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Blindsight

By Peter Watts

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Ratings:

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5 (116 ratings)

Length: 427 pages7 hours

Publisher:: Macmillan Publishers
Released:: Oct 3, 2006
ISBN:: 9781429955195
Format:: Book

Editor's Note

Loaded with ideas…

This is hard science fiction at its finest, loaded with jargon and philosophical concepts about the very notion of self and identity, taking place at the moment of first contact with an alien species at the edge of our solar system.

Description

Blindsight is the Hugo Award–nominated novel by Peter Watts, "a hard science fiction writer through and through and one of the very best alive" (The Globe and Mail).

Two months have past since a myriad of alien objects clenched about the Earth, screaming as they burned. The heavens have been silent since—until a derelict space probe hears whispers from a distant comet. Something talks out there: but not to us. Who should we send to meet the alien, when the alien doesn't want to meet?

Send a linguist with multiple-personality disorder and a biologist so spliced with machinery that he can't feel his own flesh. Send a pacifist warrior and a vampire recalled from the grave by the voodoo of paleogenetics. Send a man with half his mind gone since childhood. Send them to the edge of the solar system, praying you can trust such freaks and monsters with the fate of a world. You fear they may be more alien than the thing they've been sent to find—but you'd give anything for that to be true, if you knew what was waiting for them. . . .

At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

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Book Information

Blindsight

By Peter Watts

Ratings:

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5 (116 ratings)

Length: 427 pages7 hours

Editor's Note

Loaded with ideas…

Description

Publisher:: Macmillan Publishers
Released:: Oct 3, 2006
ISBN:: 9781429955195
Format:: Book

About the author

Peter Watts

Peter Watts is a former marine biologist, flesh-eating-disease survivor and convicted felon whose novels—despite an unhealthy focus on space vampires—have become required texts for university courses ranging from Philosophy to Neuropsychology. His work is available in 21 languages, has appeared in over 350 best-of-year anthologies, and been nominated for over 50 awards in a dozen countries. His (somewhat shorter) list of 20 actual wins includes the Hugo, the Shirley Jackson, and the Seiun. Peter is the author of the Rifters novels (Starfish, Maelstrom) and the Firefall series (Blindsight, Echopraxia).

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Blindsight - Peter Watts

Hemingway

introduction

by Elizabeth Bear

Imagine you are Siri Keeton.

With that classic opening line—spoken in the voice of Siri Keeton, first-person narrator—Peter Watts does not so much invite as abduct the reader into the experience of a Human being in the wrong place, at the wrong time, about to discover just how wrong the universe can really be.

Peter is crown royalty among writers of science fiction’s most difficult subgenre—that generally referred to as hard science fiction. His work is rigorous, unsentimental, and full of the sort of brilliant little moments of synthesis that make a nerd’s brain light up like a pinball machine. But he’s also a poet—a damned fine writer on a sentence level, who can make you feel the blank Lovecraftian indifference of the sea floor or of interplanetary space with the same ease facility with which he can pen an absolutely breathtaking passage of description.

Peter can write a paragraph about a spaceship course-correcting on a high-g burn that would make Herman Melville wring his hands in envy. He can also vividly ground the reader in the viscerality of a character’s experience, the physical sensations and emotions, and make even vastly unlikable people sympathetic and compelling.

His characters have personalities and depth, and if most of them aren’t very nice people, well, that’s appropriate to the dystopian hellholes they inhabit.

It’s my opinion that the book you hold in your hand is the best hard science fiction novel of the first decade of the twenty-first century—and I say that as someone who remains unconvinced of the correctness of its central argument.

Blindsight is the story of Siri Keeton, a man with half a brain, who is one member of the crew of the research vessel Theseus. The Theseus is crewed by a carefully selected group of technologically engineered superhumans, which—attempting to discover the source of a network of extraterrestrial probes—encounters alien life in a vessel that names itself Rorschach. While intensely dangerous, this alien life cannot even be described as malevolent, for it is as indifferent to Humanity as is everything else in the universe (except for Humanity itself). Blindsight’s contention is that this life form is better adapted to survival than Humanity in all imaginable ways, because it is not handicapped with this thing we call consciousness.

Which is to say, self-awareness, the I, the ability to observe and question our own actions—or at least to convince ourselves we are doing so.

That’s the first bit I have some quibbles with, based on my own interest in neurology. But you don’t have to agree with a novel’s premise or its thematic argument to find it a compelling work of fiction, and Peter has written a compelling work of fiction here. Also one that makes some well-thought-out, uncomfortable arguments.

It’s significant, I think, that every member of Theseus’s five-member crew is somebody who might be considered an alien—or a monster—in general Human society. They are all different from baseline—the cyborg, the vampire, the intentionally multiple mind, the mad scientist … and Siri Keeton: political officer. The person whose job it is to control the meaning, and the memes, in a world where meaning is an illusion.

Are they monsters? Are the aliens monsters? Or are they—and we—all just machines, and moral judgments utterly meaningless? As Siri himself wonders at a crucial part in the narrative—"Did he ever speak for himself? Did he ever decide anything on his own?"

In Blindsight, Peter gives us a universe that is capricious, agencyless, and coldly mechanical. He takes a rigorously behaviorist stance on Human neurology. His people are ticking clockworks—beautiful, strong, wounded, heroic ticking clockworks, with that perception familiar to so many of us of being trapped outside the course of our lives—observing, perhaps impeding, but not in control.

I keep returning to those words—Lovecraftian, indifferent—but Blindsight is also a brilliant argument for the inevitability of that same indifference. There’s an icy, logical nihilism at this book’s core that Watts never shies away from, that—in fact—he ruthlessly exploits. Horrible things happen for no reason, because the universe is like that, and Watts doesn’t give us the pretense of some higher meaning as a comfort.

His implacable alien monsters aren’t even really monstrous, any more than a plague is monstrous, or the pitiless vacuum of space. They’re just growing, because growing is what life does, and Humanity happens to be in the way.

In fact, some of the Human—or near-Human—people turn out to be, to coin a phrase, the real monsters here.

In its own way, though, that nihilism itself can be comforting, and this is another place where I quibble. If it’s all futile, we’re excused from trying. And not trying is so much easier than trying-and-failing. It’s soothing to have an excuse for hopelessness. And we do have a cultural bias toward believing that the most cynical response to any situation is the wisest and most knowledgable one.

The funny thing is, this quibble also does not detract from my assessment of this book as among the best of its kind. The fact that I find Peter’s argument insufficiently nuanced doesn’t actually change the fact that he makes it brilliantly, that his ideas are horrible and fascinating and glitter like a swarm of darkly jeweled beetle carapaces. In addition to cosmology and evolution, Peter hangs his plot on a hard-biology explanation for vampire legends that alone, in the hands of a lesser author, would be sufficient for a series of novels. Here, it’s just a subplot that reinforces the novel’s thematic argument: One more kind of instinct-driven monster to inhabit his monstrous world. One more creature that imagines itself real, confronted with an objective reality that is utterly oblivious to its existence.

