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Sometimes I struggle with how to write a clear, concise, and effective synopsis of books I read, and that is certainly the case for Ray Nayler’s The Mountain in the Sea. In these cases, I often will use the standard synopsis shared with all the sales sites by the publisher. And I’m still going to do that in a moment, but even the publisher-provided synopsis focuses on only one part of this remarkable, hard-to-pin down book. So just know that this book is definitely about octopi and androids and ecological chaos, and it’s so much more layered and complex and global than this synopsis captures.

From the publisher (edited slightly by me): “The transnational tech corporation DIANIMA has sealed off the remote Con Dao Archipelago, where a species of octopus has been discovered that may have developed its own language and culture. The marine biologist Dr. Ha Nguyen, who has spent her life researching cephalopod intelligence, will do anything for the chance to study them. She travels to the islands to join DIANIMA’s team: a battle-scarred security agent and the world’s first (and possibly last) android. As Dr. Nguyen struggles to communicate with the newly discovered species, forces larger than DIANIMA close in to seize the octopuses for themselves. But no one has yet asked the octopuses what they think. Or what they might do about it. A near-future thriller, a meditation on the nature of consciousness, and an ecological call to arms, Ray Nayler’s dazzling literary debut The Mountain in the Sea is a mind-blowing dive into the treasure and wreckage of humankind’s legacy.”

The Mountain in the Sea was such an evolving read for me. Three different and seemingly disparate narratives slowly circle each other and coalesce into a larger statement about consciousness, humanity, and the soul in a near-future where countries as we know them have collapsed and reformed, the planet is in ecological free fall, corporations control everything, and AI is fully a part of every day life. It’s a lot, and I struggled to get into it. Nayler’s writing is so detailed that it becomes distracting in its pedantry, taking me out of the narrative. He zooms in with such granularity while world building that at first, we lose sight of the world as a whole. Eventually, though, he backs off, and the descriptions of each new place begin to fit more naturally into the structure and tone of the story.

That structure provides a fascinating frame for the story, though. The narrative switches between three main characters: Ha, the scientist studying octopi in Con Dao with an android named Evrim and a security officer named Altantsetseg; Rustam, a mind hacker in the Republic of Turkey; and Eiko, a young man kidnapped and pressed into slavery on the AI-controlled ship, The Sea Wolf. The narratives are all completely distinct and siloed from each other, their only connection the fact that they appear to be occurring concurrently in this altered near-future. Obviously, these three strands of the narrative will come together at some point, but Nayler doesn’t rush to that moment. And when the strands of story do arrive together, they really just touch each other, acknowledging the impact of the narrative connection point and then continuing on. I really like how Nayler does not seem fussed about ensuring that these strands come together in a way that would require them to align and entwine. Rather, it feels much more authentic to how life actually is,, people engaging and impacting deeply here and just for a moment there. It also highlights the social disconnect and isolation so prevalent in this future, the barrier that Evrim so longs to push through in his search for his own humanity.

For really, that is the core question of this book: what makes us human? Is it the fact that humans are their own species? Or that we create culture and art, like the octopus colony that Ha so carefully studies? That we are capable of emotional evolution, like Evrim, an AI being? Or is it something else? Nayler encourages us readers to look beyond our assumptions and our need to categorize and control the world around us and to embrace the complexity of the grey areas, to shed our arrogance as a species and recognize how we co-exist in and with our world.

Though it took me a while to really connect with it, I ultimately found The Mountain in the Sea to have quite an impact on me, sticking with me for months and months and pushing me to think more philosophically and practically about what responsibility “humanness” requires of us as beings who are part of a larger world. Nayler’s compelling narrative, powerful world building, and dense yet exciting prose make The Mountain and the Sea absolutely worth checking out, and I’m looking forward to whatever he writes next.