Description
By (author) Nayler Ray
Short /annotation:
David Mitchell meets Arrival in a breathlessly entertaining and awards-shortlised literary thriller exploring men”s fraught relationship with nature.
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Pre-order Ray Nayler”s brand-new speculative historical thriller Palaces of the Crow, coming soon!
”I loved this novel”s brain and heart”
DAVID MITCHELL, AUTHOR OF CLOUD ATLAS
”A first-rate speculative thriller, by turns fascinating, brutal,powerful, and redemptive”
JEFF VANDERMEER, AUTHOR OF ANNIHILATION
There are creatures in the water of Con Dao.
To the locals, they”re monsters.
To the corporate owners of the island, an opportunity.
To the team of three sent to study them, a revelation.
Their minds are unlike ours.
Their bodies are malleable, transformable, shifting.
They can communicate.
And they want us to leave.
When pioneering marine biologist Dr. Ha Nguyen is offered the chance to travel to the remote Con Dao Archipelago to investigate a highly intelligent, dangerous octopus species, she doesn”t pause long enough to look at the fine print. DIANIMA – a transnational tech corporation best known for its groundbreaking work in artificial intelligence – has purchased the islands, evacuated their population and sealed the archipelago off from the world so that Nguyen can focus on her research.
But the stakes are high: the octopuses hold the key to unprecedented breakthroughs in extrahuman intelligence and there are vast fortunes to be made by whoever can take advantage of their advancements. And no one has yet asked the octopuses what they think. And what they might do about it.
Locus Award 2023 – Winner of First Novel award
Nebula Award 2023 Finalist.
Ray Bradbury Prize 2023 Finalist.
Shortlisted for the 2024 Arthur C. Clarke Award
Review quote:
I loved this novel”s brain and heart, its hidden traps, sheer propulsion, ingenious world-building and the purity of its commitment to luminous ideas.
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The Mountain in the Seais
a first-rate speculative thriller, by turns
fascinating, brutal,powerful, and redemptive. The book poses profound questions aboutartificial and nonhuman intelligence, and its answers are tantalizingand provocative.
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Full disclosure: in all my years as a science journalist, I could never quite get my head around the so-called hard problem of consciousness. I could recite the theories, but
it wasn”t until I read Ray Nayler”s The Mountain in the Sea that I truly understood it in my bones. This book has many layers. It has
the clothes of a futuristic eco-punk or cyberpunk thriller, the guts of a philosophy seminar and the soul of a religious tract.
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A novel of ideas… [a]
cerebral but not self-satisfied book that also features welcome episodes of comic relief and
tightly choreographed action… It is
successful entertainment as well as a warning.
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Ray Nayler has taken on the challenge of a near future that”s less certainthan ever, and made it gleam – not only with computer terminals andsentry drones (we love those, sure) but also polished coral and cephalopod eyes. From these pages, I got the sense of William Gibson,and Paolo Bacigalupi – and Donna Haraway, and Octavia Butler. This is aplanetary science fiction, and a profound new kind of adventure,featuring – among so many other wonders – the best villain I”ve read inyears. In the end, the enormity and possibility of this novel”s visionshook tears loose.
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