This thematic freight—that all we see when we look out at the universe is our own selves reflected, because that is what we are programmed to see, and that our conscious minds may very well be holding us back and slowing us down (and making us miserable in the deal), and that we are all just part of the machine—is gorgeously developed on a dozen layers: in the choice of characters; in the biology and society (if you can call it that) of the aliens; in the unfolding of several timelines of plot and subplot; in the relationships between characters; in the exploration of grief and loss and unhappiness; in the relationships between the characters and their world, and their ship, and each other; and in Peter’s own language choices as, in the voice of Siri, he allows thematic statements to be made in a variety of ways.

Blindsight is one of those rare books that alters the reader’s perception of the world and of himself, if the reader is brave enough to tackle it head-on. The idea that consciousness is self-destructive is a heady one. I can think of exactly one other novel that even has the guts to take that one on: Kurt Vonnegut’s much-maligned Galapagos. But where Galapagos is a farce, Blindsight is a tour de force, a science fiction novel that should be able to make any alert reader question not only what just happened in its pages (or pixels), but exactly who is reading them.

And even more so, who is relating those events—and whether that person even exists at all.

Imagine you are Siri Keeton.

After all, Siri Keeton does.

prologue

TRY TO TOUCH THE PAST. TRY TO DEAL WITH THE PAST. IT’S NOT REAL. IT’S JUST A DREAM.

—Ted Bundy

It didn’t start out here. Not with the scramblers or Rorschach, not with Big Ben or Theseus or the vampires. Most people would say it started with the Fireflies, but they’d be wrong. It ended with all those things.

For me, it began with Robert Paglino.

At the age of eight, he was my best and only friend. We were fellow outcasts, bound by complementary misfortune. Mine was developmental. His was genetic: an uncontrolled genotype that left him predisposed to nearsightedness, acne, and (as it later turned out) a susceptibility to narcotics. His parents had never had him optimized. Those few TwenCen relics who still believed in God also held that one shouldn’t try to improve upon His handiwork. So although both of us could have been repaired, only one of us had been.

I arrived at the playground to find Pag the center of attention for some half-dozen kids, those lucky few in front punching him in the head, the others making do with taunts of mongrel and polly while waiting their turn. I watched him raise his arms, almost hesitantly, to ward off the worst of the blows. I could see into his head better than my own; he was scared that his attackers might think those hands were coming up to hit back, that they’d read it as an act of defiance and hurt him even more. Even then, at the tender age of eight and with half my mind gone, I was becoming a superlative observer.

But I didn’t know what to do.

I hadn’t seen much of Pag lately. I was pretty sure he’d been avoiding me. Still, when your best friend’s in trouble you help out, right? Even if the odds are impossible—and how many eight-year-olds would go up against six bigger kids for a sandbox buddy?—at least you call for backup. Flag a sentry. Something.

I just stood there. I didn’t even especially want to help him.

That didn’t make sense. Even if he hadn’t been my best friend, I should at least have empathized. I’d suffered less than Pag in the way of overt violence; my seizures tended to keep the other kids at a distance, scared them even as they incapacitated me. Still. I was no stranger to the taunts and insults, or the foot that appears from nowhere to trip you up en route from A to B. I knew how that felt.

Or I had, once.

But that part of me had been cut out along with the bad wiring. I was still working up the algorithms to get it back, still learning by observation. Pack animals always tear apart the weaklings in their midst. Every child knows that much instinctively. Maybe I should just let that process unfold, maybe I shouldn’t try to mess with nature. Then again, Pag’s parents hadn’t messed with nature, and look what it got them: a son curled up in the dirt while a bunch of engineered superboys kicked in his ribs.

In the end, propaganda worked where empathy failed. Back then I didn’t so much think as observe, didn’t deduce so much as remember—and what I remembered was a thousand inspirational stories lauding anyone who ever stuck up for the underdog.

So I picked up a rock the size of my fist and hit two of Pag’s assailants across the backs of their heads before anyone even knew I was in the game.

A third, turning to face the new threat, took a blow to the face that audibly crunched the bones of his cheek. I remember wondering why I didn’t take any satisfaction from that sound, why it meant nothing beyond the fact I had one less opponent to worry about.

The rest of them ran at the sight of blood. One of the braver promised me I was dead, shouted Fucking zombie! over his shoulder as he disappeared around the corner.

Three decades it took, to see the irony in that remark.

Two of the enemy twitched at my feet. I kicked one in the head until it stopped moving, turned to the other. Something grabbed my arm and I swung without thinking, without looking until Pag yelped and ducked out of reach.

Oh, I said. Sorry.

One thing lay motionless. The other moaned and held its head and curled up in a ball.

"Oh shit, Pag panted. Blood coursed unheeded from his nose and splattered down his shirt. His cheek was turning blue and yellow. Oh shit oh shit oh shit…"

I thought of something to say. You all right?

"Oh shit, you— I mean, you never… He wiped his mouth. Blood smeared the back of his hand. Oh man, are we in trouble."

They started it.

"Yeah, but you— I mean, look at them!"

The moaning thing was crawling away on all fours. I wondered how long it would be before it found reinforcements. I wondered if I should kill it before then.

"You’da never done that before," Pag said.

Before the operation, he meant.

I actually did feel something then—faint, distant, but unmistakable. I felt angry. "They started—"

Pag backed away, eyes wide. "What are you doing? Put that down!"

I’d raised my fists. I didn’t remember doing that. I unclenched them. It took a while. I had to look at my hands very hard for a long, long time.

The rock dropped to the ground, blood-slick and glistening.

I was trying to help. I didn’t understand why he couldn’t see that.

You’re, you’re not the same, Pag said from a safe distance. "You’re not even Siri anymore."

I am too. Don’t be a fuckwad.

They cut out your brain!

Only half. For the ep—

"I know, for the epilepsy! You think I don’t know? But you were in that half—or, like, part of you was… He struggled with the words, with the concept behind them. And now you’re different. It’s like, your mom and dad murdered you—"

My mom and dad, I said, suddenly quiet, "saved my life. I would have died."

"I think you did die, said my best and only friend. I think Siri died, they scooped him out and threw him away and you’re some whole other kid that just, just grew back out of what was left. You’re not the same. Ever since. You’re not the same."

I still don’t know if Pag really knew what he was saying. Maybe his mother had just pulled the plug on whatever game he’d been wired into for the previous eighteen hours, forced him outside for some fresh air. Maybe, after fighting pod people in gamespace, he couldn’t help but see them everywhere. Maybe.

But you could make a case for what he said. I do remember Helen telling me (and telling me) how difficult it was to adjust. Like you had a whole new personality, she said. And why not? There’s a reason they call it radical hemispherectomy: half the brain thrown out with yesterday’s krill, the remaining half press-ganged into double duty. Think of all the rewiring that one lonely hemisphere must have struggled with as it tried to take up the slack. It turned out okay, obviously. The brain’s a very flexible piece of meat; it took some doing, but it adapted. I adapted. Still. Think of all that must have been squeezed out, deformed, reshaped by the time the renovations were through. You could argue that I’m a different person than the one who used to occupy this body.

