Set in 2082, Peter Watts' Blindsight is fast-moving, hard SF that pulls readers into a futuristic world where a mind-bending alien encounter is about to unfold.
After the Firefall, all eyes are locked heavenward as a team of specialists aboard the self-piloted spaceship Theseus hurtles outbound to intercept an unknown intelligence.
I loved the attempt to describe an alien that is fundamentally /alien/. trying to find a scientific basis for having vampires in the story was... interesting. the "climax" of the novel made no sense, although in its favour, I guess that made it a surprise. the casual and incredibly pervasive misogyny was tiresome, and seems to be on the part of the author rather than just another characteristic to make the protagonist unlikable (it wasn't necessary), considering that there are relatively few slurs in the novel but four misogynistic ones, and one of those is slung by the author in his endnotes at three scientists whose work he thinks insufficiently deals with their areas of research.
part of me wants to know how the core ideas spin out in the sequels but the much bigger part of me wants to avoid anything else by this author.
The ideas are compelling, and the inclusion of recreated vampires is a weird but interesting diversion. There's no emotional core though. In some ways that's by design - the primary narrative POV is of someone who's had significant, personality-destroying psychosurgery. I found myself asking why should I care about any of this throughout.
As someone on Peter Watts' own site is quoted, "Whenever I find my will to live becoming too strong, I read Peter Watts." Reader beware.
I re-read it just recently. This book fundamentally shifted my perspective on my own humanity, and maybe not in a good way. But it did a really good job! I think it took me a few reads to really get a handle on what was happening in the story and that only made the hammer blows of its conclusion stronger.
Has a permanent space on my shelf, except my copy keeps walking out of my house because I lend it out so much.
From sociopaths to truly alien aliens, from simulating empathy to seeing without perception, from unfeeling predators to semi-sentient AI, from multiple personalities living in one brain to brains replaced and enhanced by machinery, Blindsight explores how and why experience is conscious – or not.
And it turns our most important assumption about consciousness on its head – that it's the epitome of evolutionary progress. This is ultimately the question the book poses: What if it's not? To explore it, it resurrects vampires, narrates unreliably, poses alternately as a space opera and as hard sci-fi, and is at the end completely of its own kind.
If you're into mind-expanding science fiction, this is a must read – even if it is ultimately mind-deflating. (Which I won't explain further to not spoiler anything, so please, find out yourself!)
The uncertainty of first contact, amid the uncertainty of human contact.
4 stars
Content warning
Mildly spoilery review, no details
I have only just encountered Watts's work. This book is a crashing tangle of ideas, drawing from evolutionary biology, to (most particularly) cognitive science and philosophy of mind of the late 1990s.
A ship, whose crew are all variously transhuman in diverse ways, are sent to communicate with first contact. The newcomers, however, are deeply mysterious, alien in the realest sense. The result a disorienting experience in which none of the available main characters are quite someone you can wholly empathise with, and we remain uncertain throughout of just what the encounter will involve for the crew or humanity generally.
My perception overall is this book, with its extensive references and sources section, is the kind of thing you might get if Michael Crichton wrote space opera (though perhaps more disciplined and sharper). It is jam packed with well executed ideas. Ultimately, I found it quite difficult to get through in parts simply because of just how utterly out of their depth everyone was, and how desperate and hopeless the contact mission would seem to be. I suspect this is indeed Watts's intent.
While it was nice to see the richness of the cognitive science being drawn on, my own theoretical commitments also mean that none of what is in play with regards to human cognition is really tenable though. That's a very niche complaint that most of the world won't have. A little more broadly is the easiness of the some of the evolutionary psychology though - some of which is I think a little problematic.
Overall, though, this is a very solid, well written space opera thriller, if a little grim.
This book has some interesting ideas, but I really struggled with following the storyline, but more, this felt like something from pre-1970s sci-fi, with all the white maleness that contained, and some of the 'slang', such as 'spaz' are just appalling. The book was published in 2006 and there is no excuse for including such offensive and abelist language. These things made it not a great read and I stopped half-way through.
First things first, some content warnings about the book: it contains a lot of violence, a narrator who uses ableist language and ideas repeatedly, and a sort of sensory-illusion body horror that I thought was one of the book's strong points but could be deeply disturbing for the wrong reader.
