideas such as the manner and matter of intelligence and communication and its education about the oceans, it is very, very good. This one reminded me not only of Arthur C Clarke’s work – the role of Tibetans in this story is up there with The Fountains of Paradise – but also the depth of Ted Chiang’s work in its ruminations on what is intelligence and our ability to communicate. Another one I can see in the award nominees this year.
The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler
Published by W&N, February 2023
464 pages
ISBN: 978-1399600460
Review by Mark Yon