The grown-ups showed up eventually, of course. Medicine was bestowed, ambulances called. Parents were outraged, diplomatic volleys exchanged, but it’s tough to drum up neighborhood outrage on behalf of your injured baby when playground surveillance from three angles shows the little darling—and five of his buddies—kicking in the ribs of a disabled boy. My mother, for her part, recycled the usual complaints about problem children and absentee fathers—Dad was off again in some other hemisphere—but the dust settled pretty quickly. Pag and I even stayed friends, after a short hiatus that reminded us both of the limited social prospects open to schoolyard rejects who don’t stick together.

So I survived that and a million other childhood experiences. I grew up and I got along. I learned to fit in. I observed, recorded, derived the algorithms and mimicked appropriate behaviors. Not much of it was … heartfelt, I guess the word is. I had friends and enemies, like everyone else. I chose them by running through checklists of behaviors and circumstances compiled from years of observation.

I may have grown up distant but I grew up objective, and I have Robert Paglino to thank for that. His seminal observation set everything in motion. It led me into Synthesis, fated me to our disastrous encounter with the scramblers, spared me the worse fate befalling Earth. Or the better one, I suppose, depending on your point of view. Point of view matters: I see that now, blind, talking to myself, trapped in a coffin falling past the edge of the solar system. I see it for the first time since some beaten bloody friend on a childhood battlefield convinced me to throw my own point of view away.

He may have been wrong. I may have been. But that, that distance—that chronic sense of being an alien among your own kind—it’s not entirely a bad thing.

It came in especially handy when the real aliens came calling.

theseus

BLOOD MAKES NOISE.

—Suzanne Vega

Imagine you are Siri Keeton.

You wake in an agony of resurrection, gasping after a record-shattering bout of sleep apnea spanning one hundred forty days. You can feel your blood, syrupy with dobutamine and leuenkephalin, forcing its way through arteries shriveled by months on standby. The body inflates in painful increments: blood vessels dilate, flesh peels apart from flesh, ribs crack in your ears with sudden unaccustomed flexion. Your joints have seized up through disuse. You’re a stick man, frozen in some perverse rigor vitae.

You’d scream if you had the breath.

Vampires did this all the time, you remember. It was normal for them, it was their own unique take on resource conservation. They could have taught your kind a few things about restraint, if that absurd aversion to right angles hadn’t done them in at the dawn of civilization. Maybe they still can. They’re back now, after all—raised from the grave with the voodoo of paleogenetics, stitched together from junk genes and fossil marrow steeped in the blood of sociopaths and high-functioning autistics. One of them commands this very mission. A handful of his genes live on in your own body so it too can rise from the dead, here at the edge of interstellar space. Nobody gets past Jupiter without becoming part vampire.

The pain begins, just slightly, to recede. You fire up your inlays and access your own vitals. It’ll be long minutes before your body responds fully to motor commands, hours before it stops hurting. The pain’s an unavoidable side effect. That’s just what happens when you splice vampire subroutines into Human code. You asked about painkillers once, but nerve blocks of any kind compromise metabolic reactivation. Suck it up, soldier.

You wonder if this was how it felt for Chelsea, before the end. But that evokes a whole other kind of pain, so you block it out and concentrate on the life pushing its way back into your extremities. Suffering in silence, you check the logs for fresh telemetry.

You think: That can’t be right.

Because if it is, you’re in the wrong part of the universe. You’re not in the Kuiper Belt where you belong: you’re high above the ecliptic and deep into the Oort, the realm of long-period comets that only grace the sun every million years or so. You’ve gone interstellar, which means (you bring up the system clock) you’ve been undead for eighteen hundred days.

You’ve overslept by almost five years.

The lid of your coffin slides away. Your own cadaverous body reflects from the mirrored bulkhead opposite, a desiccated lung-fish waiting for the rains. Bladders of isotonic saline cling to its limbs like engorged antiparasites, like the opposite of leeches. You remember the needles going in just before you shut down, way back when your veins were more than dry twisted filaments of beef jerky.

Szpindel’s reflection stares back from his own pod to your immediate right. His face is as bloodless and skeletal as yours. His wide sunken eyes jiggle in their sockets as he reacquires his own links, sensory interfaces so massive that your own off-the-shelf inlays amount to shadow puppetry in comparison.

You hear coughing and the rustling of limbs just past line of sight, catch glimpses of reflected motion where the others stir at the edge of vision.

Wha… your voice is barely more than a hoarse whisper, … happ…?

Szpindel works his jaw. Bone cracks audibly.

… Sssuckered, he hisses.

You haven’t even met the aliens yet, and already they’re running rings around you.

So we dragged ourselves back from the dead: five part-time cadavers, naked, emaciated, barely able to move even in zero g. We emerged from our coffins like premature moths ripped from their cocoons, still half-grub. We were alone and off course and utterly helpless, and it took a conscious effort to remember: They would never have risked our lives if we hadn’t been essential.

Morning, commissar. Isaac Szpindel reached one trembling, insensate hand for the feedback gloves at the base of his pod. Just past him, Susan James was curled into a loose fetal ball, murmuring to herselves. Only Amanda Bates, already dressed and cycling through a sequence of bone-cracking isometrics, possessed anything approaching mobility. Every now and then she tried bouncing a rubber ball off the bulkhead; but not even she was up to catching it on the rebound yet.

The journey had melted us down to a common archetype. James’s round cheeks and hips; Szpindel’s high forehead and lumpy, lanky chassis—even the enhanced carboplatinum brick shit house that Bates used for a body—all had shriveled to the same desiccated collection of sticks and bones. Even our hair seemed to have become strangely discolored during the voyage, although I knew that was impossible. More likely it was just filtering the pallor of the skin beneath. Still. The pre-dead James had been dirty blond, Szpindel’s hair had been almost dark enough to call black, but the stuff floating from their scalps looked the same dull kelpy brown to me now. Bates kept her head shaved, but even her eyebrows weren’t as rusty as I remembered them.

We’d revert to our old selves soon enough. Just add water. For now, though, the old slur was freshly relevant: The Undead really did all look the same, if you didn’t know how to look.

If you did, of course—if you forgot appearance and watched for motion, ignored meat and studied topology—you’d never mistake one for another. Every facial tic was a data point, every conversational pause spoke volumes more than the words to either side. I could see James’s personae shatter and coalesce in the flutter of an eyelash. Szpindel’s unspoken distrust of Amanda Bates shouted from the corner of his smile. Every twitch of the phenotype cried aloud to anyone who knew the language.

Where’s— James croaked, coughed, waved one spindly arm at Sarasti’s empty coffin gaping at the end of the row.

Szpindel’s lips cracked in a small rictus. Gone back to Fab, eh? Getting the ship to build some dirt to lie on.

