The Mountain in the Sea
Here's a bit from a review in The Guardian ...
The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler – how to speak octopus
If a lion could speak,” Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote, “we could not understand him.” Swap “lion” for “octopus” and you have the philosophical challenge at the heart of this deeply interesting work of science fiction. What if the first alien intelligences we encountered were already living with us on planet Earth?
Rumours of sea monsters off the shores of an archipelago in Vietnam have attracted the attention of a tech giant specialising in AI, Dianima, which has bought and sealed off the islands. A marine biologist, Dr Ha Nguyen, is hired to investigate what might lurk in the water. She is joined at the isolated research station by Evrim, a sexless hyper-intelligent android built by Dianima, and the station’s security chief, a female war veteran named Altantsetseg who conducts a swarm of killer robots as though it were a symphony orchestra. It turns out that the octopuses do have a kind of garden in the sea, but no one is invited ...
I love science fiction, love the library, love my kindle. For years I had a hard time reading books because of my bad vision. I listened to audio books instead but it wasn't the same. Then my sister gave me a kindle and I was able to make text very big and could read again. Yay :)
posted by crystal | 10:58 PM
2 Comments:
Sounds very interesting! Octopi are very intelligent. They have a short but very intense life, I'm reading that it's 3-5 years. There was a sad story told by a researcher who was observing a female octopus who had laid eggs. She hung in there until the little ones were hatched, then she somehow escaped the aquarium and was found dead the next morning. I guess when they have reproduced their lifespan is over. I could never eat octopus.
Squid are similar in intelligence but more scary. I don't know if it is true that there are some in the deepest ocean as long as a football field. We should just leave that alone.
Like the squids that attack whales - very big. It seems the mom octopuses all die after their eggs hatch. Sad.
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