Overview:
Seasoned sci-fi writer Ray Nayler tackles huge humanist themes in his debut novel, on cephalopod and human sentience, and the languages that form our sense of self.
In North American literature, strict boundaries are often propped up between fiction and nonfiction, along with “literary” and “genre” prose. These are useful for commercial purposes, but out of step with our history. Speculative fiction might even be considered our oldest literary form: a realm of play and exploration, and a way of reaching deeper truths about ourselves, each other, and our world, through analogy and what-if.
I might be biased, though. As a writer of sci-fi myself, I have strong feelings about the value of such literature in pursuit of a more humanist world. And although I celebrated the humanism of goofier, classic-Trek Strange New Worlds in recent reviews here at OnlySky? The “harder” the science fiction, the more it attains a level of verisimilitude that invites readers to see its ideas as an extension of the world—and the more it can push readers to reframe their sense of possibility.
In a recent review for Strange Horizons, for example, I celebrated Derek Künsken’s The House of Styx, a book about a colony on Venus that details what life in such conditions would require. The book’s technical precision doesn’t exist at odds with its familial themes. Rather, the scientific and the social are united: the how inextricably linked with the why.
But even with a wealth of strong hard sci-fi to choose from, some work calls out for deeper analysis. Such was the case with The Mountain in the Sea, which publishes October 4 and is available for pre-order in hardcopy and e-Book. After finishing an Advanced Reader Copy, I knew this text merited a more nuanced discussion, with an author whose wealth of stories in Asimov’s, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Analog, and Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and Nightmare attests to a rigorous, thoughtful, and deeply humanist worldview.
Let’s dive in, then, to the wide-ranging worlds and insights of Ray Nayler.
An interview with writer Ray Nayler
MLC: Ray, thank you for this chat. The context of your stories may vary, but almost all carry the fruits of your research and global experiences. Although you can easily pull off classic SF tropes such as the one found in “Father” (Asimov’s, July/August 2020), and use history to build gripping thrillers like “Sarcophagus” (Clarkesworld, April 2021) and “Beyond the High Altar” (Nightmare, September 2019), most of your fiction does even more work than that.
Drawing from years of diplomatic service in Russia, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Vietnam, and Kosovo (where you’ve gained half a dozen languages!), and research into subjects like linguistics, biosemiotics, ecology, consciousness, and nonhuman animality, you seem to write with a handful of concurrent top priorities. “Yesterday’s Wolf”, which won Clarkesworld‘s Reader’s Choice Award for 2021, is an excellent example: a story that presents a culture perhaps unfamiliar to Western readers (in which women and girls are kidnapped into marriage), and maintains fealty to contextual nuance through memorable characters, while also exploring the potential of a new technology.
Your first novel, The Mountain in the Sea, continues that tradition of conveying Big Ideas through well-developed character- and context-specific subjectivities. It’s being pitched to readers as a “what-if” about cephalopod intelligence, and a near-future where humanity might be asked to co-exist with at least one other supra-sentient species. But that’s not even close to the full story, which looks at the myriad ways in which human ideas of self, community, consciousness, complicity, communication, and narratives of progress are long-overdue for a reframe.
We both know that centering richly formed characters and contexts is critical for humanist writing about Big Ideas, but these narrative elements are often treated as distinct or even oppositional, and plenty of fiction skimps on one element because it isn’t deemed as relevant as the rest. “Plot-driven” versus “Character-driven” versus “Idea-driven” writing is a common shorthand in our industry for a reason.
What brought you to your approach to storytelling? How would you describe your priorities, not only when you set about developing a new story, but also when seeking to better understand the world from which your writing draws?
RN: First of all, ML, thank you so much for taking the time to read and talk about my work. There seem to be fewer and fewer opportunities to speak about anything in depth, so I really value the time you are taking to dig deeply. I’m honored that you picked my work as something worth that kind of effort.
