The Mountain in the Sea blends classic big idea scifi with stylish cyberpunk, telling a story of communication across the deepest gaps.  Sometime in the future, the hottest technology is artificial intelligence, and the DIANIMA corporation leads the way.  Dr. Nguyen Ha, a heretical scientist who wrote a book hypothesizing that mollusks could exhibit sentience, takes a job with DIANIMA at the Can Dao nature preserve, a Vietnamese island haunted by a historic prison, thousands of exiles residents, and a legend of a troublesome sea monster.

The story proceeds on several tracks, each chapter prefigured by a quotation from Ha's book, or another fictional book, Building Minds, by Dr. Mínervudóttir-Chan the founder of DIANIMA.  The primary story is Ha unravelling the mystery of octopus intelligence and communication, along with her partners on the island Evrin, a singular conscious android built by DIANIMA, and Altantsetseg, a Mongolian security specialist and veteran of a brutal war against China who's one of the best in the world at what she does. Parallel plots track Eiko, a slave on an automated fishing vessel, a Russian mercenary hacker named Rustem, and an unknown woman gathering stories of the Can Dao sea monster for her own purposes. 

This book has its flaws: overly didactic, and the three plots don't quite mesh at the end. Eiko's story is vital for showing the bottom of this world, as well as what humanity has done to the sea, but his relationship to the main events is contrived. That said, I haven't read scifi this good in a while, and the flaws are part of the genre.