🐙 Come for the octopuses, stay for the story about communion, consciousness, and control!

The Mountain in the Sea is science fiction set in a near future when many industries are fully automated with AI. The Con Dao archipelago of Vietnam is a wildlife sanctuary for many species, including octopuses so intelligent they just might rivals humans. A tech corporation with a vested interest in seeing what can be learned from these animals has sent in researchers and sealed the area off, protecting it by deadly means if necessary.

The characters that this book primarily follows are:

Ha Nguyen, a marine biologist who struggles with the indifference people feel for the things that don’t personally affect them, and who learns the importance of connection, making oneself understood, and striving to understand others even if it doesn’t mean always agreeing with each other.

Rustem, a Tartar hacking genius who may have gotten involved in something bigger than he realized.

Eiko, a young Japanese man enslaved on an automated fishing rig.

Other characters include a badass mercenary security specialist from a nunnery, a scientist seeking mastery of creating consciousness in an attempt to fend off her own loneliness, and an android whose very existence puts them at risk from those who feel threatened by the idea of a nonhuman mind. Some of the verbal exchanges between the android and the security agent were a joy, very funny!

The octopuses feature a lot less in this book than I thought they would – I mean, a good portion of it is ABOUT the octopuses, but they actually only show up in a handful of scenes. It’s more about the people studying them, and how the world both exist in has been shaped by conscious ingenuity and all the good and bad it creates.

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