So, describing my priorities: I don’t think any storytelling element can be skimped on. For me, any piece of writing should be an integrated whole. My goal is to create a fully integrated space within which my readers can live and be and think. I see fiction as an architecture for asking complex questions. All the elements you list above need to link together perfectly for that architecture to work—plot, character, and idea. I would also add atmosphere, which is one of my deepest considerations as I write: I want my readers to truly feel the world I write for them and be engrossed in it completely.
For The Mountain in the Sea specifically, the Con Dao archipelago provided the perfect opportunity to create that atmosphere. I had spent enough time on the islands and diving there to be able to confidently see the place I was writing about, and that allowed me the confidence I needed in my setting. That setting grounds the action of the Ha / Evrim / Altantsetseg storyline, and it allows everything else to emerge. So I guess that answers the second part of the question: I worked and dwelt in that world for a while, and that allowed me to better understand and explore it, which was foundational to everything else.
MLC: I’m so glad you mentioned “seeing” the Con Dao archipelago, because that’s one of the key concerns in this book: the many ways in which we “see” the world around us, and all the knowledge gaps created by the conviction that individual perception ever offers complete or objective truth. Could you give an example from your own experience? How do you think your subject-position shaped your interactions in that region, and what other ways of seeing might exist in that environment?
Relatedly, we might not be able to identify our knowledge gaps as well as we’d like, but what do you see as the benefit of making room for the “known unknowns” and the “unknown unknowns” in our lives? Any tips for how to begin that process?
RN: It’s hard for a culture so obsessed with mastery to accept the limitations of point of view, or the idea that individual perception offers us objective truth. I think reductive materialism, which has been at the core of Western science since the nineteenth century, has provided us with an amazing amount of mastery over our environment. We have learned enough about the materials and forces constituting the world to be able to manipulate and use many of them. But at the same time that’s created an enormous blind spot: the fact that we poorly understand ecologies, systems, and the complex processes that constitute life and the world on deeper levels.
Science is in a period of owning up to this blind spot, and is slowly admitting a degree of systems thinking, but we’re far from there. I think it’s this illusion of mastery which keeps us trapped within our point of view—something the book frequently addresses—and severely limited by that entrapment.
But I would argue that the book suggests ways out of that limitation—and the primary one is empathy. It’s empathy that allows us to—however fleetingly—see the world from the perspective of another, and thereby enlarge our own understanding of it. Giving up on the idea that one’s individual perception could ever constitute something like truth is the first step toward empathy, I think.
As to my subject-position: well, I have experience in the place where Mountain is set, but that doesn’t imply mastery—just familiarity. A “sense” of a place. Mostly what I have tried to do is be aware of my own subject-position, and then listen very closely to the views other people express. It helps that asking open questions and listening closely to the answers, without judgement and while trying to actively take their position into account, is the core skill of my other profession as well. Maybe my tip for how to begin the process of making room for “known unknowns” and “unknown unknowns” in our lives is just that: listen very closely.
On a related note: I’ve often said that I did so much research for The Mountain in the Sea that it should have footnotes and a bibliography included. Of course, footnotes would be distracting in a work of fiction, but I actually did create a biography. Here’s the secret link to it, for those looking to dig deeper into biosemiotics, animal communications, consciousness, the connectome, or other topics brought up in the book. I would also mention Ways of Being, by James Bridle, which came out earlier this year, too late for me to have read it while writing Mountain. It is a nonfiction work that delves into many of the same topics, and James Bridle is a very important thinker on these subjects. Also, I worked with an amazing group of scientists from the U.S. on preservation projects in the Con Dao Marine Preserve. The work they do is amazing, and deserving of support.
MLC: When I first started reading The Mountain in the Sea, I had a strong affective response to the pacing. I felt time-warped into the 1990s, as a kid eagerly reading a new Michael Crichton novel, which always promised an exciting “what-if” ride into science and society, and had such a confident clip to the writing. Your own book goes far deeper into its chosen themes, unfurling tremendous nuance in each of its main characters and conflicts, but that punchy pacing never wavers. There’s always a danger of the work being read as “breezy” when it uses a prose style with so much momentum. But with a story like this, which asks its reader to inhabit a range of distinct subject-positions, it also feels like a solid match of form and function.
