Ray Nayler

Debut novelist Ray Nayler has written one of the most masterful science fiction novels to come along in some time. This near-future thriller takes place mostly on an archipelago off the coast of Vietnam, where a species of octopus appears to be developing culture. A multinational tech company has purchased and sealed off the islands for further study, and Dr. Ha Nguyen is there to research the creatures. There are others on the team, including Evrim, who is the first humanoid artificial intelligence to have been created, and indeed every character in this novel adds substantially to the story. I’ll be honest: I felt like this book broke my brain several times. It’s just so profound and well written. Ultimately, it’s a study of culture, language, consciousness, and the nature of intelligence, as well as a rumination on ambition and how we treat the world. It’s lyrical and thoughtful, and I'll immediately pick up the next Ray Nayler novel as soon as it’s available. —Chris Schluep, Amazon Editor

A Novel

The Mountain in the Sea

abi a

“The great and terrible thing about humankind is simply this: we will always do what we are capable of.”

Katy Watkins

"I was a nautical engineer, before all of this. This—" He gestured around them, to the darkened, sweat-stinking barracks lurching in the storm. “This world didn't exist. It was a story in the news. A story I clicked past without reading. Autotrawlers crewed by slave crews. Another world, a degraded shadow of our own. How was I to know there was a hole in the world that I could fall through, like falling through an open manhole? That I could fall right through that story in the news, and end up on the other side, on a planet I don’t even recognize? And become a person I don’t recognize.”

Giovanni Silva

Rustem felt the hairs rise on the back of his neck. Later he would remember this moment—when this man’s words penetrated to the core of him. Later he would say to someone, “I didn’t know, until that second, that all of us have a portal. I didn’t even know, then, that he had found mine. But I felt it. It was like he reached into me, and turned a dial, and the entire mechanism that made me who I was shifted into a new configuration.”

“Another metaphor. Metaphors are all I have to talk with, anymore. I’min this world now where words don’t work, so I keep having to dig around,find concepts somewhere else..."

“It’s a good nickname. Bakunin wrote God and the State. Have you readit?”

“He was right about many things. And wrong about some things. Butmore right than wrong.”

“I should read it, I guess,” Rustem said. “I’m not much for books.”

“There isn’t time in life for everything."

We are, and have always been, a part of the world. We do not stand above it. We are “involved” with the world. This word has a sense not just of participating, not just of complication, but also of a curling inward, a coiling we call “involution.” We are coiled into the world, nestled inside its processes, wound into its forms.

There are two selves in the mind. One is the present self, the ship—neural activity, tacking between the elevated and the mundane. Between thoughts of the meaning of life and of how to glue a handle back on a broken coffee mug. The other is the current on which the vessel is borne: the more permanent self. The memories of childhood, learned concepts, habits and resentments—the built-up layers of previous interactions with the world. This self changes as well, but only slowly—as slowly as a river’s course is changed by shifts in environment and erosion, time wiping a sandbank away or building one up anew. We consist only of change—but some change is fast, and some comes only over years, decades, a lifetime.

And sound was muted, as if…” “As if,” Evrim said, “everything had moved a bit farther away.” “Yes,” Ha said. “That is exactly what I was going to say. How did youknow?” “Because that is exactly how I began to feel six months ago. What didyou do to make the feeling go away?” “I didn’t do anything. I hid it from everyone. I kept on studying, kept on talking to other people, kept on doing everything exactly as I had been. Whatseemed most important was to make sure that nobody knew. I learned to hideit. To smile. To ‘join in’ with everyone in group activities. To pretend to besomeone I was not.

“Dr. Mínervudóttir-Chan says trauma is ‘etched into our physical being.’” “Yes,” Ha said. “I think I was just in such a state of emotional distress—the boy I loved who did not even know I existed, the long years of loneliness, my obsessive studying and the exhaustion it caused—all of it came together,and in that moment something just … shifted inside my mind. And it stayed shifted. When I walked out of the building, the colors were not as bright asthey should have been. It was as if the sun had gone behind a cloud—but the sun was right there in the sky. Right there, where it had been when we walked into the prison. Only now it was dim enough for me to look right at it.

