The Voice of the Kraken – Ray Nayler: What would the Kraken say?

What would happen if one day we suddenly encountered an intelligent, previously unknown species in the sea? Frank Schätzing already played this out 20 years ago in his best-selling novel “The Swarm”, whereby all of humanity immediately found itself in great danger because the ravaging nature of the Anthropocene defended itself. The 47-year-old Ray Nayler deals with this in a much more relaxed manner and, despite all the fantasy, ultimately more realistic because it is less trying to be spectacular, in his award-winning novel “The Voice of the Kraken”.

In the near future, scientist Ha Nguyen will be researching octopuses on the Vietnamese island group of Con Dao, of which there are plenty on the archipelago. The archipelago was bought by a company called Dianima, which simply relocated the local population in order to preserve the exceptional ecological marine biotope. Ha Nguyen now lives in the former hotel of the tropical holiday paradise together with the artificial life form Evrim, a unique android who was virtually banished to the remote archipelago as an AI for political reasons. The Mongolian Altantseg, who has a considerable arsenal of weapons and surveillance systems, ensures security on the island, which is closed to the public.

“The Voice of the Octopuses” begins as a story about an ambitious research project and then unfolds a global narrative on the topic of ecology in different storylines. On the one hand, there is the marine biology research on Con Dao, during which Ha and Evrim are astonished to discover that a whole community of intelligent octopuses has settled on the ocean floor in a decades-old shipwreck, which eventually begins to communicate with them.

The large octopuses not only write symbols in the water like the giant octopus-like aliens in the film “Arrival” (2016), but also play with colors on their skin, manipulate objects and suddenly appear on land. The further Ha and Evrim explore the colony, the more surprised they are by what lies beneath the sea and has been mentioned in legends of the archipelago for centuries. There is also the story of Eiko, who originally wanted to work for the Dianima corporation and ends up on a huge AI-controlled fishing trawler where he has to work as a slave in fishing with other kidnapped people. AI-controlled, the fully automatic trawler operates as a floating factory to exploit maximum resources. Meanwhile, in Istanbul, a secret organization is trying to recruit a hacker to break into a complex AI system.

It is about the question of how other beings think, feel, communicate and build social bonds and how humans can interact with them.

The fascinating thing about the different storylines is the really skilful, light-handed and yet extremely complex conceptual work in this novel, in which, in addition to a lot of AI technology, a whole global map of economic and political spheres of interest is drawn up. Con Dao is located in the Ho Chi Min autonomous trading zone, Tibet is an important player in the advanced digital development, and reference is made again and again to various recent regional wars in Asia and Europe.

Ray Nayler lived for 20 years as an employee of the US State Department, a consulate and various cultural and research institutions in, among other places, Russia, Turkmenistan, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Azerbaijan and Kosovo. His stays abroad seem to have given him enormous inspiration in his writing. After making a name for himself in the science fiction community for years as a short story writer, “The Voice of the Kraken” is his debut novel, as dystopian as it is utopian.

Ultimately it’s about the relationship between humans and other species. This includes octopods as well as artificial intelligence and also addresses the question of how other creatures think, feel, communicate and build social bonds and how can humans interact with them? There won’t be a happy ending, that much can be revealed, because the difficulty of communicating, of not only understanding but also taking the needs of other species into account, can be overcome in this near future, which is just as profit-oriented as our present , hardly solve.

But the extraordinary octopuses are not better creatures because they live more closely with nature. And the AI ​​modeled on humans is not just a machine that can be controlled to the last consequence, but rather develops an autonomous life of its own. In the end, Ray Nayler’s novel at least hints at how a more open-minded ecological awareness could change social contacts between all these different species and thus life as a whole on our planet. However, he refrains from pointing the moral finger and instead packs it into a rousing science fiction story that is exciting right up to the last page.

Ray Nayler: The Voice of the Kraken. A.d. America. English v. Benjamin Mildner, Tropics at Klett-Cotta, 464 pages, born 26 €.