Almost a Mind Floating in the Ocean: An Exclusive Guest Post from Ray Nayler, Author of The Mountain in the Sea, Our June Speculative Fiction Pick
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For those that gravitate towards the science in science fiction, this book will make you rethink everything you ever thought you knew about intelligence and sentience. This riveting debut is a first contact story, an eco-thriller, and a philosophical mediation on the nature of consciousness and what humankind will leave behind as its legacy. Keep reading to hear from Ray Nayler about the intelligence of the octopus species and how it inspired him to write this story.
For those that gravitate towards the science in science fiction, this book will make you rethink everything you ever thought you knew about intelligence and sentience. This riveting debut is a first contact story, an eco-thriller, and a philosophical mediation on the nature of consciousness and what humankind will leave behind as its legacy. Keep reading to hear from Ray Nayler about the intelligence of the octopus species and how it inspired him to write this story.
There is perhaps no creature on earth more alien than the octopus. Who, visiting Earth for the first time, could even conceive of an animal like the human and an animal like the octopus inhabiting the same planet? In the former, we have a big brain linked to a sophisticated spinal cord. In the latter, we have neurons distributed throughout the body so that it is almost a mind floating in the ocean, each of its limbs an independent, thinking, exploring part of the whole. The human being is a rigid hierarchy of skeleton and muscle. The octopus is so flexible, so formless, that it can take on a thousand shapes, and can squeeze itself through any hole larger than its eye and the only hard part of its body — its beak. But not only are these two creatures inhabitants of the same planet — they are also distant relatives: two experiments in intelligence that diverged 500 million years ago to find their own ways in the world. Two masters of their very different environments.
I’ve long been fascinated by first contact stories: let’s just say that Alien, which my father mistakenly took me to see when I was three, left a deep impression on me: it’s the perfect example of an encounter with another intelligence with completely different designs on the world, and the disastrous results. At the other end of spectrum is probably E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, in which the alien is wholesome, weirdly cuddly, and life-affirming, and the first encounter is a journey of learning and discovery. Arrival is a more sophisticated, adult version of this latter kind of drama, in which the encounter with the “other” leads us to a better philosophical understanding of ourselves.
The Mountain in the Sea asks questions somewhere between these two first-contact extremes of deadly misunderstanding and blissful personal growth: if another species on earth evolved a way to communicate with symbols, and a sophisticated culture, would we be able to understand it, across the barrier of so much physical and mental difference? If we could understand it, would it be interested in interacting with us? How would it perceive humans, this talented species that has done so much damage? And — finally — do we humans really understand one another? For me, as we move into a world increasingly threatened by ecological catastrophe and suffused with machine-learning, AI, and manipulative algorithms, these seem like increasingly important questions to ask.
