The Mountain in the Sea

The novel’s exploration of communication and environmentalism reflects Ray Nayler’s international relations background and his work on marine sanctuaries. Nayler spent 20 years abroad as a Peace Corps volunteer and a US Foreign Service officer in Russia, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Vietnam, Kyrgyzstan, Azerbaijan, and Kosovo. In interviews, he has discussed the impact of living as a foreigner for almost half his life and the challenges of communicating across different cultures. He characterizes his experiences as feeling like an outsider, though he qualifies that he felt most out of place when he lived in Fremont, California as a youth. Nayler describes his sense of alienation in trying to read and express himself in different languages and different societies but also how his experiences gave him insight on his own cultural background and how others perceive him: “Being abstracted from my own culture […] allows me to see it more clearly. I can bring an outside perspective to my own upbringing and culture that I could not have before I lived away from it for so long” (“Q&A with Ray Nayler.” From Earth to the Stars: The Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine Author and Editor Blog, 28 Feb. 2018). Nayler’s distance from the familiar enabled him to develop a global and multidimensional perspective of the world and himself.

Many of the novel’s characters reflect Nayler’s experience of feeling like an outsider, and they consider how others view them as a way to more successfully communicate and better understand themselves. Evrim, the only one of its kind, must contend with its unique identity and reception in a world hostile to its existence. Dr. Ha Nguyen, the lonely scientist, seeks to understand the octopuses on their own terms and from the perspective of how humans must appear in their minds. In exploring the difficulties of interspecies and transhuman communication, the novel emphasizes the importance of empathy to reach understanding.

Nayler’s work on marine conservation projects informs the novel’s setting. In Vietnam, Nayler was the Environment, Science, Technology, and Health Officer at the US Consulate and worked in the Con Dao archipelago. His projects included a campaign to save the dugong (a marine mammal related to the manatee) and a biodiversity program that taught children on Con Dao to dive and photograph marine wildlife. In interviews, Nayler cites a memorable night dive in Con Dao and an encounter with a cuttlefish as a moment that inspired the novel’s premise of first contact with a conscious underwater species.

Nayler’s experiences inform the novel’s descriptions of Con Dao, from its history as a former prison colony to its status as a nature preserve that struggles to protect the habitat. The novel’s characters discuss how poverty intersects with illegal fishing and poaching. Nayler has commented in interviews that the only science fictional element of Eiko’s storyline as an enslaved person on a fishing vessel is that an AI system captains the ship. Speculative elements of first contact with a marine species merge with real-world issues regarding the exploitation of human labor and natural resources.