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The Mountain in the Sea (SF) - Ray Nayler ****

I'm giving this book four stars despite some irritations, because it's engaging and does inspire some thought about the nature of consciousness, though I think it could have been better as a science fiction novel.

As has become something of a clichéd structure, Ray Nayler switches between three narratives that initially seem unconnected but eventually come together. The central one involves marine biologist Dr Ha Nguyen, who arrives on the Con Dao archipelago, which has been bought by a corporation that evacuated the inhabitants, apparently to make it a wildlife reserve. The only other people present are a military specialist, who defends the location against attacks, and an AI-driven android. Ha is there to observe the local octopuses - but nothing is quite what it seems.

In the other two threads, a robotic trawler is manned by slave labour to process the fish it catches, and an AI specialist is attempting a particularly difficult exploration of a neural network. As the plot draws together, we flip between periods of philosophical discussion and action sequences, usually involving deaths. As mentioned above, there is plenty of consideration of the nature of consciousness, both from observation of the octopuses, which seem to have developed symbolic language and of various AI constructs - and this is where Ray Nayler succeeds in making this an intriguing read (though I wouldn't describe it as a thriller, as one of the quotes on the jacket does).

The negative aspects start with what sounds like a niggle, but proved a real pain. Because the central character's name is Ha, we get sentences starts such as 'Ha heard the insect cacophony from the jungle...' - and every time I read that as 'He', wondered for a moment who this new male character was and then realised. From the science viewpoint, the ability of the AI specialist to explore neural networks was more a matter of magic than programming skills. And having just read Stephen Baxter's Time with its chromophore talking squids, having chromophore talking octopuses brought on a feeling of déjà vu. It didn't help that I'd also recently read Nicholas Humprey's Sentience, which provides real scientific doubts on the validity of cephalopods being sentient.

Not only am I a little fed up of multiple-threaded narratives, although the automated trawler with its rebelling slaves was visceral in its impact, it added very little to the overall thrust of the book - whenever we were on the ship, I just wanted to get back to the rest. And perhaps most irritating of all, each chapter began with an extract from either a book by Ha or by the scientist behind both the android and the corporation that took over the archipelago. These were heavy handedly portentous, sometimes verging on the kind of parody pompous language you'd find in Private Eye. In the end I stopped reading them.

Some issues, definitely for me - though I accept that they might not worry others - but I'm still glad I read it because of the opportunity to think a little more about what it is to be a sentient being.

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Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here
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