Speaking in Colors: A Review of “A Planet with a Lake,” by Derek Nason

In my Combined Service universe, there is a race of sentient octopods; physically, they resemble the Great Pacific Octopus, although I have given my octopods a longer lifespan and full sentience, with a few other modifications that make for good stories. Octopuses, like the octopods of Domum Oceanum, have no vocal organs, so it is only natural that they would communicate chromatically, speaking in colors, textures and patterns.

The octopuses in Derek Nason’s short story, A Planet with a Lake (published in Issue 73 of the ezine Abyss & Apex) also “speak” chromatically. They don’t begin to communicate outside their own species, however, until a space-travel disaster strands them on a distant world. One of them, Rapha, begins at that point, to communicate with the spaceship’s artificial intelligence, and to figure out how to survive in a harsh new place.

In the tradition of all great science fiction, Nason’s story makes imaginative use of the most recent cephalopod research. We’ve only recently learned that octopuses and other cephalopods can modify their own genome through RNA editing. Scientists theorize that this ability is connected both to an octopus’s intelligence, and to its shorter lifespan.

What if, the story asks, an octopus figured out how to alter its own genome in ways that better adapt it to a harsh environment, and enable it to live longer? But it is not enough, for story purposes, to ask and answer a fascinating what if question: one must also figure out how to tell the story to humans. So is born Nason’s touching story of an unlikely friendship, between Rapha and the artificial intelligence, whose name is (black oval).

Go, read, and enjoy.