Diana's Reviews > The Mountain in the Sea

Looks like this will be an unpopular opinion, though I have a feeling the average rating for this book will even out once all the 5* “thank you to the publisher” reviews have been bumped lower.
Might be a case of “it’s not you it’s me”, and to be fair the book isn’t THAT bad, but in this instance I’m judging it against its own lofty aspirations - I’ve given objectively worse books better ratings, but these books also didn’t try to tell as complex of a story as this one.

First off, I don’t think this is science fiction. It reads like fantasy. The “science” is basically all faux blabbering about AI and ridiculous tech, to an extent that I can’t even tell which parts of the blabbering relating to octopus intelligence are actually real science. Which is a shame, because octopuses are awesome in real life too.

The main thing that pushes it into fantasy territory for me isn’t even the sentient AI stuff, because that would just be standard sci-fi. It’s the baffling insistence of the author to create a bizarro world where no currently existing country appears to still be in existence. The blurb says this is supposed to take place in the near future and it reads like it too; I would’ve guessed 50-100 years in the future max. But if that’s the case, the “political system” Nayler creates is hysterical.
Like I said, none of countries we know today still seem to exist, and instead we get tons of random city state “Republics”, high tech paradise Tibet, and the “Chinese-Mongolian winter war”. Seriously man? A geopolitical shakeup this drastic either would take a lot more time or, like, atomic conflict. My point is, you can’t just drop these names in there and then apparently not think about how we got to a point where Ho Chi Minh City is now an autonomous rich af trade zone.
Especially because none of this is needed to make the actual story work, all it did was make me cringe to hell and back. Yep I’m a geopolitics nerd and yep it’s nitpicky to be bothered by shit like this in a work of fiction, but if you’re writing a book that takes itself so goddamn seriously and is so self-important, then you have to be held to your own standards.

We have three main story and time lines: one taking place on an island where we follow a scientist investigating the emergence of an intelligent octopus species (or I should say, even more intelligent than real octopuses already are); one that follows some hacker dude; and one about a trafficked man enslaved on an automated fishing vessel.
Only the first one would’ve been needed. In a way, I found the story of the modern day slaves to be the most impactful, especially because this is something that actually goes on in real life and is both absolutely dreadful and also completely invisible to the wider world. That being said, it didn’t add anything to the plot. Neither did the hacker storyline. Yeah I know Naylor wanted to go off about sentience and intelligence and all that, but compared to the first contact plot it seemed… I don’t know. Redundant. You have a chance to create an inventive tale of first contact, “aliens” right among us - stick with that!

We also have excerpts from characters’ fictional science books opening each chapter, which… oh boy. So self-important, I just cannot. Also irrelevant, because we learn these things during the main storyline anyway. Showing not telling ya know? Thanks for the info dumping though.
Plus, endless faux science monologues. Sometimes monologues about feelings thrown in for a change, which unfortunately still doesn’t make it any better.
As for the writing, I’m pretty sure Ha, Evrim and Rustem were the same person. At least they were written the exactly same way, loooong monologues included. Kidding obvs, but also kinda not.

As I said, it might be a “it’s not you it’s me” thing. Plenty people seem to have liked it, but it didn’t work for me. In large parts I think because I was so disappointed the cool concept wasn’t as poignant as I thought it would be and Nayler wasted an interesting first contact story trying to throw in musings about robots (and that world building, argh).
… appreciate the opportunity for a good rant though. Love a good rant! 😅