Alexander Barrera’s Reviews > The Mountain in the Sea > Status Update

I think I realized yesterday, more so today, that the three storylines are probably not going to intersect. Personally, I don’t need all the characters to meet, but I would like their to be consequences from each storyline bleed into another. Right now, DIANIMA seems to be the thread tying them all together.

Also, the chapter about Dr. Chan was fucking amazing. Read it listening to “Rite of Passage”.

I love how the allusions of details from the quotes keep buildings and expectations for what will be discovered by our researchers.

And this last chapter had such beautiful prose describing the octopus performance.

God fucking dammit I’m not re-writing what I just wrote.

I like a lot of stuff rn, that’s all I’m gonna say.

This book has me kinda hooked right now. I love all the allusions to the importance of language. I love the quotes before each chapter from Ha’s and others’ books. I’m a sucker for this kind of philosophical framing in media.

I love the exploration of science leading to understandable conclusions about the octopi. I like going the perspective of seemingly unrelated characters.

Okay, I realized that this book is basically a cyberpunk book. And that has me so much more interested. I love getting pieces of lore about how our real world has undergone a different history that has shaped the political landscape of the world, forming different kinds of nations. But it’s also not the focus of the story. At least not yet. It’s background lore. The best kind of lore.

I hate that the beginning of this book (the first 2 chapters) is mainly just reading through needlessly long, purple-prose descriptions of locations. That shit is exhausting to read.