Thursday, March 2, 2023

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Naylor

 


The Mountain in the Sea is in acclaimed philosophical science fiction novel by author Ray Naylor, who had previously only written short fiction. The novel came highly recommended to me by a fellow reviewer, so I actually bought the novel when it was on sale at a physical bookstore. I say "philosophical" science fiction because, while this novel is described in advertisements as a thriller, it's a really a story that makes arguments through a main story-arc dealing with the discovery of a possibly sentient species of octopus that lives outside an archipeligo in Vietnam, and how the attempted examination of that species by the book's main protagonist Ha and android scientist Evrim reveals things about consciousness, language, and interactions between other people. Such novels, which are based less on character development and more on ideas, aren't my usual reads, but the acclaim for this was so high I couldn't resist giving it a try.

Unfortunately The Mountain in the Sea isn't really a hit for me. The book's main plot and its two side plotlines do sort of come together okay in a philosophical sense, but I'm not really sure there is too much here honestly all that interesting, at least to me. The exploration of language and differences in species work really well I do think, but the exploration of consciousness really wasn't that special for me, and I'm not sure the book's ideas about empathy and really its opposite, indifference, is that impressive - it kind of feels like an essay in novel form, and I'm not sure the fiction helps anymore there. Add in some thriller elements that I thought distracted from the main ideas, and well I largely felt like just going "huh" when this was finished rahter than feeling like I learned much or had a revelation about this world or our own.

Note: I read this in part also as an audiobook. The audiobook reader is very good, but the book relies in part upon symbols drawn in the text, so you're missing a little if you read it in this format.


--------------------------------------Plot Summary------------------------------------------------------ For years, the Con Dao Archipeligo has been home to rumors of a deep sea monster, a being believed to be local superstition by most....and yet those rumors have taken the real lives of a few unfortunate souls. Now the Archipeligo has been taken over by the global tech corporation DIANIMA, its occupants have been removed, and Dr. Ha Nguyen is on her way there to become one of the only humans on the Islands...where she hopes she will find the thing she seeks more than anything else: sentient intelligence belonging to another species, specifically the Octopus.

What Ha finds on the island, along with the miraculous one of a kind android Evrim and a dangerously lethal bodyguard, is far more than she could have anticipated, as the Octopi have evolved into beings with what seems like their very own culture...a culture that appears miraculous and wondrous even as it seems dangerous to the humans. But is it truly possible for human and Octopi cultures and understandings to be bridged?

Meanwhile, while Ha and Evrim desperately try to understand something so inhuman, others have their eyes on what is happening on Con Dao, believing what is happening there to be the key to building new intelligences like no others, and will do anything to get their hands on that understanding....
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The Mountain in the Sea has three narratives: First, there's the main one I describe in the plot summmary, taking place from the perspective of Ha, as she, along with Evrim and security agent Altantsetseg, investigate the Octopi at Con Dao to truly see if they are sentient. Then there's the narrative featuring Rustem, a genius hacker for hire who in the past has hacked weak AI robots and used them to kill monstrous Oligarchs and has now been hired by a mysterious identity-shrouded woman for an impossible job. Finally there's the narrative of Eiko, a man who had been captured and enslaved by a corrupt corporation who uses AI fishing boats armed with slave captured labor to haul in fish, since using fully automated systems is more expensive than using enslaved human labor. All three narratives do eventually intertwine to some extent, but largely exist to build off one another philosophically, with each having at least something to do with language, consciousness, and memory of both humans, AIs and others.

So for Eiko's narrative, you have the idea of him building a memory palace in his mind to keep information safe and secure, a memory palace that is a part of him he himself can't get rid of; and for Rustam, you have him- owing to his upbringing as poor and lacking technology - relying upon a brilliant and otherwise unthinkable visualization of connections and maps between devices that others rely on technology for in order to hack. Rustam's narrative, in addition to introducing at least one interesting other concept that comes into play in the main narrative, at least sort of works, especially as it comes to the ideas of "Portals" that he finds in AIs to allow people to control them if they know the way in...just like the Portals he later realizes even natural beings have. By contrast, Eiko's narrative is just kind of largely superfluous and kind of distracting. And speaking of distracting, there kind of is a fourth narrative, that following hte mysterious evil anonymous woman who hired Rustem and appears to be gathering stories of the Octopi in Con Dao and then murdering the people whose stories she obtains. This narrative is even worse than a distraction, as it's simply pointless, as if it was added to make this seem like a thriller to readers early before they're hooked, only for the narrative and the thriller to be utterly abandoned and peter out.

But the main narrative is the star here, and it comes together in a book that deals with the difficulties of reaching out across cultures and languages, and the struggles of connection and empathy as things go horribly wrong due to their opposite, which isn't hatred necessarily, but indifference. Ha and Evrim are very good characters to guide this perspective, as the story deals with conscious and unconscious thought among everything else. There's certainly a lot of philosophical ideas being thrown around here, and to top it off, the book includes preludes from Ha's and another character's fictional books before each chapter.

At the same time, while the book ends on a hopeful note, it's....not really saying anything? Like the philosophy about it all is interesting, and its approach to centering "indifference" as the worst compared to outright hatred is curious, but all of these ideas don't really lead anywhere. And so I finished the book, thought to myself "huh", and doubt I'll read about it again. None of these concepts really wowed me or made me change the way I think, which is kind of what I want in philosophical SciFi if I'm not getting super interesting character development, which kind of prevents me from rating this book that highly. The closest the book comes is one interesting idea, in which people have invented a fake companion AI called a "Point Five", which provides a fake person to talk to who appears real, but really is just there to be a sounding board for you instead of having their own independent identity, and which a character finally comes to realize is a crutch that only further allows them to remain indifferent to others by removing the need to interact with them.

So that's The Mountain in the Sea, a philosophical sci-fi novel that is written well, without much really that stuck with me afterwards. Others obviously disagree, and this might be worth a try, but I can't rate it super highly.


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