Are we trapped, then, in the world our language makes for us, unable to see beyond theboundaries of it? I say we are not. Anyone who has watched their dog dance its happiness in thesand and felt that joy themselves—anyone who has looked into a neighboring car and seen adriver there lost in thought, and smiled and seen the image of themselves in that person—knows the way out of the maze: Empathy. Identity with perspectives outside our own. The liberating, sympathetic vibrations of fellow-feeling. Only those incapable of empathy are truly caged.

“Shut up. I have more to say. You’re more than conscious. You are also human. It doesn’t matter what you are made of, or how you are born. Thatisn’t what determines it. What determines you are human is that you fully participate in human interaction and the human symbolic world. You live in the world humans created, perceiving that world as humans perceive it, processing information as humans process it. What more is there? Being human means perceiving the world in a human way. That’s all. So, you arehuman. You may also be more than that, but you are certainly as human as most people I have known. More human than some.”

It wasn’t that she had ever believed he was real—it was more like she had believed he was enough. And when the sense he was not enough surfaced—sometimes suddenly, an intrusive thought that jarred the harmony between them—she had been able to silence it. For Years.

“The edge. Dr. Mínervudóttir-Chan spoke about it in an interview Evrimwas watching. You’re so perfect, Kamran. So … close to perfect, anyway.But in the end, even you are flat. I just never reached your edge before. I came right up to it, and always turned away. I didn’t want to push you—ask you questions you couldn’t answer. I hid your edge even from myself. You were too important to me—helping me think through my problems, laughing with me, keeping me company through so many long hours. That’s the real trick. It’s not how convincing you are. In fact, the questions were always there to ask. It would have been easy. Where are the graduate students you always talk about? What is this experiment you have been working on foryears? But I never did it. And that’s the point: I hid the edge from myself. That’s how this works. That’s how addictive this is—this need to feel likethere is always someone there, unconditionally. Someone to talk to. Someonewho understands. To not have to do the work myself to make myself understood. Instead, I just kept on with this self-deception, pretending I had someone when I did not. I know the doctors who prescribed you to me meantwell. They thought they were helping me through a dark time. But in the end,you aren’t anything but a prosthesis. You can’t replace real support. Youcan’t call anyone to help me, Kamran. Because you are here, on this island, inside the oculus. You are the oculus. They would never let me have a lineout to someone back home. It doesn’t make sense. Do you see?”

So I don’t look too closely. Why? Because I keep lying to myself. Making the pieces fit the way I want them to, not the way they are. That is what got me trapped here: Lying to myself. Staying in my own head, making decisions alone. And now I am in trouble again, and I have no one I can trust. Why? Because I haven’t worked hard enough to build that trust. I have to break this pattern, or the same thing will happen again. I need to stop running away from the people I need support from. I need help.”

Communication is communion. When we communicate with others, we take something fromthem into ourselves, and give them something of ours.Perhaps it is this thought that makes us so nervous about the idea of encountering culturesoutside the human. The thought that what it means to be human will shift—and we will lose ourfooting.Or that we will finally have to take responsibility for our actions in this world.

What does it mean to be a self? I think, more than anything else, it means the ability to selectbetween different possible outcomes in order to direct oneself toward a desired outcome: to befuture-oriented. When every day is the same, when we are not presented with the necessity tochoose between different possibilities, we say we don’t “feel alive”—and here I think we guessat what being alive actually is. It is the ability to choose. We live in choices.

“What more are we? Our memories, our actions, our memories of ouractions. Nothing more than that.”

When the brain stores long-term memory, it changes the memory from activity to structured connections. Imagine it like this: You are trying to remember a phone number. At first you have nowhere to write it out. So you say it to yourself, over and over. That is activity. Then you finda terminal and write the phone number out, converting activity to physical structure. These persistent connections, filed away as structures in the brain, form the more permanent self. The momentary activity is the fleeting “you”—such as the “you” reading these words in this exact moment. If you recall these words of mine later, it will be because they have, in asense, been written down in the neural connectome of your brain, taking up a physical presence inside you.This is why it can be so difficult to overcome trauma: Memories are inscribed in us. They are etched into our physical being.

Even if Evrim may have been very close to being human when Dr.Arnkatla Mínervudóttir-Chan brought them online, they would not be now: without sleeping, and especially without forgetting, they must be drifting further and further away from anything that could be called “human.” That’swhat we are, we humans—creatures that can forget. We have a horizon, beyond which we can remember very little. Nothing can reside in our mindsforever, etched into us. No resentment, and no joy. Time rubs it away. Sleep rubs it away—sleep, the factory of forgetting. And through forgetting, were organize our world, replace our old selves with new ones.

