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A review by ketreads
The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler
hopeful
informative
3.0
This is a book I've seen floating around quite a bit both online & IRL so when I saw it during my birthday book haul I just had to get it!
I recently finished this book and I'm very conflicted on how I feel about it. On the one hand, it didn't quite live up to the exploration of octopus society and the potential confrontation of two intelligent species. But on the other, I loved the existentialism and the questioning the limits of human perception, and memory and what defines consciousness. I loved the way it was written, where I kept feeling on the verge of not understanding what was going on but still managed to cling to the characters as an anchor point.
This book follows 3 main story lines:
Ha, a marine biologist bought on to investigate a new society of octopus
Rustem, a hacker
and Eiko, a recent graduate looking for a job
I really enjoyed the former two. I spent a lot of the book trying to work out how both stories intertwined and once it finally clicked, I had a lot of fun rereading certain chapters with this new knowledge. My complaint comes with Eiko's storyline. We spend the majority of the book not quite understanding why or how Eiko fits into our plot, and unlike Rustem, there's no solid reasoning in the finale that has the previous chapters feeling worth the space. I liked what the author was trying to do with Eiko's storyline, but I did not like the story or it's eventual conclusion.
Overall, while the ending itself was a bit rushed I did like the outcome of it. I also wish we saw more octopus shenanigans as that's half the reason I was here but once the book was recontextualised as a thought experiment on humanities definition of sentience, it was less of an issue.
I recently finished this book and I'm very conflicted on how I feel about it. On the one hand, it didn't quite live up to the exploration of octopus society and the potential confrontation of two intelligent species. But on the other, I loved the existentialism and the questioning the limits of human perception, and memory and what defines consciousness. I loved the way it was written, where I kept feeling on the verge of not understanding what was going on but still managed to cling to the characters as an anchor point.
This book follows 3 main story lines:
Ha, a marine biologist bought on to investigate a new society of octopus
Rustem, a hacker
and Eiko, a recent graduate looking for a job
I really enjoyed the former two. I spent a lot of the book trying to work out how both stories intertwined and once it finally clicked, I had a lot of fun rereading certain chapters with this new knowledge. My complaint comes with Eiko's storyline. We spend the majority of the book not quite understanding why or how Eiko fits into our plot, and unlike Rustem, there's no solid reasoning in the finale that has the previous chapters feeling worth the space. I liked what the author was trying to do with Eiko's storyline, but I did not like the story or it's eventual conclusion.
Overall, while the ending itself was a bit rushed I did like the outcome of it. I also wish we saw more octopus shenanigans as that's half the reason I was here but once the book was recontextualised as a thought experiment on humanities definition of sentience, it was less of an issue.