Skip to main content

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.

Hardback:   
Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Infinity Machine - Sebastian Mallaby ****

It's very quickly clear that Sebastian Mallaby is a huge Demis Hassabis fan - writing about the only child prodigy and teen genius ever who was also a nice, rounded personality. After a few chapters, though, things settle down (I'm reminded of Douglas Adams' description of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy ) and we get a good, solid trip through the journey that gave us DeepMind, their AlphaGo and AlphaFold programs, the sudden explosion of competition on the AI front and thoughts on artificial general intelligence. Although Mallaby does occasionally still go into fan mode - reading this you would think that AlphaFold had successfully perfectly predicted the structure of every protein, where it is usually not sufficiently accurate for its results to have direct practical application - we get a real feel for the way this relatively unusual company was swiftly and successfully developed away from Silicon Valley. It's readable and gives an important understanding of...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Laws of Thought - Tom Griffiths *****

In giving us a history of attempts to explain our thinking abilities, Tom Griffiths demonstrates an excellent ability to pitch information just right for the informed general reader.  We begin with Aristotelian logic and the way Boole and others transformed it into a kind of arithmetic before a first introduction of computing and theories of language. Griffiths covers a surprising amount of ground - we don't just get, for instance, the obvious figures of Turing, von Neumann and Shannon, but the interaction between the computing pioneers and those concerned with trying to understand the way we think - for example in the work of Jerome Bruner, of whom I confess I'd never heard.  This would prove to be the case with a whole host of people who have made interesting contributions to the understanding of human thought processes. Sometimes their theories were contradictory - this isn't an easy field to successfully observe - but always they were interesting. But for me, at least, ...
Post a Comment
Read more

God: the Science, the Evidence - Michel-Yves Bolloré and Olivier Bonnassies ***

This is, to say the least, an oddity, but a fascinating one. A translation of a French bestseller, it aims to put forward an examination of the scientific evidence for the existence of a deity… and various other things, as this is a very oddly structured book (more on that in a moment). In The God Delusion , Richard Dawkins suggested that we should treat the existence of God as a scientific claim, which is exactly what the authors do reasonably well in the main part of the book. They argue that three pieces of scientific evidence in particular are supportive of the existence of a (generic) creator of the universe. These are that the universe had a beginning, the fine tuning of natural constants and the unlikeliness of life.  To support their evidence, Bolloré and Bonnassies give a reasonable introduction to thermodynamics and cosmology. They suggest that the expected heat death of the universe implies a beginning (for good thermodynamic reasons), and rightly give the impression tha...
Post a Comment
Read more