For the first time in my life I read an entire novel on a computer screen – I thought this would make it harder, but in practice the ability to sneak a chapter in between other business permitted me to finish it faster than I normally would making time to sit down with a physical book. “Upon the Mirror Sea” by I.D. Reynolds is available to read for yourself here if you want, and the short version of this review is, I recommend doing so.
The longer version begins with explaining what it’s about, though, and that’s a nontrivial task. For a full background of the speculative science involved I’d suggest reading this post, but to summarize: certain optical illusions can appear to face one direction or another depending on how your brain chooses to resolve them. This property allows a clever artist to create images that encode logical circuits that you effectively run on the hardware of your visual cortex instead of your frontal lobe, like mining cryptographic hashes with a GPU. Now the twist: the psychedelic chemical DMT produces a known effect of vastly increased apparent depth perception. Therefore, in theory, one could encode, say, an unsolved mathematical problem into a pattern of colored tiles, take a big hit of a vape, then perceive, Magic Eye-like, the solution to the problem in the topography of the tiles.
Within the world of this novel, that’s precisely what happens in the near future: Shanghai is the global hub of “neikonauts”, people who flood their brains with tryptamines and link them with computers to crack security systems and beat the stock market. Embedded in this amplified version of the classic cyberpunk VR hacking motif, our protagonist Mona, a talented but aimless graduate student, links with the minds of other neikonauts to heal them of the psychological debris left behind by imperfect tile-algorithms. Her advisor Dr. Deng, the prickly yet brilliant scientist who all but invented the field, disapproves of this dangerous method of treatment, but the arrival of an unusual case leads Mona to discover a fascinating (and possibly lethal) new piece of neural software circulating through the underground. Following that thread leads to a conspiracy hidden in the foundations of her field.
A lot more happens after that: I’ve only introduced half of the concepts the story throws at the reader – I didn’t even mention the 3D-printed idea eggs. Unfortunately that’s my greatest criticism: the novel sets up an excellent, exciting core premise, but ultimately spends a large percentage of its time (especially in the back half) focusing on the titular “mirror sea”, which is related to neikonautics but only somewhat adjacently. It’s a neat idea in its own right – a fractal cyberspace created by correlations in data from anonymized cameras set up around the city – but I found my eyes spontaneously skimming over the lengthy descriptions of it. The sea also infects you with cult-like beliefs if you look at it too much, for some reason? It ends up drawing a lot of attention away from the strongest elements of the story, leading to less elaboration than I would have expected on major elements like the Deng Bridge.
That aside: the quality of prose is high, the author displays a rich vocabulary (although an amusing predilection for the word “annealing”) as well as a playful sense of poetry in how they structure sentences for dramatic effect. The quality of characterization is, shall we say, average for science fiction: I found Dr. Deng memorable but the protagonist never quite felt like a real person to me. The pacing was solid although the ending was a bit too open-ended to feel entirely satisfying. It handles the classic SF problem of exposition deftly, letting terms and ideas wash over the reader with just enough context to remain legible, then explaining them in passing later on.
Broadly, Upon The Mirror Sea could be described as “post-cyberpunk”, but people have been calling things that for the last 20 years, so it’s probably more useful to place it in the emerging category of programmer science fiction – although it also more than passingly resembles something Greg Egan might have written in the 90s, which isn’t a criticism. Certainly, the author’s professional coding experience adds a pleasing texture to the text, and connects it to the current conversations going on about the impact of distributed computing on human minds, and the fears of human minds continuing to retain relevance in the face of computers thinking for themselves. One might even read into the novel an attempt to create a fantastic reason that human brains can continue to compete with electronic ones, although I wouldn’t necessarily assert that as the author’s primary goal.
If you are Ian Reynolds, then apologies for the criticisms, I really did like your book! If you are not Ian Reynolds, then take my recommendation to read his novel. The tiles are waiting for you.