Again and again I asked myself how humankind could transcend the limitations of our ownform, the rigidity of our structures. Again and again, the solution seemed impossible. In ourbodies as in society, our structures are built to replicate themselves, and themselves only. Weare embedded in habit. We dread the truly new, the truly emergent. We don’t fear the end of theworld—we fear the end of the world as we know it.

But what could be more illusory than the world we see? After all, in the darkness inside ourskulls, nothing reaches us. There is no light, no sound—nothing. The brain dwells there alone,in a blackness as total as any cave’s, receiving only translations from outside, fed to it throughits sensory apparatus.

“So, it’s a joke, right? Or not exactly a joke. Someonesaid that people don’t really want to date other people. They don’t really wantequal partnership—you know, two full people in a relationship. Two peoplewith demands and desires and differences of opinion about everything. Whatthey want is one-point-five people in the relationship. They want to be thecomplete one, the person who controls the relationship—and they want theother person to be half a person. You know, someone who gets them, but whodoesn’t have their own demands. Someone who appears complete, with allthese personality quirks and their own opinions and stories about the world—but not in an annoying way. Not in a way that would demand you change.

Partly, the friendship was a result of Eiko’s new determination to caremore. There was a time when he would have kept to himself. A time wheneven someone coming to his aid would not have been enough for him tobegin confiding in that person. But now his determination to care had begunto feel almost religious.That didn’t mean it felt real to him—not yet. He still felt that distance,that detachment. But he was groping toward it, toward something genuine.Fellow feeling, or whatever one might call it: he had no word for what it was.He was forcing himself to connect, to feel, to identify with others. Becausepeople had to matter. They had to. If they did not matter, it meant he did not

It was here that she had learned what it meant to be completely alone.She found herself thinking of Evrim. Of what they had said about theautomonks at the temple:I find them eerie. Repulsive. I suppose it is the same for you when youlook at a monkey. Unsettling.That was how she felt, looking back at herself as a child: Like looking atsome half-minded thing. An inferior version of the self she was now. A failed attempt.

Enjoyed many aspects of this book. Creative near future world, loved the marine focus. But it suffered a little from characters with the same author voice (except for one character who wears an old translator). There were often long, redundant monologues that said nothing by the end. I didn't care for the excerpts from the protagonist's fake research book, either — eventually I stopped reading those because there were far too many and they distracted from the story. Overall, cool sci-fi book in a unique setting that suffers from some typical sci-fi genre issues.

Katelyn Caillouet

i consumed this! so crazy. i want to see an octopus again 

really loved this! so many memorable characters, all very well done. funny that i read this right after three body problem, even the themes are similar but they’re executed completely differently. beautiful + especially relevant

julia

I thought this was gonna be a solid 3 or 3.5 for most of it, it wasn’t a particularly fun read and I wasn’t attached to the characters, but ultimately I love the big picture ideas and concepts in play, and I was hooked by the end.

love a book that raises the bar for every one after it. this was incredible

claire

Jay Harris

Not all of the plot lines worked for me, but the story’s best moments were amazing. 🐙

Mountain in the Sea

Extremely interesting and overall enjoyable. At times, it got a bit confusing with the separate characters that never quite converged the way I expected. Very cerebral and thought-provoking; I wish I could read both of the imaginary books quoted throughout.

Emiley Jones

Thrilled by how much I loved this. One of those books that I just want to climb inside of and live in (despite how unpleasant that would be in the kinds of books that I tend to feel this way about). I liked it so much that I read the acknowledgements.

Brett Seybert

Thrilled by how much I loved this. One of those books that I just want to climb inside of and live in (despite how unpleasant that would be in the kinds of books that I tend to feel this way about). I liked it so much that I read the acknowledgements.

Humanity is still afraid the minds we make to do our dirty work for us—our killing, our tearing of minerals from the earth, our raking of the seas for more protein, our smelting of more metal, the collection of our trash, and the fighting of our wars—will rise up against us and take over. That is, humanity calls it fear. But it isn’t fear. It’s guilt (p 266).

The Mountain in the Sea A Novel

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