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More on The Mountain in the Sea
The characters are so alone in this book. There's no community and no model for/of community--at all! Just people groping toward (or away from) one another on an individual basis. Evrim, the sole android ever created, Ha, the solo octopus researcher at the research site, Rustem the solo hacker, Altantsetseg the solo security agent, Arnkatla Minervudóttir-Chan (LOL, Minerva's daughter), the solo designer of the android. Eiko, the enslaved guy on the fishing ship, strives not to be solo: he actively tries to see people and build unity with them, but his efforts are mainly fruitless.
I thought this was going to be contrasted with something not-solo about the octopuses, but no. There is no octopus perspective, and the way the octopuses are "read" by the humans (and Evrim) presses them into a human mold rather than seeing them on their own terms. For example, the autonomy of octopuses' legs from their executive function gets talked about, but it never figures at all. Instead, we see the legs used for walking on (on land, even!), like human legs, and for holding weapons or gifts, like human hands. Octopuses as like us rather than different from us.
In the sense that they're living creatures, that's true. Organic life is having a hard time in this future world, whether it's octopuses or humans or sea turtles. The octopuses can kill one or two intruders in their garden, just as Altantsetseg can kill intruders in the cordoned-off zone where research is going on, but in the end, the nonhuman systems that people have built but no longer control are more powerful and not given to compromise.
So what does the future hold? Evrim is seen as better than human because they're incapable of forgetting things. And yet even within the story, perfect recall is shown as problematic. Characters talk about trauma being etched in the body and the memory. So it seems strange to celebrate perfect recall as an improvement. A solo being, able to brood over each and every thing that's ever happened to them ... brrrr, seems cold, very cold.
Huh, well that turned out more negative than I thought it would when I began writing this entry. My Goodreads review was more positive. I guess I have lots of very mixed feelings about the book. It sure has been food for thought, though.
I thought this was going to be contrasted with something not-solo about the octopuses, but no. There is no octopus perspective, and the way the octopuses are "read" by the humans (and Evrim) presses them into a human mold rather than seeing them on their own terms. For example, the autonomy of octopuses' legs from their executive function gets talked about, but it never figures at all. Instead, we see the legs used for walking on (on land, even!), like human legs, and for holding weapons or gifts, like human hands. Octopuses as like us rather than different from us.
In the sense that they're living creatures, that's true. Organic life is having a hard time in this future world, whether it's octopuses or humans or sea turtles. The octopuses can kill one or two intruders in their garden, just as Altantsetseg can kill intruders in the cordoned-off zone where research is going on, but in the end, the nonhuman systems that people have built but no longer control are more powerful and not given to compromise.
So what does the future hold? Evrim is seen as better than human because they're incapable of forgetting things. And yet even within the story, perfect recall is shown as problematic. Characters talk about trauma being etched in the body and the memory. So it seems strange to celebrate perfect recall as an improvement. A solo being, able to brood over each and every thing that's ever happened to them ... brrrr, seems cold, very cold.
Huh, well that turned out more negative than I thought it would when I began writing this entry. My Goodreads review was more positive. I guess I have lots of very mixed feelings about the book. It sure has been food for thought, though.
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I say all this, critically, but at the same time, there were things I did appreciate a whole lot about the book. (I feel compelled to add that. This isn't a case where I hurled the book across the room--I just eyerolled at these particular parts. But other parts I held in my mind really carefully, and at two points I even teared up.)
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It was like he was channeling Updike but at least Updike had a brain and some patronizing charm
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I hear you so hard on the ESOL. Although I do ESOL tutoring, I've never had someone whose first language was oral only as a student. But Tikuna, the Amazonian language I'm learning, is an oral language that only had writing imposed upon it in the past century. The notion that Tikuna culture is somehow less-than fills me with fury.
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BTW, I owe you an email update. I'll try to do that shortly. I just need to see where one of those group email threads left things, and what the next step is, and who needs to do that step...
Onwards!
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For me, I really appreciate that he tries to show people trapped in systems--there's no one supervillain you can point to. And I like some of his ideas (like about point fives, that I talked about last time). But his overall vision in the book seems so BLEAK. And his ranking of cultures, putting literate cultures about oral ones, is embarrassing in a person who's trying to talk about, or show, approaches to thinking in different ways. It's just wrong! And yet the guy himself seems widely traveled, and I can tell he cares about places, people, cultures... so I don't know.
But now I'm morbidly curious. I'll have to find those other reviews.
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After reading other comments, ETA: About a decade ago I was auditing a class on process theology in which for some reason the instructor and my colleagues all simply stated that humans have richer lives than chipmunks. And I said I didn’t know, I didn’t know how I’d feel about it if I were a chipmunk. And they all told me I *did* know, and got mad at me.
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Ranking and rating things can be a fun game, but it's not a necessity! Like, you can enjoy buttercups, apple blossoms, peonies, and forget-me-nots without needing to rank them!
Regarding the author, I don't know at all. Within the story, the models for successful union and communitarianism, at least for humans, all seem to involved union with machines as well. I have nothing against that as a plot element, but philosophically, I find it odd, since there's plenty of communitarianism among humans today. But it may be that he wanted to imagine something good about human-machine relations. From his bio, it seems he's lived and worked in many places around the world (e.g., Vietnam, Turkey).
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