But what could be more illusory than the world we see? After all, in the darkness inside our skulls, nothing reaches us. There is no light, no sound—nothing. The brain dwells there alone, in a blackness as total as any cave’s, receiving only translations from outside, fed to it through its sensory apparatus. —Dr. Arnkatla Mínervudóttir-Chan, Buildi

“She doesn’t have to tell me. I know her. She isn’t like you, Ha. She doesn’t want communication. What she wants is mastery. She wants to create, and she wants to control. For you, communicating with the octopuses—understanding them—is an end in itself. For her, it’s about how she can exploit that knowledge, use it to push her own work forward.”

“Language doesn’t just allow us to describe the world as it exists: It also opens up a world of things that are not here. It grants us the power to over-consider. Because we are linguistic, creative beings, we can better think through things, solve much more complex problems. We can imagine how things might be, might have been, might become. Imagin

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

“What I would like to build,” Indra said, “is a forgetting palace. A place where I can put the things I don’t want to remember anymore.” “It’s important to remember things. It is who we are.” Indra looked up at him. His eyes were red from prolonged crying. “Yes. That is why I need the forgetting palace. Because I don’t want to be the person carryin

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

Invention is what has gotten us this far, made us the masters of this planet. But it is also what traps us. It is a compulsion. We cannot stop, no matter what the consequences.

And by then I had already broken into so many neural networks. I already knew what it’s like to be a container ship, for example. What it’s like to be a patrol drone, scanning the streets of Chelyabinsk. What it’s like to be a tow-satellite, dragging an old communications rig up out of a decaying orbit. I’d always had this … I don’t know what you’d

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