Probably communing with the Captain. Bates breathed louder than she spoke, a dry rustle from pipes still getting reacquainted with the idea of respiration.

James again: Could do that up here.

Could take a dump up here, too, Szpindel rasped. Some things you do by yourself, eh?

And some things you kept to yourself. Not many baselines felt comfortable locking stares with a vampire—Sarasti, ever courteous, tended to avoid eye contact for exactly that reason—but there were other surfaces to his topology, just as mammalian and just as readable. If he had withdrawn from public view, maybe I was the reason. Maybe he was keeping secrets.

After all, Theseus damn well was.

She’d taken us a good fifteen AUs toward our destination before something scared her off course. Then she’d skidded north like a startled cat and started climbing: a wild high three-g burn off the ecliptic, thirteen hundred tonnes of momentum bucking against Newton’s first. She’d emptied her Penn tanks, bled dry her substrate mass, squandered a hundred forty days’ of fuel in hours. Then a long cold coast through the abyss, years of stingy accounting, the thrust of every antiproton weighed against the drag of sieving it from the void. Teleportation isn’t magic: the Icarus stream couldn’t send us the actual antimatter it made, only the quantum specs. Theseus had to filterfeed the raw material from space, one ion at a time. For long dark years she’d made do on pure inertia, hording every swallowed atom. Then a flip; ionizing lasers strafing the space ahead; a ramscoop thrown wide in a hard brake. The weight of a trillion trillion protons slowed her down and refilled her gut and flattened us all over again. Theseus had burned relentlessly until almost the moment of our resurrection.

It was easy enough to retrace those steps; our course was there in ConSensus for anyone to see. Exactly why the ship had blazed that trail was another matter. Doubtless it would all come out during the post-rez briefing. We were hardly the first vessel to travel under the cloak of sealed orders, and if there’d been a pressing need to know by now we’d have known by now. Still, I wondered who had locked out the Comm logs. Mission Control, maybe. Or Sarasti. Or Theseus herself, for that matter. It was easy to forget the Quantical AI at the heart of our ship. It stayed so discreetly in the background, nurtured and carried us and permeated our existence like an unobtrusive god; but like God, it never took your calls.

Sarasti was the official intermediary. When the ship did speak, it spoke to him—and Sarasti called it Captain.

So did we all.

He’d given us four hours to come back. It took more than three just to get me out of the crypt. By then my brain was at least firing on most of its synapses, although my body—still sucking fluids like a thirsty sponge—continued to ache with every movement. I swapped out drained electrolyte bags for fresh ones and headed aft.

Fifteen minutes to spin-up. Fifty to the post-resurrection briefing. Just enough time for those who preferred gravity-bound sleep to haul their personal effects into the drum and stake out their allotted 4.4 square meters of floor space.

Gravity—or any centripetal facsimile thereof—did not appeal to me. I set up my own tent in zero g and as far to stern as possible, nuzzling the forward wall of the starboard shuttle tube. The tent inflated like an abscess on Theseus’s spine, a little climate-controlled bubble of atmosphere in the dark cavernous vacuum beneath the ship’s carapace. My own effects were minimal; it took all of thirty seconds to stick them to the wall, and another thirty to program the tent’s environment.

Afterward I went for a hike. After five years, I needed the exercise.

Stern was closest, so I started there, at the shielding that separated payload from propulsion. A single sealed hatch blistered the aft bulkhead dead center. Behind it, a service tunnel wormed back through machinery best left untouched by Human hands. The fat superconducting torus of the ramscoop ring; the antennae fan behind it, unwound now into an indestructible soap bubble big enough to shroud a city, its face turned sunward to catch the faint quantum sparkle of the Icarus antimatter stream. More shielding behind that; then the telematter reactor, where raw hydrogen and refined information conjured fire three hundred times hotter than the sun’s. I knew the incantations, of course—antimatter cracking and deconstruction, the teleportation of quantum serial numbers—but it was still magic to me, how we’d come so far so fast. It would have been magic to anyone.

Except Sarasti, maybe.

Around me, the same magic worked at cooler temperatures and to less volatile ends: a small riot of chutes and dispensers crowded the bulkhead on all sides. A few of those openings would choke on my fist: one or two could swallow me whole. Theseus’s fabrication plant could build everything from cutlery to cockpits. Give it a big enough matter stockpile and it could have even built another Theseus, albeit in many small pieces and over a very long time. Some wondered if it could build another crew as well, although we’d all been assured that was impossible. Not even these machines had fine enough fingers to reconstruct a few trillion synapses in the space of a Human skull. Not yet, anyway.

I believed it. They would never have shipped us out fully assembled if there’d been a cheaper alternative.

I faced forward. Putting the back of my head against that sealed hatch I could see almost to Theseus’s bow, an uninterrupted line of sight extending to a tiny dark bull’s-eye thirty meters ahead. It was like staring at a great textured target in shades of white and gray: concentric circles, hatches centered within bulkheads one behind another, perfectly aligned. Every one stood open, in nonchalant defiance of a previous generation’s safety codes. We could keep them closed if we wanted to, if it made us feel safer. That was all it would do, though; it wouldn’t improve our empirical odds one whit. In the event of trouble those hatches would slam shut long milliseconds before Human senses could even make sense of an alarm. They weren’t even computer-controlled. Theseus’s body parts had

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I picked Blindsight up thinking I'd be reading an immersive sci-fi story. At least I got the immersive part right. I guess it is, technically, also a sci-fi story in so much that the plot takes place in space, but labelling this book as sci-fi would be doing it a disservice.This really is a heavy book, and keeping up with it is tough. Normally I put this down to lazy/pretentious writing and/or bad storytelling, but in this case it turns out to be more of a mutual agreement between the book and the reader. Yes, you have to struggle to get your head around it, but once your head is around it you realise that the struggle really was the only way to get where the book needed you to be. There is no black or white in this book, no simple characters, no easy answers. The characters are a collection of beings who are all very different, not only from each other, but also from what they once were, and what others may think they should be. The reader only ever sees these characters through the eyes of the narrator, Siri, who should in theory be the most reliable storyteller available. But is he?So many things are explored in this book, and there are trains of thought that are ethically, emotionally and (for me at least) intellectually challenging. Several times I had to re-read segments, not because I had missed something, but because I just hadn't understood the point or the impact of what I just read. And when I did finally understand, that didn't always make me less confused or unsure of what was going on. This is a book that will keep you guessing and keep you thinking, not only about what is happening in the book, but also about things that go beyond the book itself.In the end I have no idea whether I'd call Blindsight an inaccessible sci-fi story, or a somewhat accessible work of philosophy. I'm also not sure whether I liked it, or whether I loved it. The sci-fi in this book is solid, but is overshadowed by the great number of thought-inspiring avenues this book ventures into. I can't help but think I might have liked to go a bit further down some of these avenues, not to see them be resolved, but just to explore them a bit more. On the other hand, it's possible that the book very consciously stopped just short of where I would have liked it to go, and instead of "simply" being able to think about things, I also have to continue guessing as to what exactly the author wanted to make me think about.It feels wrong to say that I enjoyed this book, but I'm very happy to have read it. The feeling Blindsight gave me is comparable to that of working on a very complex problem: solving it can be frustrating, but once it's solved I feel great. Having finished this book I feel like I've almost worked through most of the problem, but without the satisfaction of having resolved it.Which, considering the book itself, seems about right.