What are the thematic benefits of using such a matter-of-fact, immersive register in a story that ranges so widely with respect to character and context? Did any other structural decisions come into play (for instance, with the epigraphs) when developing this book to be as fully representative of its imagined world as possible?
RN: I had a lot to balance in this book—keeping all of the characters’ points of view in mind at all times, since point of view is part of the book’s central argument about communication, as well as maintaining the driving pace I wanted, and attending to a really complicated set of biosemiotic arguments about the embodiment of meaning. But I never see anything as an either / or choice I have to make. Rather, I like to think of it as a part of the challenge: can I keep all these balls in the air? Can I drive the plot forward while attending loyally to my thematic concerns? Can I retain depth at breakneck speed? These challenges make it exciting to me as a writer to write the book. They get me up in the morning. They provide the resistance I need to make the writing engaging to me. I was able to bring my short story writing experience to bear on this novel, which helped.
The epigraphs that lead each chapter were part of that technique of compression so vital to short story writing: here they allowed me to suggest an entire ghost library of reference materials outside the action of the text, and to weave a lot of the ideas I wanted my reader to keep in mind into the text without sacrificing forward motion and action. They also, I hope, allow the reader a moment to take their own pulse, to pause and reflect on the thematic concerns of the book before plunging ahead.
As to structural elements besides the epigraphs: I concentrated on picking the last possible moment to start a scene, and the first possible moment to end it, so that the chapters would aggressively swoop down into scenes already in progress, and then shift away to focus to other scenes in progress, driving the action forward. This is something I learned, more than anything, from film—and film is as much of an influence on my work as any kind of writing is.
The last thing I want to do is bore my reader: I want them to feel like, in this 460 or so pages, they got 1,500 pages of material to ponder. A lot of early readers have described the book as “unputdownable” or something similar. I take that as the highest compliment. If I can pack maximum philosophy into something unputdownable, and sacrifice nothing of my own ideas along the way, I feel like I’ve succeeded.
So long as we can listen closely, and avoid having faith in the superiority of one system over another, we can weave together, for ourselves, a freer and more accurate interpretation of the world.
RaY NAYLER
MLC: This touches on another “way of seeing” that could do with a reframe: the idea that a text has to be laborious and lengthy to be meaningful, and to elicit an earthquake of perspective-shift for readers. Many of the theorists you draw from were well known for producing difficult reads, such that proof of their mastery requires one to perform equally intricate, obscure, and niche jargon. (I speak as a seasoned academic myself.) But from a humanist perspective, this is hardly an effective means of reaching as many as possible—and from a literary perspective, it’s not even close to representative of how much work conveys complexity in simpler ways.
Film scripting is a wonderful example of greater efficiency. There’s a pitch-perfect leanness in, say, Alien (1979), that harmonizes perfectly with its subject matter. Are there other writers or writing traditions that you’ve admired and/or drawn upon in your own pursuit of more accessible and compressed treatments of complex topics?
RN: Oh, I agree: the shooting script of Alien is such a perfect example of leanness and compression. I also very much admire the way film noir and noir literature do this: there is a very compact, clear style that writers like Dorothy B. Hughes and Patricia Highsmith have that I greatly admire. In poetry, there are so many examples, but the leanness of “In a Station of the Metro” is worth studying. In the same way, noir cinematographers like John Alton and Anthony Mann and Nicholas Musuraca (to name a few) were able to use German expressionist visual language to communicate so much while working within so much constraint.
You asked for writers, I know, but I find so much to learn from in the visual arts and especially the theater. I learn more about effective writing in museums and theaters than I do between the pages of books, I think. After all, everything is structured like a language in the end: it’s all just the manipulation of sets of symbols. It all translates.
