Premise
In The Mountain in the Sea, marine biologist Dr. Ha Nguyen works with humanity’s only (allegedly) sentient android Evrim and Mongolian mercenary drone operator Altantsetseg to investigate what they believe to be a civilization of intelligent octopuses near the Con Dao archipelago off the coast of Vietnam.
Some chapters focus on two other characters whose storylines loosely intertwine with the main plot: Rustem, a Tatar hacker contracted to find an exploit in Evrim’s connectome, and Eiko, a young Japanese man abducted in Vietnam and forced to work on board an autonomous fishing vessel.
The Vibes Are Great
Something about this book’s setting and atmosphere managed to strike exactly the right chord for me. From the opening scene:
Night. District Three of the Ho Chi Minh Autonomous Trade Zone. The plastic awning of the café streamed with rain. Under its shelter, wreathed in kitchen steam and human chatter, waiters wove between tables with steaming bowls of soup, glasses of iced coffee, and bottles of beer. Beyond the wall of rain, electric motorbikes swept past like luminescent fish.
Yeah that rules.
For me, the core of this, I think, is characters who have access to a ton of technology but are surrounded mostly by nature. Something about that premise appeals to me. Well, that, and breakfast.
In the makeshift kitchen, Altantsetseg sat eating a hard-boiled egg. The table was cluttered with the elements of a disassembled rifle, oil rags, several terminals, and various electronic components…
The smell of fresh coffee managed to push back the scent in the lobby of gun oil, ozone, mold, and neglect. An overcast early light came through the windows, along with the salt-flesh smell of the sea. Altantsetseg indicated a bowl of eggs and a stack of toast near the coffee machine with a flick of her chin.
Thoughts on Evrim
I suspect maybe this is the point of the character, but at least initially I expected more out of Evrim. For them to make some superhuman discovery, maybe. When they were first introduced, I kind of got Jukka Sarasti vibes from Peter Watts’ Blindsight, and I assumed Evrim was going to be playing 4D chess the whole book. Other characters even suspect similarly. For example, from Dr. Nguyen:
How much does Evrim know? Everything all humans know? Or just some things? How does that work? How smart is that brain?
And there are some scenes where Evrim displays flashes of superhuman skill, but those moments felt more to me like Evrim being a living calculator rather than a superhuman strategist. There’s a scene, for example, where they spot something in a video recording that would’ve required software or specialized tooling for a human to identify. For the most part, I felt Evrim became more alive and more relatable as the storyline progressed.
Point-Fives
Hey look, this book predicted GPT-4o!
“So, it’s a joke, right? Or not exactly a joke. Someone said that people don’t really want to date other people. They don’t really want equal partnership— you know, two full people in a relationship. What they want is one-point-five people in the relationship. They want to be the complete one, the person who controls the relationship— and they want the other person to be half a person. You know, someone who gets them, but who doesn’t have their own demands. Someone who appears complete, with all these personality quirks and their own opinions and stories about the world— but not in an annoying way. Not in a way that would demand you change. So six or seven years ago, this big company in the SF-SD Axis that specializes in AI started cranking these out.”
Jokes aside, it’s impressive that Nayler nailed AI sycophancy so accurately and came up with, in my opinion, such a plausible extrapolation of it, especially considering that this book came out in October 2022—a month before ChatGPT was released!
Later in the book there’s a bit of a reveal that Kamran, a character I’d interpreted as Dr. Nguyen’s long-distance partner, is actually (shocker) a Point-Five. Dr. Nguyen then has a bit of a monologue where she explains what she finds harmful about these pseudo-relationships.
“That’s how addictive this is— the need to feel like there is always someone there, unconditionally. Someone to talk to. Someone who understands. To not have to do the work to make myself understood. Instead, I just keep on with this self-deception, pretending I had someone when I did not. I know the doctors who prescribed you to me meant well. They thought they were helping me through a dark time. But in the end, you aren’t anything but a prosthesis. You can’t replace real support. You can’t call anyone to help me, Kamran.”
He had kept her from wanting the things anyone should want— friendship with others, a relationship with someone who had their own needs: someone who could be offended, could walk away. That was the key: That ability of the other person to leave, to disappear. The choice they could always exercise to not be there.
This all seems like a pretty plausible fixture of the actual near future to me, if not something that’s already going on to some degree.
Moravec’s Paradox
High-maintenance, robots. Susceptible to all sorts of weather damage at sea. Electricity and salt water are a bad combination. Rust, decay, short circuits. Expensive. We make better robots. Cheaper to maintain, more expendable.
One of the side characters, Eiko, is abducted and forced to work on board the Sea Wolf, an autonomous fishing vessel. A shipboard AI makes all of the strategic business decisions for the ship: where to go, how long Eiko and the crew have to work, even how much they get fed. It felt a bit like a paperclip maximizer for marine protein (and therefore money). As the quote suggests, Eiko and the rest of the crew are forced to do all the work that robots would be too expensive to do— mostly hauling catches out of the water, then gutting and processing the fish. Cool to see a reasoned-through plot that hinges significantly on Moravec’s Paradox.
Cool Things That Actually Exist
I always enjoy it when books mention interesting facts about the real world. In this case, Dr. Nguyen and Evrim are discussing the octopus settlement they’re studying and they compare it with Octopolis and Octlantis, which I was surprised to learn are real locations off the coast of Australia where gloomy octopuses are known to gather and reside. Wikipedia even calls them “non-human settlements.” So cool!
Anyway, I liked this book, especially the atmosphere and setting.