The Mountain in the Sea

“Here we are,” Ha said, “telling stories around the campfire to fend off the terrors of the dark.” “I am not afraid,” Evrim said. “Dr. Mínervudóttir-Chan minimized that in me. It’s counterproductive. She allowed me just enough to keep me from being reckless.”

One of the aims of The Mountain in the Sea is to explore the idea of communication with a truly alien species here on earth, one that has developed its own system of symbolic communication. Above all, I wanted to be as honest as I could about the complexities of the problem of communication between species. Being true to that goal meant doing a mas

But for hours, despite that, he lost himself in the work. At first he had thought of it as a maze, as he usually did. That was the common metaphor—the labyrinth. But these last few days he had come to see it for what it was: a palace. It was a palace as large as the world itself. As he wandered its corridors, searching for a way into its central ch

But when it was my turn not to be indifferent, I failed that same test. I was indifferent to the villagers, the local population. I had thought of myself as someone who cares for everything, and cares too much—but in fact I only cared for some things. Other things, I discarded. I didn’t think at all of their struggles for survival, their subsistenc

of this—all Ha’s hope for a breakthrough, and any hope the Shapesinger and her kind had—rested on violence. On Altantsetseg’s ability to wield violence, to direct it against the people who would destroy this sanctuary. It was easier to pretend that Altantsetseg was an individual, that all of her choices were her own, than to admit that Altantsetseg

“Yes, that is true,” Ha said. “We can’t conclude the octopus made this. But at the least, it is a manuport: an object moved purposefully from its original context because it had importance or significance.

Eiko paused. What reaction could he expect from the hardened glass of the wheelhouse? From its reinforced steel-plate door? From the mind beyond? It was a mind full of sonar images of the seafloor, full of maps of banks and shoals, full of trawling methods and market prices. A mind in which the relative value of their lives was just more data.

I’m not skeptical of what we are dealing with: I am trying to determine the level of development. In humans, there are hundreds of thousands of years between the collection of objects which have meaning to them and the arranging of stones for ritual purposes to the actual carving of symbolic objects. I’d like to know for sure whether it’s the forme

The weathered surface of the chunk of exposed volcanic stone smoothed, and paled. Where before there was only stone, a horizontal slit opened. An eye. The rock slivered itself into two.