No intelligent animal is as antisocial as the octopus. It wanders the ocean alone, more inclined to cannibalize its own kind than band together with them, doomed to a senescent death after a haphazard sexual encounter. The octopus is the “tribeless, lawless, hearthless one,” denounced by Homer. This solitude, along with her tragically short life span, presents an insurmountable barrier to the octopus’s emergence into culture. But this book asks the question: What if? What if a species of octopus emerged that attained longevity, intergenerational exchange, sociality? What if, unknown to us, a
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