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

Annabelle Gauthier

Not only do we not agree on how to measure or recognize consciousness in others, but we are also unable to even "prove" it exists in ourselves. Science often dismisses our individual experiences-what it feels like to smell an orange, or to be in love-as qualia. We are left with theories and metaphors for consciousness: A stream of experience. A self-referential loop. Something out of nothing. None of these are satisfactory. Definition eludes us.

And through forgetting, we reorganize our world, replace our old selves with new ones.

If he could be dead without having been born at all-if it were as easy as never having existed-he would do it. But he feared death above all things. There isn't anything a coward can't live with. No amount of pain and suffering is too much.

Emiley Jones

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

How we see the world matters—but knowing how the world sees us also matters.

It may have been necessary, but she wasn’t obligated to find it acceptable. She could not.

That’s what we are, we humans—creatures that can forget. We have a horizon, beyond which we can remember very little. Nothing can reside in our minds forever, etched into us. No resentment, and no joy. Time rubs it away. Sleep rubs it away—sleep, the factory of forgetting. And through forgetting, we reorganize our world, replace our old selves with new ones.

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.

I think what we fear most about finding a mind equal to our own, but of another species, is that they will truly see us—and find us lacking, and turn away from us in disgust. That contact with another mind will puncture our species’ self-satisfied feeling of worth. We will have to confront, finally, what we truly are, and the damage we have done to our home. But that confrontation, perhaps, is the only thing that will save us. The only thing that will allow us to look our short-sightedness, our brutality, and our stupidity in the face, and change.

Are we trapped, then, in the world our language makes for us, unable to see beyond the boundaries of it? I say, we are not. Anyone who has watched their dog dance its happiness in the sand and felt that joy themselves, anyone who has looking into a neighboring car and seen a driver 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.

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