I want to like this book. It does a great job of imagining aliens who are very deeply alien and in unsettling ways. And at it's best it's a tautly narrated story of the terrifying encounter with them. It also plays some amusing games with vampire tropes, and poses interesting questions about what counts as life, sentience, intelligence, etc.
But I found some of the author's tics grating enough to really put me off. The voice is irritatingly macho-male, to the extent that it makes me, a cis man, want to yell at the author to shut up and cede …
First things first, some content warnings about the book: it contains a lot of violence, a narrator who uses ableist language and ideas repeatedly, and a sort of sensory-illusion body horror that I thought was one of the book's strong points but could be deeply disturbing for the wrong reader.
I want to like this book. It does a great job of imagining aliens who are very deeply alien and in unsettling ways. And at it's best it's a tautly narrated story of the terrifying encounter with them. It also plays some amusing games with vampire tropes, and poses interesting questions about what counts as life, sentience, intelligence, etc.
But I found some of the author's tics grating enough to really put me off. The voice is irritatingly macho-male, to the extent that it makes me, a cis man, want to yell at the author to shut up and cede the mic. In the first half there's a really clunky tendency to do foreshadowing very explicitly, which intensifies the macho storytelling feel. And the narrator is consistently casually ableist, even though there are aspects of the overall story and the narrator's life history which push back hard on the same.
I'm glad I read it, but not sure I can really recommend it.
At the end of the day, I will always be a sucker for a "small group of experts in their field go to space on a momentous mission for Earth and run into shenanigans" story, regardless of genre. To Be Taught If Fortunate, Providence, Alien... I love them all. And in that regard, Blindsight did not disappoint.
There was so much I really enjoyed about this story. The shifting perspective from present to past served as a great world building tool and character development device for Siri. I loved the character interactions and the unique character "quirks" for each of the crew (It took me a few chapters to actually realize what was going on with The Gang!). The writing was relentless with the technological terms: even from the beginning, so that took some getting used to. But the overall story was truly fascinating and kept me interested from about …
At the end of the day, I will always be a sucker for a "small group of experts in their field go to space on a momentous mission for Earth and run into shenanigans" story, regardless of genre. To Be Taught If Fortunate, Providence, Alien... I love them all. And in that regard, Blindsight did not disappoint.
There was so much I really enjoyed about this story. The shifting perspective from present to past served as a great world building tool and character development device for Siri. I loved the character interactions and the unique character "quirks" for each of the crew (It took me a few chapters to actually realize what was going on with The Gang!). The writing was relentless with the technological terms: even from the beginning, so that took some getting used to. But the overall story was truly fascinating and kept me interested from about mid way when the forward momentum started to pick up. I loved loved loved how the aliens were described and ultimately ended up being. I found it to be the most likely case of first contact for humans, and the thesis of the over arching story was brilliantly executed.
My primary complaint with this book was just how damn preachy it grew to be! Initially, these large blocks of thematic heavy content was isolated to a few character monologues. However, toward the end of the book, whole chapters seemed to be devoted to the narrator simply info dumping philosophy to the reader without clearly tying it back into the story. I started to dread these sections of the text because they frequently occurred at the height of action. This was an..... interesting structural decision.
Well, I am not sure what I just listened to but it sure was a fun ride! This 2007 Hugo nominated book tells the story of a crew sent to investigate the source of alien probes. Led by a re-animated vampire because they can think on levels unimaginable by humans, they are tasked with figuring out who the aliens are and if they are belligerent. A small crew with diverse talents, they have no idea what they are in for.
And, to be honest, I am not entirely sure what they ran into, even after listening to the book. Probably because I couldn't go back an reread some of the more confusing portions - I just kept plunging ahead! Certainly not a fault of the narrator, as T. Ryder Smith did an amazing job with this wildly literate tale.
A real treat for hard science fiction fans, as the world …
Well, I am not sure what I just listened to but it sure was a fun ride! This 2007 Hugo nominated book tells the story of a crew sent to investigate the source of alien probes. Led by a re-animated vampire because they can think on levels unimaginable by humans, they are tasked with figuring out who the aliens are and if they are belligerent. A small crew with diverse talents, they have no idea what they are in for.
And, to be honest, I am not entirely sure what they ran into, even after listening to the book. Probably because I couldn't go back an reread some of the more confusing portions - I just kept plunging ahead! Certainly not a fault of the narrator, as T. Ryder Smith did an amazing job with this wildly literate tale.
