The Mountain in the Sea

4.5 stars rounded up.

This Nebula finalist focuses a lot on communication, philosophy, and biosemiotics. It was a fascinating speculative fiction looking into the near future. The quotes at the beginning of the chapters (which come from the main character's book) were profound and were a big takeaway for me. I enjoyed the sections dealing with the octopuses, and appreciated that the author made the hacking storyline not attempt to explain the semantics of it all but rather focus on character development. My only minor gripe is the parts with action were not as engaging as I would have liked, but that could have just been me.