Rating: 5

“I am the bridge between the bleeding edge and the dead center. I stand between the Wizard of Oz and the man behind the curtain. I am the curtain.” In “Blindsight” by Peter Watts What if: There is only one consciousness that we all share? (Universal Consciousness) What if: People are caught in the illusion of separation? (Encouraged by the limitations of the five senses) What if: Fear and insecurity give rise to the need to think of ourselves as the creators of our consciousness? (Perhaps we tune into consciousness like a radio tunes into a station). "Consciousness" is body-mind. It is implied in the very meaning of the word "consciousness", the "con-" or "com-" signifying "together" or "altogether". What this "together" refers to is the senses and sense impressions. Body-mind is sensate consciousness, and is called therefore "mortal self in time" or "ego-nature". It is particularistic and therefore associated with "point-of-view" or perspectivising consciousness, like a searchlight or the beam of a flashlight stuck in one direction. This, and its self-understanding, is reflected in the famous symbol of the Enlightenment of a pyramid surmounted by the all-seeing eye such as symbolised still on the Great Seal of the United States, but is called by Blake "Single Vision & Newtons sleep" or "Urizen" or Urizenic Man. This is the "point-of-view" consciousness structure and is typically what we call "consciousness" or "mind". It is the perspectivising eye of da Vinci, but it is sensate. To be stuck in sensate consciousness is the human condition of narcissism. There is yet the awareness "before", "behind", "beyond", or "beneath", or implicit or tacit or however you want to describe it. The body consciousness, or mind, is only a function of the greater awareness. It is not sensate and is not dependent upon the body organisation for its function. By contrast with "point-of-view", it is "overview". In contrast to particularism, it is holistic, and perceives wholes rather than parts, and is often characterised as "oceanic feeling" or "oceanic awareness" and with non-locality. It is the “itself” that is referenced in the Zen Koan "show me your face before you were born". It is called by the neurologist Iain McGilchrist, "the Master", while the body-mind or body-consciousness, which is point-of-view and ego-nature, is called "Emissary". In those terms, the so-called "measurement problem" in physics is associated with the consciousness, which is body-mind, while the issue of "non-locality" (or synchronous effect or transluminal effect) is associated with the Awareness. In traditional Hermetic philosophy (alchemy), the body-mind was called "lead", and the awareness was called "gold". And the idea was to transmute the former into the latter through certain exercises, performances, or operations of a symbolic or metaphorical nature. Most scientists explicitly abandoned Cartesian Dualism centuries ago. But as John Searle pointed out 25 years ago, most of them still implicitly accept a Cartesian distinction and are hung up on trying reconcile two things are not two. So materialists tend to separate the world into two kinds of phenomena and assign one of them to reality and the other to illusion. When we eliminate the ontological difference that is implied in this account, things become a lot clearer. Similarly for forms of idealism. Consciousness is subjective in exactly the same way that digestion is. The nutrients in the food we eat are only available to us because the processes that extract them are internal to our bodies. Similarly the brain is internal to us and thus its processes are only directly accessible to us. The confusion about consciousness arises from two sources. The crypto-Cartesianism that still prevails and see mental and physical phenomena as ontologically different when in fact they are only epistemologically different. The problem of materialism is that it ignores the reality of structure. Clearly, the universe is made of one kind of stuff, but that stuff is made into a load of different things with many layers of complexity, with each layer displaying emergent properties. The only way to deal with this is to accept structure anti-reductionism alongside substance reductionism. In other words, structure is real. The second source is the insistence on dealing with conscious states in the abstract form "consciousness". Of course we are still arguing about the features of this abstraction. We have the same problem with all abstractions. Digestion becomes incomprehensible if we treat it as an abstraction as well. Conscious states are defined by David Chalmers as easy problems. His Hard Problem simply doesn't exist because it’s based on an abstraction mistaken for an entity. There is no "consciousness" there is only a sequence of conscious states. And these are wholly generated by the brain - whose substance can be reduced, but whose structure cannot. Searle also showed how we can have epistemically objective knowledge of ontologically subjective domains. The value of money is entirely subjective, for example, but objectively to anyone versed in European money, a 5€ counts as money of a certain value. This is an epistemically objective fact that has no basis in reality, only in the collective intentionality of people who use European money. Conscious states are ontologically subjective, but this does not preclude us from having epistemically objective knowledge about them. These are problems for which there have been solutions available for a generation. The solutions are by no means simple, I'm just referencing the main ideas here, and the resulting philosophy although largely settled is far more open to possibility, changed, and the unexpected that any form of scientific materialism. The trouble is that philosophers are more interested in arguments than in solutions. If they solve problems then they are out of a job, so they continue to generate arguments. Douglas Adams summed this up very nicely when he lampooned them in The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. The conceptual impasse of Watts really only arises because he refuses to abandon Descartes. That's the first step to a better worldview. “Blindsight” was, for me, equal parts brilliance and frustration. Watts obviously spent a huge amount of time with his investigation, and brings these details together relatively seamlessly SF-wise (which is no mean feat with so much crap being published in the SF area nowadays), but the overarching theme (consciousness is, evolutionarily speaking, epiphenomenal) left me puzzled. The tone of Watts' novel is resonant with a certain philosophical emptiness and the accuracy of his scientific extrapolation is stunning; unfortunately, the central hypotheses of the book strained my credulity. In this sense, my beef may be more with the premise than the book itself, which is no fault of Watts. A requisite for consciousness is a matrix, or form, or pattern, upon which consciousness can build. Curiously that necessary maquette seems quite arbitrary, and is usually wrong. It is a genetically inherited assumption about the nature of reality. But once encumbered with that genetically-installed assumption, there is no pathway to an intellectual breakthrough. To recap, an individual’s consciousness is simply one of the many Brain Operating Systems, based upon genetically-installed assumptions about the nature of reality. And is usually, and always wrong. The free book on the internet explaining it all runs to nearly a million words. It is tough going for those not familiar with the problems, and involves learning new concepts. The problem of consciousness is mostly down to a semantic error in the use of the word 'conscious'. If someone is hit over the head and is knocked out they may on recovering announce that they are now 'conscious'. It is clear that that's an empirical statement with a clear biological meaning. Descartes introduced an error in separating mind from body and gave rise to use of the word 'conscious' in a completely different (and I would argue meaningless) sense. So we have discussions about whether advances in AI will produce consciousness - utter nonsense of course, you might as well be arguing about whether a robot can have a pulse. The word conscious in this sense doesn't have a meaning. Bottom-line: “Blindsight” is a work of Hard SF of the highest caliber worthy of the capital H (even with its flaws). Those who lament the lack of hard sf being published (especially deep, broad, quality, hard SF) in the last few years will find sweet relief here. SF = Speculative Fiction.

