Subjective Chaos - Best Science Fiction Novel - The Mountain In The Sea by Ray Nayler

Publisher – Weidenfeld & Nicolson

Published  -Out Now

Price – £16.99 hardback £9.99 Kindle ebook

There are creatures in the water of Con Dao.
To the locals, they're monsters.
To the corporate owners of the island, an opportunity.
To the team of three sent to study them, a revelation.

Their minds are unlike ours.
Their bodies are malleable, transformable, shifting.
They can communicate.
And they want us to leave.

When pioneering marine biologist Dr. Ha Nguyen is offered the chance to travel to the remote Con Dao Archipelago to investigate a highly intelligent, dangerous octopus species, she doesn't pause long enough to look at the fine print. DIANIMA- a transnational tech corporation best known for its groundbreaking work in artificial intelligence - has purchased the islands, evacuated their population and sealed the archipelago off from the world so that Nguyen can focus on her research.
But the stakes are high: the octopuses hold the key to unprecedented breakthroughs in extrahuman intelligence and there are vast fortunes to be made by whoever can take advantage of their advancements. And no one has yet asked the octopuses what they think. And what they might do about it.

Communication is key to being human. It is how we make connections, share, progress and ultimately prove we are not alone and are finally heard. In Science Fiction the First Contact novel is the idea of taking communication outside of humanity – bridging to the alien. That we are not the only consciously intelligent life in the universe is something we dearly wish to be true. In Ray Nayler’s The Mountain In The Sea we do get a provocative idea that such life is closer than we think but I am startled by how much I felt let down by the book’s attempt to explore this concept.

Dr Ha Nguyen is secretly hired by the powerful DIANIMA corporation for a secret project. Hidden on an island now owned by the company she will only be working with the strange security expert Altantsetseg and the world’s only self-aware android Evrim. Their mission is to explore the island’s secrets that suggest there is an unusually intelligent species of Octopus in the nearby waters. But the evidence is of an intelligence never seen before. Elsewhere in the world a hacker is hired for a purpose no one else can deliver on by a force that will kill without mercy and a fishing vessel filled with kidnapped slaves managed by its own hostile AI is about to go off course in an unexpected way.

On the face if it this novel should be right up my street. These are themes I love to explore. I’d also heard many great things about this story and yet ultimately my reaction is cross between asking myself ‘is that it?’ and disappointment. I find this book shallow, internally incoherent, passionless and in some aspects rather troubling.

The start was promising. This is an interesting premise that Earth is large enough to have its own other intelligent life that exists on a similar yet very different level to humans. The Octopus has long been such a candidate and Nayler indeed highlights a lot of research into his amazing creature’s skills and abilities. First Contact on our own world not light years away is fascinating. Ha’s arrival at the island sets up how do you prove this. A great science fiction idea. Its just one I found wasted and ultimately not caring about.

The first issue for me is there really is not much plot to this story. At over 450 pages in hardback the pace is glacial. To bulk up the novel we have the sub-plots of a hacker being hired (for reasons that won’t take the reader long to work out) realising he is in too deep. He moves around the world and his not quite girlfriend gets killed offscreen as a warning to him to stay on track. The plot continues to move around the world and the hacker does what we know he is very good at to end the threat. Then we get our secrete fishing vessel. Controlled by a mix of armed soldiers and AI this kidnaps people takes them around the world fishing for profit. It sounds a cool idea until you ponder exactly how such a ship works. The owners are happy to pay for sophisticated AI and heavily armed guards but not actual crew. It feels extremely over elaborate and ultimately this is Chekov’s fishing vessel as we can easily guess where it is heading. Add in a secret island owned by a corporation and even the company owner arriving two thirds in to explain the plot (before dying off-page but apparently that’s all ok really). I find this is a story that for such alleged profoundness it just using standard SF tropes that you could find in books I read 20-30 years ago. SF building on stories within SF is not new nor itself a bad thing but this feels curiously bland. As are the characters in all these plots. The ending brings on a while new force to take over things but one that is happy to kill people who trespass – slightly at odds with who they’re supposed to represent. Nayler seems to struggle plotting a novel length story and instead this feels like several spliced short story tales stretched out and padded without cohesion.

In terms of characters, I find this book again bland. This is science fiction where people tend to talk in paragraphs of exposition to move the story along. All relevant to the plot but to my ear more like someone showing us their homework than managing to give a character their own voices. It is not unusual in science fiction but by 2023 is it too much to ask for exposition to be delivered at least naturally? Our non-human AI Evrim feels like any other intelligent android be they Vision or Data working out if they are alive but feels very stereotypical.  My biggest frustration is with Ha. Very quickly they find the corporation is prepared to kill anyone entering the waters. She finds the corpses on the beach. While acknowledging she too is a prisoner, she is strangely unaffected; this is worse though as we discover she is apparently haunted by guilt herself to people she felt she let down and then Nayler explains that really Ha has long-term depression and only now this is magically lifted by the island giving her purpose. The contradictions over a few hundred pages are stark if you think about it. The same is apparently true of Evrim. I find such magic handwaviums on mental health disturbing most of the time and used on these bland characters even more a strange choice.

Finally, there is the look at communication. I’m told the linguistic ideas are complex and accurate. This may be but there is actually very little within the many pages of the book. When they are discovered, they are soon solved and all again mechanically to solve the plot. It added nothing to the tale and for me feeling gilded on rather than central to the alleged theme. Ultimately this tale made the theme boring.

Safe to say this is not going to be close to my picks for the finalist. I find this novel far too close to the science fiction of the past; poor in delivery and for a tale of communication that has little to say but think itself very important doing it. Emotionally uninvolving and a non-event. I don’t think this will make a lasting impression on the genre at all.