MLC: This is a great point, Ray, because your time in many countries has also given you more firsthand exposure than most to the visual languages of different societies. I mentioned in my preamble that book marketing often relies on stark binaries, but there’s also a broader false binary between culture and art, when writers are so often informed by lived experiences that don’t translate as easily as saying “I read this book” or “I saw this film”. You propose empathy as a bridge that can help us move toward more systems-oriented thinking, but is there a real-life role for the compression and clarity that shapes your fiction, too? And (without totalizing or reducing any given culture) have you encountered people or places worth considering in relation to how they approach these communicative strategies?
RN: It’s a tough question, and I had to really give this a lot of thought. I’d like to shift the question from “communicative strategies” to “investigative strategies”—each human (and likely animal, those still remain largely unavailable to us) perspective has techniques for interrogating existence, and the larger a variety of them you can encounter, listen to, and learn from, the closer you might come to a truer understanding of the world.
I think that the richest human vision—the widest possible vision, the one that includes the largest number of perspectives—is best. Charles Sanders Peirce talked about the seeking of truth being a collective effort: that it may be that there is a truth out there, but the only way to reveal it, to confirm it, would be for a collective body of honestly striving, seeking individuals to, over a period of time probably much larger than a lifetime, strip away falsehood and error through the application of curiosity and intellect. (I am paraphrasing Peirce here.)
Maybe another way to put it is this: the more perspectives I encounter, the more comparative tools I gain to interrogate the arbitrariness and distortion that comes along with all perspectives, including my own—and the more I also come to respect the flecks of revealed truth revealed in the perspectives of others.
There is something both naïve and condescending in the narrative of the Western traveler who goes abroad to become enlightened by their (usually interpreted as spiritual or “mystical” in a condescending way) superiority. I reject that narrative. I reject the idea that any single perspective could be fundamentally correct about the world, or that one particular culture has answers to it all. But you don’t have to be fundamentally correct to have valuable insight into aspects of existence, and I do think that’s where lived encounters with diverse perspectives benefit us. So long as we can listen closely, and avoid having faith in the superiority of one system over another, we can weave together, for ourselves, a freer and more accurate interpretation of the world.
MLC: One other danger with a book as engaging as this one is having reviews sum up its plot as “the story of three protagonists whose journeys eventually intertwine”. But that description doesn’t do the themes of The Mountain in the Sea much justice, because by the end we’re not supposed to think of just those three characters as having brushed up against one another’s lives. The scope should be both much larger and much smaller: on the one hand, binding us to a level of interconnectivity and complicity vaster than we might have realized. On the other, awakening us to the limits of all our representational and relational frameworks.
To arrive at these and related concepts, you’ve threaded the academic needle delicately. Exceedingly few Big Names are dropped (though Easter eggs abound in some of the language, for those who know where to look!), and by making up your own literary canon inside the universe, you’ve given readers all the tools they need, in-text, to grasp the more intricate ideas being explored.
The ability to make complex topics accessible to others is perhaps the best evidence of our own synthesis of the material itself. What, to you, were the most important (and challenging!) ideas you grappled with when writing this book?
RN: I have a nearly boundless curiosity, and so, in a way, every new short story, novel, or other project I take on is just an excuse for me to dig deeply into a topic I am interested in researching. I was really interested, in this case, in digging into some of the ideas I had encountered in my readings about biosemiotics, embodied language, systems theory, dependent arising, and other rabbit holes I’ve been making my way down for the last several years. I was already reading a lot on these topics, but Mountain allowed me to structure that reading into research and give it shape. It gave me an excuse to dig both deeper and more carefully into the material.
I find that having the responsibility of making your ideas clear to others forces you to do a better job of thinking. E.M. Forster’s famous quote is “How can I know what I think till I see what I say?” I used that phrase, when I was teaching poetry writing in Turkmenistan, as the central epigraph for the class.
Writing helps us think, because it is a process of composing our thoughts so they will be intelligible to others. Since thinking is, I think, nothing more than an internal conversation, that process of composition for others makes our thought process intelligible to ourselves as well. Without that process, a lot of my research would remain unsorted and directionless. Even as I write this answer, I feel the “why” of what I do as a writer better coalescing. That’s what makes these kinds of conversations about craft so rewarding to me: they allow me to become more intelligible to myself.