Rating: 4

Peter Watts is one of the more brilliant living science fiction authors, and "Blindsight" is an excellent addition to his work. This book has one of the more interesting takes on first contact with alien life I have read in a while, as well as quite a few interesting things to say on the topic on sentience.

Rating: 5

I'm not a big hard sci-fi fan. I usually avoid it. Much of the jargon is over my head and the characters are usually kind of in the background and not very deep. I picked this up on audio thinking that the blurb sounded interesting - vampires and sci-fi sounded like it was either going to be great or crash horribly. So I was pleasantly surprised by some of the deep characterization in this one and also that I liked the vampire. It really is amazing how intelligent some of these writers are. There were a number of different categories that Mr. Watts seems to be highly knowledgeable in and at least half the time I understood him with my lowly bachelors in computer information systems. That's not a bad ratio compared to some of the other hard sci-fi I've read in the past.I do have to say I was left lost on a couple of things and even did some googling to get more closure. My wife, who read this book at the same time (on audio also) is now listening to the 2nd book so I'm hoping she'll have some answers for me.

Rating: 3

Each generation has to re-tackle the major themes of science fiction anew, because the human world that aliens contact is changing all the time. You have but to look at, say, David Brin's 'Forge of God' to see that it was a situation where aliens were contacting the Earth of the mid- to late 1980s. Even when the first contact is set in the future, our view of that future hinges on how we view that future based on the concerns and emergent technologies of our own day. Arthur C. Clarke's '2001' was set in a very 1960s vision of a Big Science power block future. And the same applies to 'Blindsight'.But there is so much more to 'Blindsight' than just first contact with aliens. The world Peter Watts has built (his afterword to the novel seems to hint that there are some connections with the world of an earlier trilogy of his, 'Rifters') is way in advance of ours in terms of genetic manipulation, personality restructuring, space colonisation and virtual worlds. Oh, and Watts has found a use for matter transmission that is restricted to sending single sub-atomic particles from a to b.Having said that, Watts' Earth is only really sketched through the eyes of his characters; and we see comparatively little of it, mainly in passing. That's not really the point. And the aliens remain a puzzle, right up to the end where their belligerence is laid bare for all to see. And that is how it should be. Alien life is going to turn out to be more unknowable than we can imagine; Peter Watts gives us some pointers towards that.But 'Blindsight' isn't even really a novel about aliens. Rather, he takes a group of characters from our world on a journey to find aliens who were responsible for manifesting an encounter with the unknown on Earth, the sudden appearance of 62,000 alien probes that burn up in Earth's atmosphere and in that short time very possibly found out much more about us than we did about them. The crew that is sent to try to find the beings responsible for that act is comprised of a number of individuals, all of whom are in some way or another damaged; the bulk of the novel is taken up with exploring those personalities and finding (for the most part) the humanity limping along inside the, even though many readers might reject those personalities as barely human. There are a couple of exceptions - the extinct evolutionary line of human vampires, which disappeared way back in our prehistory, have been genetically re-engineered back for their predator's skills in organisation and strategy. 'Human' hardly describes them (most of the time).In the end, this is hardly a novel of first contact; rather, it's about us, about humanity at its weakest, when we are so damaged as to hardly seem human for one reason or another; and how, despite that, we are still human despite everything. Along the way, we have to get to grips with some serious science (as someone once said of another novel from another hand, "this isn't just Hard Science Fiction, it's bl**dy DIFFICULT science fiction!"). And then, just when you've resigned yourself to a long critique of the human condition, the action roars back with a vengeance - I had to read the last fifty pages or so in a couple of fairly breathless sittings because the story pulled me along. And all the science stuff fell into place, because it is important.Anyone who thinks science fiction is merely escapist adventure needs to read this book.

Rating: 5

This was is a challenging book to get into because of the technical jargon. But the story is very interesting, and the main characters and aliens are so refreshingly unique. I will definitely return to it again someday for rereading.

Rating: 4

The book reads like an essay in cognitive science. Midway through it I started to feel that the author had nearly the same problem as the narrator: a failure to feel empathy for his characters.

Rating: 2

Most unsettling book I've read this year.

Rating: 5

I've divided this review into two parts - first describes the literary qualities - story, language, atmosphere, etc. The second one is about the ideas that are to a degree related to the story but also very strong on its own. Feel free to weight each of those parts differently and therefore arrive at your own rating.

The literary qualities
Nothing really interesting is going on in this department, its average at best. Maybe even bellow the average. The problem is not in the story - its really good, thought-out, without any clunky parts, but nearly everything else is.. alien to the standard experience, which does not necessarily means wrong but it makes it really hard to delve into the story and into the reading flow. In points:
- first 1/3, maybe even more, is confusing, rather boring and not making much sense
- there is something wrong with the form the book is written it, its not really a book that you can get immersed in, that puts you in the flow and allows you to get completely overwhelmed with it. It feels more like a literature of fact, like a transcript of a court session or something like that.
- I've found the technical jargon of the spaceship quite overwhelming, but i suppose that is because English is not my first language.
To sum it up I've been missing all the enjoyment of a good book in this one, from the literary side. It simply felt as if the language, story, characters were just a vehicle to convey all the points, all the information author wanted to.

The data
Function over form, that's what this book evokes in me. Peter Watts has some very interesting views on the human nature, consciousness, evolution, sociobiology etc., all more-or-less based in scientific research and they absolutely dominate every other aspect of the book. Both story and characters are simply proprieties to demonstrate these views and to present all the information in a way that is more comprehensible to us humans. Our brains were designed in such a way that it is much easier to comprehend information in a form of a story - we are primed for stories in every possible way. Our lives are stories we create for ourselves, our goals and desires are to a large degree created by the stories that circulate in the society and so on. Its much more cognitively taxing to think in the abstract terms. And it works, when the intended information and concepts begin to appear in the story everything gets more much interesting and the last ~100 pages are a brutal storm of incredible ideas well worth it. I was already interested in the topics that Watts covers here but he managed to make everything much more concrete, more pronounced and he stirred my interest, so I am more likely to pursue those information.

Rating: 4

This is very good sci-fi.Really made me question the meaning of consciousness and sentience in a way that I'm still doing.Definitely a 'big ideas' book, not a plot and characters one, though they weren't distracting.atmospheric. creepy.

Rating: 5

Rather hard scifi (considering it's a novel about first contact featuring vampires in space, um) that - as good scifi should - asks difficult questions about humanity, consciousness and emotion.I found this interesting and thought-provoking rather than enjoyable, but am struggling to write a review that doesn't turn into one of several essays. Good brain food; don't expect much in the way of sustenance for the heart.

