April, 15, 2024 archives

The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler explores what happens when humans create and encounter other intelligent life here on Earth. There’s an artificial intelligence in the form of an android, created as a Frankenstein’s monster from bits and pieces of the minds of humans but becoming something else, and then an emerging civilization of octopus that appears to have developed a written language. The backdrop is another hyper-capitalist dystopia where automated trawlers staffed by human slaves are scraping the last bits of protein from the oceans.

It’s a richly-drawn world, but the novel feels a little unfulfilling because it doesn’t just tell a complete story. There are a few parallel story lines that really only come together in the last couple of chapters, and clearly there could be a lot more to the story.

This speech by Martha Wells at the annual Jack Williamson Lecture at Eastern New Mexico University in Portales, New Mexico helped me connect some of the themes between The Murderbot Diaries and this novel.