I understand what you are saying above about how the book will be summarized by many as being about the intertwined journeys of three protagonists. That’s reductive, but it seems like the fate of all writing: the text is, by nature, non-reducible. But almost all efforts to summarize, review, or describe it will be reductive. On the other hand, there can also be rich, productive readings of the text that discover things about it even the author may not be aware of. I’m hoping to see a number of those as well, and I think this conversation is a good example of one.
My goal is to create a fully integrated space within which my readers can live and be and think. I see fiction as an architecture for asking complex questions.
Ray nayler
MLC: You’ve touched on a comment I give to folks who ask me about writing fiction: this idea that writers are first and foremost in conversation with ourselves on the page. We have to make the text—and the concepts they contain—clear to us, before we can begin to make them useful to others. For this reason, I routinely talk about initial drafting as a process of conversing with ourselves, telling the story to ourselves. And when folks get discouraged by how much of a mess that story sometimes first appears on the page? I try to get them to see the beginning of that conversation as intel, giving them a better sense of where their own hesitancy lies.
But what you’ve written here, and in Mountain, amplifies this issue immensely. I suspect that in person, online, and in written text alike, we often forget how much we’re negotiating our way of seeing with ourselves as much as with other people. As definitive as text or tweet can look on the page, there’s an illusory sense of arrival in it, of having formed complete opinions on specific topics, that can inhibit deeper curiosity and growth.
Mountain certainly builds on this concept by offering us an ending of beginnings—or maybe it’s better to say “new middles”, in a conversation as old as life itself. Holding a finished book in hand must also give one a misleading sense of finality sometimes, but what did the process of writing this book open you to in the way of next steps—and not just as a writer, but as a human, too? What new middles have you arrived at from your studies for this book? Will we be seeing any of them in other projects soon?
RN: Patricia Highsmith said something about how writing a novel is wonderful, because whatever else is going on in your life you are writing a novel and that gives you a kind of framework for the rest of it. Something everything else is organized around. I think it’s a bit like that. I said earlier that a work of fiction is an architecture within which to ask questions, and I really think that’s what it is: you build a structure, and while you are building that structure, that space, you are thinking about balancing all the elements necessary to complete it. That’s a lot of very satisfying work, a lot of internal conversation.
But it’s not only the structure that counts—it’s the use of the structure by living beings. The readers come into the building you have built for them, and the building inspires them to ask their own questions. I think of the completion of the book or short story as a starting point for conversations that will happen in other minds and between minds. What’s exciting about bringing a work of fiction (or any work of art) into the world is sparking that conversation. After all, the book or story only lives when it is read—that’s the difference (to dip for a moment into semiotics, my favorite pool) between a “sign vehicle” and a “sign”. A sign vehicle is something that has the potential, if it encounters the right reader, to mean something. But it is incomplete without the reader—like a stop sign, hidden by a tree. It is not a complete sign. In the same way, a book or story is nothing until it is read. The book is just a sign vehicle. It only becomes a living sign during the act of being read.
I learned a lot while writing Mountain, and what I learned pushed me down many different pathways. Some led me to write a novella which I can’t talk about just yet, but which will be announced soon, and others led me to start another novel which I’m not ready to talk about. But more fundamentally, The Mountain in the Sea has given me the opportunity to spark, and benefit from, many conversations. I can’t wait to see where those exchanges will lead my thinking and the thinking of others.
MLC: I can’t either, Ray. Thanks so much for taking the time to talk out this ripping good read of a first novel, which is both a solid page-turner and a deep dive into systems thinking with lessons for us all. The Mountain in the Sea is of course available for pre-order now, and every formal writer knows that pre-orders matter immensely for publishing logistics in our currently precarious global distribution network. I hope we’ll be seeing a lot more of your work in the years ahead.