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456 pages, Hardcover
First published October 4, 2022
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(Ok, let’s see if I can feature more octopuses in my review than the book did…)
“…[S]pecies of hyperintelligent octopus…”
"That was one of the keys, Ha knew, to understanding them. That lack of control from the center, that feedback from limbs, that pure embodiment of mind. They were not trapped in a skull, controlling everything from behind a sheath of bone. They were free-flowing, through the entire body. Not a ladder--a ring. A neural ring moving signals from limb to limb to mind, back again. A distribution loop through the whole body. A whole consciousness that could become parts, and then whole again. A whole consciousness that could become parts, and then whole again. It was one of the many problems Ha felt she would have no time to solve."
"It was easier to pretend that Altantsetseg was an individual, that all of her choices were her own, than to admit that Altantsetseg was a part of them. That all of them were, in fact, bound together so tightly that they formed a single entity, incapable of functioning--incapable of surviving--without all of its interlocking parts in place."
But what could be more illusory than the world we see? After all, in the darkness inside our skulls, nothing reaches us. There is no light, no sound—nothing. The brain dwells there alone, in a blackness as total as any cave’s, receiving only translations from outside, fed to it through its sensory apparatus.
—Dr. Arnkatla Mínervudóttir-Chan, Building Minds
“It was the indifference of the world—the indifference of the boy I loved to me, the indifference of the guards to the suffering of the people in the cages, the indifference of all of it, that made me crazy. I couldn’t accept it. I couldn’t stand to be a part of it. I felt cut off from people. How could they just ignore what was going on around them? The suffering of others? The striving of others? Their feelings? It was like they were clad in armor, and I didn’t have that armor."
I want to help my readers imagine how we might speak across an almost unbridgeable gap of differences, and end forever the loneliness of our species—and our own loneliness.
We are shaped and limited by our skeletons. Jointed, defined, structured. We create a world of relationships that mirrors that shape: a world of rigid boundaries and binaries. A world of control and response, master and servant. In our world, as in our nervous systems, hierarchy rules.