Back in 2019, I read the book Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness by Peter Godfrey-Smith and said: I really enjoyed this evolutionary tale. It’s equal parts biology and philosophy. I will never look at cephalopods quite the same way again. Reading Ray Nayler’s The Mountain In The Sea reminded so much of that book that I couldn’t resist flipping ahead to the acknowledgements at the back. Sure enough, Other Minds gets a big shout-out. But that’s only part of the make-up of The Mountain In The Sea. There’s just as much William Gibson as Peter Godfrey-Smith. I don’t just mean that the book is an unexpectedly rip-roaring cyberpunk thriller—which it is—but that it’s also got that Gibsonian narrative structure; three disconnected protagonists in three separate stories that you just know are going to connect before the book is done. The great accomplishment of this book is how well it balances the two genres of philosophy and cyberpunk. There’s plenty of musings on the nature of consciousness, be it human, octopus, or artificial intelligence. But there’s also plenty of high-tech hacking shenanigans. Above all, it’s an excellent example of one of my favourite subgenres of science fiction: first contact. It’s as linguistically satisfying as Ted Chiang’s Story Of Your Life, the pinnacle of the first-contact subgenre. The fact that there are no extra-terrestrial species just adds to its realism.