A real treat for hard science fiction fans, as the world envisioned by Peter Watts in the far future just explodes off the page. Everything from strange plagues to virtual sex are seamlessly interwoven into the story. Just amazing.
I'm going to knock it down to 4 stars only because I couldn't quite follow some of the twists and turns of the story. Not that I don't think they weren't structurally sound, I just found it hard to track. But an amazing book nonetheless and I can't wait to read the free short story (found (here) and the followup book, [b:Echopraxia|18490708|Echopraxia (Firefall, #2)|Peter Watts|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1380224957l/18490708.SX50.jpg|26174428].
1) "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."
2) "Once there were three tribes. The Optimists, whose patron saints were Drake and Sagan, believed in a universe …
1) "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."
2) "Once there were three tribes. The Optimists, whose patron saints were Drake and Sagan, believed in a universe crawling with gentle intelligence—spiritual brethren vaster and more enlightened than we, a great galactic siblinghood into whose ranks we would someday ascend. Surely, said the Optimists, space travel implies enlightenment, for it requires the control of great destructive energies. Any race which can't rise above its own brutal instincts will wipe itself out long before it learns to bridge the interstellar gulf. Across from the Optimists sat the Pessimists, who genuflected before graven images of Saint Fermi and a host of lesser lightweights. The Pessimists envisioned a lonely universe full of dead rocks and prokaryotic slime. The odds are just too low, they insisted. Too many rogues, too much radiation, too much eccentricity in too many orbits. It is a surpassing miracle that even one Earth exists; to hope for many is to abandon reason and embrace religious mania. After all, the universe is fourteen billion years old: if the galaxy were alive with intelligence, wouldn't it be here by now? Equidistant to the other two tribes sat the Historians. They didn't have too many thoughts on the probable prevalence of intelligent, spacefaring extraterrestrials–but if there are any, they said, they're not just going to be smart. They're going to be mean."
3) "This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, and keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the speech from the screams."
4) "'You think you'd be able to fight the strings? You think you'd even feel them? I could apply a transcranial magnet to your head right now and you'd raise your middle finger or wiggle your toes or kick Siri here in the sack and then swear on your sainted mother's grave that you only did it because you wanted to. You'd dance like a puppet and all the time swear you were doing it of your own free will, and that's just me, that's just some borderline OCD with a couple of magnets and an MRI helmet.' He waved at the vast unknowable void beyond the bulkhead. Shreds of mangled cigarette floated sideways in front of him. 'Do you want to guess what that can do? For all we know we've already given them Theseus' technical specs, warned them about the Icarus array, and then just decided of our own free will to forget it all.' 'We can cause those effects,' Sarasti said coolly. 'As you say. Strokes cause them. Tumors. Random accidents.' 'Random? Those were experiments, people! That was vivisection! They let you in so they could take you apart and see what made you tick and you never even knew it.' 'So what?' the vampire snapped invisibly. Something cold and hungry had edged into his voice. Human topologies shivered around the table, skittish. 'There's a blind spot in the center of your visual field,' Sarasti pointed out. 'You can't see it. You can't see the saccades in your visual timestream. Just two of the tricks you know about. Many others.' Cunningham was nodding. 'That's my whole point. Rorschach could be—' 'Not talking about case studies. Brains are survival engines, not truth detectors. If self-deception promotes fitness, the brain lies. Stops noticing— irrelevant things. Truth never matters. Only fitness. By now you don't experience the world as it exists at all. You experience a simulation built from assumptions. Shortcuts. Lies. Whole species is agnosiac by default. Rorschach does nothing to you that you don't already do to yourselves.'"
As much philosophy fiction as science fiction, the book is about the adventures of a crew of almost-humans from Earth, each with special powers, evolved or engineered, though not exactly super-heroes.
They have been sent to investigate probably hostile aliens.
As well as a struggle against beings so alien as to be almost impossible to understand, the book covers the nature of consciousness, the relationship between intelligence and consciousness, the implications of optical and similar illusions from other senses and more
Probably the most mind-blowing book I've read this year. Difficult to untangle, but riveting and suspenseful. I hope Watts continues this thought experiment on intelligence and consciousness and new ways of thinking about thinking.
I really loved it, aliens, weird humans, neuro-trivia, it has it all. And then it was pointed out to me, that a neat trick in the story makes no sense because of laws of physics. Now I'm confused, I feel like I was too lazy a listener, not paying enough attention, and, if I missed that, what else did I miss? Still, I was entertained a lot.
