Join two authors whose new novels imagine aquatic animals with previously unimagined levels of intelligence. Brett Ashley Kaplan’s dreamlike Rare Stuff follows a photographer, Sidney, who seeks answers to the mysterious disappearance of her whale-loving mother nearly two decades before. The trail of clues lies in her deceased father’s manuscript, which hypothesizes in part that Sidney’s mother was taken in by a highly unusual group of whales. Ray Nayler’s The Mountain in the Sea is a speculative novel about the discovery of a highly intelligent, and possibly dangerous, species of octopus. Nayler’s realistic near-future world-building anchors a gripping plot about the ensuing fight for domination, one that will shape the future of humanity and change how we think about consciousness itself.

Moderator: Juli Berwald, science writer and author of Life on the Rocks and SpinelessBrett Ashley Kaplan, Ray Nayler, Rare Stuff, The Mountain in the Sea