Rating: 3

Really interesting, chock full of ideologies, debates, and fascinating new technologies. It's great scifi. The only problem is that I completely disagree with the main premise of the book, which turns out to be that sentience is in fact a *problem* rather than Our Specialness. It's a cool twist to the usual first contact with alien life scenario, but unfortunately it makes no sense to me. I just don't get it. Yeah, a consciousness means that you second guess decisions and are slower to make them, so from an evolutionary standpoint it may not be the best ability to have. Maybe when we get into space, the very fact that we know we exist will be the death of us. I am so fine with that. If the other option is life without awareness, I don't care that it makes me less likely to survive a space battle. I thought I was arguing this against Watts until near the very end of the book, and even then I'm not sure what his stance on the issue is. If you're looking for a mind fuck, go for this novel.

Rating: 4

Wanted to give it 5 stars but it wasn't always easy to follow the events in the book. This IS hard science fiction and not for the faint of heart. I'll definately read Watts next book. There just aren't enough sci fi writers out there willing to push the envelope.

Rating: 4

Forget 2001 and its progeny, this is *the* novel about alien contact. Both the aliens *and* the humans depicted in it seem both totally realistic but are 'alien' in different ways. It is not an easy read, but it is a rewarding one...

Rating: 5

I really liked this book. Some of the ideas in it still have me thinking.

Rating: 5

This messed with my mind. The plot's okay, the characters are okay, but the main selling point here is the weirdness, and this book has plenty. It will make you think, and then it will make you think about thinking.

Rating: 5

"Blindsight" is an idea book. Nearly all of its science- the science that really matters- is biology, with a special emphasis on neurology. This is unusual for a book set in space, where plasma cannons, self-replicating attack nanoswarms, or the like are more typically the technological focus. Blindsight is also unusual in having powerful computers/AI in the setting that essentially make no difference to the plot. (This is no Vernor Vinge space story, as much as it may superficially resemble one!) It is a book about humans, aliens, and what lies in between.While "Blindsight" has many good ideas, it has one Big Idea on which the book is founded. You don't recognize the nature of this idea, as well as the beautiful aptness of the book's title, until quite late into the work. The idea is powerful and presents a scary possible view of the cosmos that I hadn't heard before.Unfortunately, I think the book's fundamentals like plot and character development aren't up to the level of the book's science or philosophical ideas. This is most apparent after the Big Idea comes out, when the book wraps up rather abruptly, with a muddied view of events, and without exploring some of the consequences of and challenges to the Big Idea. I feel like Watts' writing could use greater clarity- sometimes obscurity in writing is needed to help the reader discover ideas or to keep the aliens mysterious, but Watts over-uses obscuring language and writing from limited points of view, so that even things that have no literary purpose to be unclear can be so.Still, I recommend it, particularly for fans of neuroscience and hard SF, as well as for folks who like first contact stories. This book blows the last first contact story I read, The Mote in God's Eye, out of the water.

Rating: 5

This book suffered in my estimation because I read it in close proximity to Solaris, a book that is a vastly superior depiction of contact between humanity and an alien. That being said, Blindsight is a solid work of science fiction, and if I hadn't followed it up with what is perhaps the best depiction of otherness the genre has ever produced, I would have been impressed with how different and alien the aliens of Blindsight are. It only suffers slightly from too many ideas thrown in to one book syndrome, and only a few of the ways humans responded to the alien presence made no sense. In this genre, that puts you solidly above average.

In response to planet earth being photographed by aliens humanity responds by sending a warship. Why a warship? Who knows. Likewise it makes little sense why the people sent on this mission take the most aggressive course of action repeatedly against what they think is a technically superior species. I just chalk it up to that being what humans do in books like this.

In the crew that humanity sends no one is fully human. One has intentionally generated multiple personality disorder, one is a cyborg (am I remembering that right? It's been a few months), one has been augmented to control robots like they are part of her own body, and one is a hyper intelligent vampire. The narrator has the ability to analyze things objectively without feeling emotion due to childhood brain surgery. So like I said, there are a whole lot of ideas bouncing around here at the same time. It would have been nice to have at least one fully human character in the narrative to see how your average human would respond to the situations that occur, but Blindsight seemingly eschews the idea of science fiction as a way to explore the human condition in favor of cramming in lots of ideas about transhumanism.

There are some cool ideas here, like the one about how all the signals humanity sends out into the universe could be interpreted as an attack by aliens that think and behave differently from ourselves, but this book didn't feel like a complete work. Things happen, sometimes for good reasons and sometimes just because, and then it ends. Like I said, it's solid. Read Solaris, then read a bunch more Lem, then wait a couple of months, then if you still want more stories of alien contact then maybe give Blindsight a try.

Rating: 3

Absolutely magnificent. This book reminds me a little bit of Aronofsky's films (Requiem for a Dream, Pi, Black Swan) but with its own very sci-fi and unique twist. I can't remotely do it justice without spoiling the premise of the book outright, so I'll say this. Go read it already, dammit!

If this book doesn't win at least half the awards in existence, I'll be very disappointed. In the awards committees.

Rating: 5

Wow! This is going to be a different kind of review for me. I can honestly say I'm not sure I understand what happened in this book, but I kept reading because I felt some underlying "thing" driving me to the end.

First, the problems:

I never felt grounded in Watts' world. Terms to describe the society were never explained. I guess he thought I was smarter than I am? This was almost as annoying as when authors explain everything as if I were stupid. Here is another example where there is a fine line marking how we gauge the intelligence of our readers. (I do read hard sci fi and enjoy it. The trick is giving me just enough info to follow the science--I don't feel like I got it here).
I could never picture any of the characters. Not physically anyway.
The main character and narrator had half of his brain removed as a child and it happened to be the side that processed emotions. Thus I never connected emotionally with the MC. Or anyone else for that matter.

So why did I keep reading to the end?

The plot was compelling enough that I just had to know what the heck was going on and I hoped there would eventually be some kind of explanation I could understand. Here, let's try this.

What I think might have happened in the book (possible spoilers, but I'm not sure):
Siri (MC) had seizures as a child, so his parents had half of his brain cut out and replaced with inlays to fix it. Society (this is on earth) had developed to a point where most people were full of wiring and electrical gadgets built in that the was normal.

To be useful, you specialized in specific inlays or upgrades. If you didn't want to be useful you just plugged your brain into Heaven to create your own realities while your body rotted in a vault. (I wish more of THIS had been discussed.)

Anyway, Siri was the synthesizer--meaning he gathered info through observation of "topography" or body language, compiled it and sent it back to whoever hired him. He doesn't even have to speak the language of those involved he is so good at this.

So, there is a threat and he's sent out into space with a small crew to do something. None of them really know what. They wake up from cryosleep and spend most of the book observing this thing. The ongoing question boils down to sentience versus intelligence. What is the norm of the universe?

People and aliens die. The vampire broods, spazzes out, is possessed by the ship (if he was ever his own person to begin with is debatable). Everyone is played. Heaven is unplugged by radicals. In the end, Siri goes crazy or becomes human again. The end.

