But the book isn’t simply a mashup of other SF situations: it is also a novel of ideas – and with so much information, the reader can forgive the few times a character takes a deep breath and delivers a massive exposition-dump. As well, all the robotics and AI stuff was trying too hard, clearly way too advanced for a storyline that was supposed to be fairly near future. This is very much Arrival, in that the core story is a scientist brought on board to try and understand and communicate with a hyperintelligent alien species.

Also, there's a bit of time-switching between characters, so that may be disorienting, but I promise that the story manages to fit together decently.

It is a novel about conscience and sentience and capitalism’s drive to destroy, or commodify, everything on the planet. Al inicio de cada capítulo tenemos un extracto de las investigaciones realizadas anteriormente por las dos doctoras.

A near-future thriller about the nature of consciousness, Ray Nayler’s The Mountain in the Sea is a dazzling literary debut and a mind-blowing dive into the treasure and wreckage of humankind’s legacy. From these pages, I got the sense of William Gibson, and Paolo Bacigalupi - and Donna Haraway, and Octavia Butler. I expected more than two or three characters to be part of the team to contact civilized cephalopods and for this to be the focus of the book, like contact with the intelligence aboard the crashed spacecraft in Michael Crichton's Sphere was the focus of that book. Most of the Sci-Fi books I read limits the human interactions either only with higher intellects or only with lower intellects. Evrim, the AI, got his/her/its name from Turkish and it means evolution as it was revealed in the book later.

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”. As often happens, I felt the characters were slaves to the concepts or tech, though extra credit is due to writing the chief protagonist as a Vietnamese woman who speaks English and Turkish. My thoughts on this novel might be moot because, in some respects, the logic that has gone into this work is, as they say, something that exists beyond my current pay grade. Undertones of ecological morality and conservation, overfishing, and interesting political messaging all rounded out this intriguing plot, set in what I think is fairly near-future. Also like story says we have describe 3rd person with gender neutral "O", which would stopped me from saying "his/her/its" like I did above.

That's because the information is always presented through its effects on characters we are made to care about.However, the more cerebral parts dealing with the limits of human language and the reasons behind it thrilled me.

I have a deep fondness for the earnest robot novel, dating to my childhood love of Isaac Asimov—and Janet Asimov, for that matter, whose (very tame, I'm sure) scenes of sexual awakening in the oft-reread Mind Transfer fired my preadolescent imagination like little else. However, it is also not one without a sense of espionage, ensuring the book also works a bit as a thriller.The brain dwells there alone, in a blackness as total as any cave’s, receiving only translations from outside, fed to it through its sensory apparatus. That all of them were, in fact, bound together so tightly that they formed a single entity, incapable of functioning--incapable of surviving--without all of its interlocking parts in place. This book has a confusing structure, but it deals with very interesting questions: what is consciousness, what does it mean to be human, what do humans owe other forms of life, etc. More than that, though, on a meta-level, the author probably also put that in because of the age-old thought experiment of ANY species becoming murderous once crossing a certain threshold in their intelligence.