The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler
“Night, District Three of the Ho Chi Minh Autonomous Trade Zone.
The plastic awning of the café streamed with rain. Under its shelter, wreathed in kitchen steam and human chatter, waiters wove between tables with steaming bowls of soup, glasses of iced coffee, and bottles of beer.
Beyond the wall of rain, electric motorbikes swept past like luminescent fish.
Better not to think of fish.
Lawrence concentrated his attention instead on the woman across the table, wiping her chopsticks with a wedge of lime. The color-swarm of the abglanz identity shield masking her face shifted and wavered.
Like something underwater…” [p. 5]
Put down whatever book you have started and grab The Mountain in the Sea. Keep a notebook or post-its handy because you are going to want to record nearly every word on each page — the writing is just that good!
The story begins with Dr. Ha Nguyen, (Ha), a fictional marine biologist who has accomplished groundbreaking work on octopus consciousness and authored the speculative book How Oceans Think.
Ha’s research indicates that octopuses are solitary animals while humans are highly social. Octopus life spans are short: an average of three years, with many species living only a year. Once octopus eggs hatch, the young of most species float to the surface and drift in the plankton before settling to the bottom at another location. That kills any connection to place or family. Because of this, Ha does not believe that any octopus can acquire consciousness as we understand it. She states it would have to live longer, raise its young, socialize, and pass on information from one generation to the next, thus developing a complex, symbolic system of communication.
Despite her confidence in her research, Ha’s curiosity is raised by a rumor that an octopus colony on the remote Vietnamese archipelago of Can Dao might demonstrate consciousness. She travels by helicopter to the area to see for herself if the rumor might be true.
The drone helicopter’s landing lights, their beams filled with windblown rain, panned over the ocean chop. They cut through a span of mangroves and flooded the airport tarmac.
There were no lights anywhere on the ground. The ruin of a runway slanted across most of a narrow neck of the island. The helicopter landing circle was a faded smear. Ancient planes rotted against a black tree line. The plastic siding of the main building was peeled away like scales torn from a dead fish.
The helicopter swung into a final descent. It twisted and settled with a lurch, indifferent to human comfort but efficient. The rotors cut off. The doors winged open.
Ha heard the insect cacophony of the jungle, the hooting call-and-response of macaques. Rain blew sideways into the pod. She hauled her gear from the storage compartment. The drone’s engines ticked, cooling. [p. 12]
Most of the action in The Mountain in the Sea takes place around the South China Sea at an environmental reserve (once a seaside resort) and research station on the remote Vietnamese archipelago of Can Dao in an undefined but relatively near future where applications of artificial intelligence (AI) are both widespread and varied. The mega-transnational tech corporation DIANIMA has bought and sealed off the area, protecting it with killer drones. The conglomerate DIANIMA trades in AI tech and invests its considerable resources with no moral or ethical boundaries to accomplish its goals. They have shipped the Indigenous population out of the area so they can study the rumored intelligent species of octopuses.
The Mountain in the Sea has been described by one reviewer as “speculative fiction,” another as “old school science fiction.” One plotline stars the marine biologist Na, who is joined at the isolated research station by Evrim, an empathy-possessing hyper-intelligent android (the world’s one and only) created by DIANIMA’s Dr. Arnkatla Mínervudóttir-Chan; and the station’s security chief, a female war veteran named Altantsetseg.
In a second plotline, which takes place in the same world and time, a brilliant rogue security hacker named Rustem works for a strange, masked woman who makes it clear to him that he remains alive only as long as he is useful to her. The third plotline revolves around Eiko, a young programmer recently hired by DIANIMA, who is kidnapped and forced to work as one of many slaves aboard an illegal AI-controlled fishing factory ship far off in the Pacific. His tale of isolation takes on the quality of a bonus standalone parable until around the second half of the book when events make it clear how his story is connected to the other two plotlines.
The narrative is unique due to the author’s knowledge and extensive research. Born in Quebec and raised in California, Ray Nayler lived and worked abroad for two decades in Russia, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Vietnam, and Kosovo. A Russian speaker, he has also learned Turkmen, Albanian, Azerbaijani, and Vietnamese. Ray Nayler is a Foreign Service Officer with the U.S. Department of State. He previously worked in international educational development, as well as serving in the Peace Corps in Ashgabat, Turkmenistan. In Vietnam he was Environment, Science, Technology, and Health Officer at the U.S. consulate in Ho Chi Minh City. He also served as the international advisor to the Office of National Marine Sanctuaries at National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). He is currently a Diplomatic Fellow and Visiting Scholar at the Institute for International Science and Technology Policy at The George Washington University. He holds an MA in Global Diplomacy from the Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy at SOAS, the University of London.
The Mountain in the Sea won the 2023 Locus Award for Best First Novel, was a finalist for both the LA Times Book Awards’ Ray Bradbury Prize and The Nebula Award, among other acknowledgements. I recommend it for those who appreciate non-traditional Earth settings in their science fiction and for those who, as Kawai Strong Washburn put it, enjoy a novel “with a killer heart and a sci-fi head.”