Oh, and the title? Blindsight has something to do with your brain stem. Its the part of you that sees what the rest of your brain doesn't believe is possible. That shadowy movement you catch in the corner of your vision that disappears when you focus on it kind of thing.

Rating: 2

Somehow, this book wasn't quite as good as it should have been, and I'm not sure what was missing. The writing is excellent. The book vacillates between being hilariously funny and incredibly disturbing. It is one of the creepiest books I have ever read (a lot of it reminded me of the "Silence in the Library" Doctor Who episodes), so it is good that there is a lot of humor to ease the tension. It is also very suspenseful.The characters are all quirky, but interesting, and vividly portrayed.The book explores what it means to be an individual. The (unreliable) narrator has only half a brain, and the rest of his brain is manmade. People can go to "Heaven" - a place where their consciousness is decorporealized and they can exist independently of their bodies. Another character has multiple personalities - four minds in one body. Other characters are grafted to machines, so that their senses are mediated by machinery. The vampire commander of the mission can plug his brain directly into the ship's computer. And the aliens are even weirder. The book can be difficult, because there are a lot of scenes where the reader doesn't really understand what is going on. Conversations between characters can be especially hard, because they will frequently end the conversation just before the big revelation, and it is implied that the reader should be able to figure it out, and often I couldn't.I read this book out loud, and it should have spawned a lot of great conversations with the person I read it to. (It isn't a very good book for reading out loud - it's hard for the listener to follow what's happening.) Yet somehow, other than "what just happened?" this book didn't generate conversations. There are so many fascinating concepts in this book, particularly about consciousness/sentience and what it means to be human... yet somehow they are explored in a way that doesn't leave room for the readers to do any of their own exploring.

Rating: 4

Delightfully woven prose testing the boundaries of the human condition while maintaining a flowing narrative and succulant plot.

Rating: 5

Each time I have tried to describe this book to someone I end up making it sound silly when it's actually amazing.

Rating: 5

I can't fault his cleverness in setting up the plot, but the style of writing is not really for me. I am having a hard time figuring out who these characters are, and the dialogue and prose seem kind of strained, making it hard for me to read. I have noticed this in other stories by Watts as well. I've gotten a little over halfway through and I think it's time to give up on this.

Rating: 2

I like it, but I think it needs a second reading. The only thing that disappointed me is that I was left with the feeling that nothing much actually happened in the book. It's quite slow moving but it is very philosophical and not boring. I liked all the characters. They are all very original, but I am always a bit put off if the people are too smart, too strong or do everything perfectly. Seems too inhuman somehow. The aliens were quite amazing really alien! All in all, quite impressive reading.

Rating: 5

The first of two recent novels whose plot features a genetically re-engineered subspecies of human, the other being Richard K. Morgan's "Thirteen". Watts book, which appears to be half of a longer work, examines the notion that sentience, self-consciousness, is not necessary to the survival of intelligent life, through an alien encounter/first contact story featuring a crew of differently abled humans captained by a re-created vampire.

Rating: 4

Okay, I gave this book TWO second chances because I had heard great things about it, but I eventually gave up.

It's certainly a gutsy choice to have a person with no empathy as your main character, but it's pretty hard to get readers to care about someone who has only a vaguely intellectual interest in other people. Especially if the story is told in the first person by this character.
So as a result, we know that one guy is a vampire, and another guy has some kind of prosthetic senses, and there's a military woman and another woman with a multiple personality. We don't really get to know much else about them, or at least not by page 183.

The other problem I had with this book was that it was hard to picture exactly where everyone was and what they were doing in whatever scene. Most of the action takes place in a spaceship, and you never get a clear idea of how it's set up, plus there are all these sort of virtual-reality things going on at the same time, and the vampire guy tends to hide out in his room and you don't really know where that is, and I think there are supposed to be some kind of tents that the people live in? On a spaceship? I don't know.

Anyway, it's not that a book has to be easy to read; I like books that are complicated, but I think it's the mark of a good writer that you shouldn't have to be wondering where the aft thruster maintenance room is instead of just being engrossed in the story.

Rating: 2

Wow. This was a tough one. It was a very good hard sf book that I don't think I'll be coming back to anytime soon. As others have said: "abandon hope all ye who enter here." A well written, excruciating exploration of the human "problem" where it turns out that it really is a problem. How do you take a book whose central premise seems to be that the development of self-awareness in human evolution was a wrong turn that wasn't meant to happen at all? That it was in fact contrary to the entire development of intelligence throughout the rest of the universe that only occurred due to a fluke in the evolution of a competing species? Talk about being alone in an uncaring reality. Watts manages to take Lovecraft's primary hobby horse and make it work in a way that is truly frightening in its utter nihilism. This isn't a scary universe because Watts tells us so (as it would have been had Lovecraft wrote the tale), it's scary because he shows us so.

Our primary filter for information is Siri Keeton, a man with literally only half a brain. Due to a childhood trauma he was essentially lobotomized and given computer processors to make up for what was removed. Siri obviously lost a lot during the process, but "gained" the ability to be the ultimate "Chinese Room" for humanity...for all that was worth. His whole life he has been trying to understand even 'baseline' humans and his facility with doing so, with looking at the human enigma on the surface and from the outside, and parsing it correctly has led him to become a professional conduit between these baseline humans and the posthuman entities they have created and made to work for them. He is a uniquely appropriate narrator for this tale as his very mode of existence showcases Watts' entire argument in microcosm; and interestingly his entire development as a character is the reverse of the development of the story and even of the universe itself. Siri's story starts and ends as a very lonely one, but for very different reasons.

Another fascinating element of the tale is the fairly unique use of vampires as an off-shoot sub-species of humanity originally destroyed due to humanity's self-awareness and then brought back by high science to be our servants. These are probably the most frightening vampires I've yet come across in fiction, not only because of the pseudo-scientific "plausibility", but primarily because of what we eventually discover about them in the story's conclusion.

I will say very little about "Rorschach", the alien entity with whom humanity attempts to communicate in this tale of first contact, except to say that the Lovecraftian enigma of its seeming indifference to human existence is truly chilling in its implications. Far more than any dreaming Cthulhu, Rorschach is an entity whose strangeness is truly to be feared.

All in all this was a rewarding, though deeply uncomfortable, read.

Rating: 4

I struggled through two hundred pages of this hard science fiction novel. I finally just gave up. I couldn't relate or connect to the main character. The supporting characters were also two dimensional. Some of the science was intriguing, but the prose struck me as scientific shorthand, forcing my mind to connect dots for jargon unfamiliar to it. The lone vampire character seemed like a completely random wild card element.

Rating: 2

1. This is hard sci-fi. Book contains many scientific references, that is good as you can check out these sources he used to write the book.
2. I'm not sure, but this is authors reply to vampire pulp fiction overflow. And this is the work about vampires I like the best. Actually the only one I like. Because I find that subject very uninteresting.
3. I guess you already know that Blindsight is available for free on authors webpage.
4. Do not try to add this book to abandoned/unfinished list, as it has very cool ending!

Rating: 4

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