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The Mountain in the Sea, by Ray Nayler
Oct. 31st, 2022 08:57 pmThis is not for bingo--I'm ~2/3 of the way through that and 7/12 of the way through the year, so I felt okay picking up a couple books that don't fit. :P I'm not necessarily planning to do full-scale "bingo-style reviews" for these, but it had enough "it's like X but without the Y" that I wanted to mention it just in case other people find it useful!
This was billed as a book about "what if humans discovered a sentient octopus society. First contact with all the ensuing complications, but we don't need space travel, because it's right here on Earth!"
And indeed, the main plotline is about what you would expect, based on that advertising. Like Steerswoman (especially Steerswoman #3), there's the challenges of first contact are deepened by "from a human perspective, these creatures are scary and dangerous and unknowable...but...from their perspective, we are scary and dangerous and unknowable! Dang. Tread lightly." What you might not expect are the B-plots. One of them felt like "what if Infomocracy [the modern nation-states as we know them have dissolved, replaced by tiny states and sprawling nonprofit/nongovernmental entities with lots of nebulous power]...but much darker [nobody can do anything about the slaver AI ships on international waters.]" And not only are humans pondering "what if we meet another species whose minds are complex like ours, but very different," but they're also making AI which may or may not be self-aware and grappling with "what if digital minds are like ours, but also different." There's a neat twist involving personalized semi-aware AI who serve as "emotional support" beings of a sort for individual humans.
Unfortunately, and maybe this was more a problem with my expectations, I didn't really feel as if the B-plots were as engaging/connected to the A-plot as I would have hoped. There are a couple times where we hear the same story ("there was an octopus and it attacked me! almost as if it knew what it was doing!") from multiple points of view, but it felt more repetitive than supplemental. The AI ship was SFy, sure, but it wasn't the kind of SF I cared about. Between chapters, there are excerpts from characters' in-universe books--"remember, octopus have extremely different bodies than we do, the metaphors that are significant to them will be different!" Again, it felt redundant. (This extends to quoting a poem about Odysseus--"hey look, an octopus who survives to adulthood to develop a culture and pass it down has to be a brave hero that survives many sea battles!"--which I think was also written by the author.)
The "hey look, my learnings, let me show you them" extends to namedropping the "what is it like to be a bat?" thought experiment. Only, now, it's "what is it like to be an octopus? or an AI?"
Anyway, some evocative parallels with stuff that worked for me, but overall, I felt like I'd have preferred a streamlined novella focused on the octopuses' gardens. (Yes, they call them that.)
This was billed as a book about "what if humans discovered a sentient octopus society. First contact with all the ensuing complications, but we don't need space travel, because it's right here on Earth!"
And indeed, the main plotline is about what you would expect, based on that advertising. Like Steerswoman (especially Steerswoman #3), there's the challenges of first contact are deepened by "from a human perspective, these creatures are scary and dangerous and unknowable...but...from their perspective, we are scary and dangerous and unknowable! Dang. Tread lightly." What you might not expect are the B-plots. One of them felt like "what if Infomocracy [the modern nation-states as we know them have dissolved, replaced by tiny states and sprawling nonprofit/nongovernmental entities with lots of nebulous power]...but much darker [nobody can do anything about the slaver AI ships on international waters.]" And not only are humans pondering "what if we meet another species whose minds are complex like ours, but very different," but they're also making AI which may or may not be self-aware and grappling with "what if digital minds are like ours, but also different." There's a neat twist involving personalized semi-aware AI who serve as "emotional support" beings of a sort for individual humans.
Unfortunately, and maybe this was more a problem with my expectations, I didn't really feel as if the B-plots were as engaging/connected to the A-plot as I would have hoped. There are a couple times where we hear the same story ("there was an octopus and it attacked me! almost as if it knew what it was doing!") from multiple points of view, but it felt more repetitive than supplemental. The AI ship was SFy, sure, but it wasn't the kind of SF I cared about. Between chapters, there are excerpts from characters' in-universe books--"remember, octopus have extremely different bodies than we do, the metaphors that are significant to them will be different!" Again, it felt redundant. (This extends to quoting a poem about Odysseus--"hey look, an octopus who survives to adulthood to develop a culture and pass it down has to be a brave hero that survives many sea battles!"--which I think was also written by the author.)
The "hey look, my learnings, let me show you them" extends to namedropping the "what is it like to be a bat?" thought experiment. Only, now, it's "what is it like to be an octopus? or an AI?"
Anyway, some evocative parallels with stuff that worked for me, but overall, I felt like I'd have preferred a streamlined novella focused on the octopuses' gardens. (Yes, they call them that.)
