Will I love The Mountain in the Sea?

Reading The Mountain in the Sea felt like sitting beside a wiser writer and watching him peel apart the idea of consciousness with his bare hands. I kept pausing not because I was confused, but because Nayler’s restraint made me rethink my own approach to storytelling—how much I explain, how much I trust a reader to reach back.
The way he writes about communication made me realize how clumsy I can be on the page when I’m trying too hard to make a point. Nayler lets two minds brush against each other and trusts the friction to illuminate everything. That… show more.

This was the best book I read in 2024, and it wasn’t even a close contest. The imagination, the writing, the characters, and the incredibly timely subject matter combine into an absolute science fiction masterpiece that marks a staggering debut for Ray Nayler.

This is a first contact story unlike any I’ve ever read, that calls to mind the best work of Peter Watts and Jeff VanderMeer. Set in the near future in Vietnam, it follows a small scientific team that is searching for signs of non-human sentient life on Earth. The story is so good, so fun to explore,… show more.

Reading Ray Nayler’s The Mountain in the Sea reminded me of my experience reading Dune decades ago, when I was a teen. It opened up another world, another way to experience the world, but in the case of Nayler's book, that new perspective didn’t require traveling to a fictitious, distant planet. It was the world of a conscious, intelligent octopus here in earth’s oceans. Nayler takes us inside the minds of a number of his characters. In fact, much of the intrigue of the book is experiencing the central situation from myriad perspectives, each of them with a different and… show more.

This is one of those books that I almost wish I’d written, except no one but Nayler could have done it justice.

It starts with a discovery of potentially sentient octopuses, the scientist studying them, and the global corporation that controls her access and funding. From there, the story gets dizzying in scope: it spans countries and social classes, somehow managing to be a thriller while delving deep into zoology, climatology, neurology, the consequences of war and colonization, and the nature of consciousness itself—while still showing the wonder of this new-found species.

Everyone’s fate, terrifyingly, lies in the hands of… show more.

Sometimes you can judge a book by its cover – I spotted this book in a bookstore in DC and was immediately drawn to the artwork, a spectacular Japanese-style print of an octopus lurking just under the surface of the sea.

The book turned out to be just as good: an extremely original story about a scientist and an AI super-intelligence on a remote island off the coast of Vietnam (which is owned entirely by an international corporation who have moved the entire population off it) researching a community of octopuses who have evolved to the point where they have… show more.

When I love a book, I rave about it at the drop of a hat. I raved about this mind-blowing SF thriller to everyone I met for weeks.

It’s got everything: international skullduggery, evil tech business empires, a world under ecological threat, futuristic science based on current cutting-edge research on cephalopod intelligence, and – of course - intelligent octopuses. I dove right into this and just surfaced long enough to read parts of it aloud to whoever happened to be nearby.

Thought-provoking, exciting, and exquisitely written, this book won the Locus Award for Best First Novel, and it is absolutely… show more.

The fact that both my first and second book choices refer to octopuses, or octopi, is something that only struck me as I picked my way through the towering mountains of books I have bought (the bigger number) and read (a smaller, though still substantial number) in the past 12 months.

But if Ben Goldsmith’s book had me in tears, Ray Nayler’s had me laughing out loud and reading out sections to my long-standing (and long-suffering) wife, Elaine.

The story centres on pioneering marine biologist Dr. Ha Nguyen, who is invited to the remote Con Dao Archipelago to investigate a… show more.