Ha Nguyen is many things; a brilliant researcher who studies octopi, the best-selling author of a book on cephalopod thought, an orphan, and the latest addition to a small team assembled on a near-future Vietnamese island to study strange activity in the local tentacled sea life. The local octopodes, protected as part of a nature reserve, are behaving in eerily developed ways.
What she finds may change the world’s understanding of what it means to be human forever, but first, she has to navigate relationships with the world’s most advanced android and a Mongolian mercenary whose surliness hides her true self, all before forces as far away as Central Asia and as mysterious as the open sea sabotage her work entirely.
There’s so much happening in this near-future world with its ravaged climate, scientific capitalism, and shifting geopolitics. The story has a complicated setup but once you figure out what’s really happening a light bulb goes on and it all becomes simple. This is also one of the few science fiction novels I’ve read with a largely Asian cast that never really veers off into the Fetish Zone, either interrogatively or in that semi-naive exploitative way that was all the rage a half dozen years ago. It’s just sci-fi set in Asia, and therefore populated almost entirely by Asians, with no random white heroes–very normal, and weirdly rare.
The author is also a white dude, albeit well-traveled, multilingual, and by all accounts, a really nice guy who did a lot of research for this book. I was very suspicious going into this and very pleased by the end. I may have to give him what I dub the Chakraborty badge, for a writer who creates great characters of a different race or culture without being weird about it.
The book is also wildly well-written, full of twists and turns and really beautiful prose. The science is deep in a philosophical way, and the philosophy of the book is communicated best by the appearance of a character that I can’t tell you about because it’s a massive spoiler. I’ll just say that I gasped out loud at the scene where I realized who and how important she was. (And no, it’s not who you’ll think at first.)
This was a nice surprise, although I’ll never look at octopuses quite the same way again. Or humans, for that matter.
8 arms and carved symbols to The Mountain In the Sea.
(Fellow readers, this was a nice surprise. I wasn’t expecting to get as attached to the beings in this book as I did, but here I am, misting up at the potential future of a fictional consortium of octopi. Anyway, if you’d like to follow suit or just find more books like it, please check out the Equal Opportunity Bookshop. Just remember that we have an affiliate relationship with the site so if you make any purchases, we get a lil’ kickback. Now, go and read something good! Peace!)
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