Paperback, 384 pages
English language
Published March 4, 2008 by Tor Books.
Two months since the stars fell...
Two months since sixty-five thousand alien objects clenched around the Earth like a luminous fist, screaming to the heavens as the atmosphere burned them to ash. Two months since that moment of brief, bright surveillance by agents unknown.
Two months of silence while a world holds its breath.
Now some half-derelict space probe, sparking fitfully past Neptune's orbit, hears a whisper from the edge of the solar system: a faint signal sweeping the cosmos like a lighthouse beam. Whatever's out there isn't talking to us. It's talking to some distant star, perhaps. Or perhaps to something closer, something en route.
So who do you send to force introductions on an intelligence with motives unknown, maybe unknowable? Who do you send to meet the alien when the alien doesn't want to meet?
You send a linguist with multiple personalities, her brain surgically partitioned into separate, …
Two months since the stars fell...
Two months since sixty-five thousand alien objects clenched around the Earth like a luminous fist, screaming to the heavens as the atmosphere burned them to ash. Two months since that moment of brief, bright surveillance by agents unknown.
Two months of silence while a world holds its breath.
Now some half-derelict space probe, sparking fitfully past Neptune's orbit, hears a whisper from the edge of the solar system: a faint signal sweeping the cosmos like a lighthouse beam. Whatever's out there isn't talking to us. It's talking to some distant star, perhaps. Or perhaps to something closer, something en route.
So who do you send to force introductions on an intelligence with motives unknown, maybe unknowable? Who do you send to meet the alien when the alien doesn't want to meet?
You send a linguist with multiple personalities, her brain surgically partitioned into separate, sentient processing cores. You send a biologist so radically interfaced with machinery that he sees X-rays and tastes ultrasound, so compromised by grafts and splices that he no longer feels his own flesh. You send a pacifist warrior in the faint hope she won't be needed, and a fainter hope that she'll do any good if she is needed. You send a monster to command them all, an extinct hominid predator once called "vampire," recalled from the grave with the voodoo of recombinant genetics and the blood of sociopaths. And you send a synthesist—an informational topologist with half his mind gone—as an interface between here and there, a conduit through which the Dead Center might hope to understand the Bleeding Edge.
You send them all to the edge of interstellar space, praying you can trust such freaks and retrofits 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 only knew what was waiting for them....
Hard, as jargon-heavy sci-fi, as violent eldritch horrors, as our unlikable unforgiving neurodiverse crew tears apart those around them, as a philosophical conclusion about consciousness, self-awareness, and artificial intelligence. It is surprising to me that I still deeply liked it on re-read.
It had some very interesting ideas but the book style and jargon is hard to read. I had to use LLM to accompany my reading just to understand the plotline
I might do a more thorough review later, with spoilers, once I'm on my computer
I read this a while ago and re-read it. It's a challenge to read, dense with invented jargon and hard to follow just because of how weird everything is. It's probably the most nihilistic book I've ever read, and the characters are not at all sympathetic. Nevertheless, having half understood it from reading it too fast 10 years ago, it has stuck with me since then, and held up even better the second time and I'm giving it a rare 5 stars.
The first time I read it, it was more emotionally impactful - more horror than sci Fi and in ways I was not at all expecting. The second time I felt like I could at least wrap my head around it completely.
Coming back in the age of LLMs certain concepts about what …
I might do a more thorough review later, with spoilers, once I'm on my computer
I read this a while ago and re-read it. It's a challenge to read, dense with invented jargon and hard to follow just because of how weird everything is. It's probably the most nihilistic book I've ever read, and the characters are not at all sympathetic. Nevertheless, having half understood it from reading it too fast 10 years ago, it has stuck with me since then, and held up even better the second time and I'm giving it a rare 5 stars.
The first time I read it, it was more emotionally impactful - more horror than sci Fi and in ways I was not at all expecting. The second time I felt like I could at least wrap my head around it completely.
Coming back in the age of LLMs certain concepts about what intelligence and sentience actually are start seeming a lot more relevant. Some of the ways the main character is unable to relate to other people reminds me of some of the dangerous Internet subcultures that have grown prominent in the past few years. It feels alarmingly more relevant than the first time despite not being at all about any of these things.
The characters are not like conventionally sympathetic but I think you have to approach the book with a willingness to empathize with a broader range of people than most books ask you to - not in the sense of being bad people but of being people who relate to the world differently than most people depicted in fiction.
The vampire thing is unnecessary and out of place, you could have the exact same story and not call them that
Two books I've read that I would say are most similar are Annihilation and Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep (not the movie though)
Really interesting regarding self-awareness, identity and cognition as well as evolution. Especially so towards the end. Also some real surprises and tensions. Some of the ideas were obscured by unnecessarily jargon-y language or long-winded descriptions of spaceship engineering that did not help me imagine the things described. Perhaps that is part of the idea when you let the ship "jargonaut" be the narrator.
Some very interesting ideas about aliens, intelligence, and the self but not in a form I can say I actually enjoyed reading. This is probably a polarizing book.
Wow! What an experience. This book checked off some boxes for me: consciousness, transhumanism, first contact, deep dive into existential questions. But some of it went over my head, and I had a hard time following some plot points. I haven’t read the notes at the end yet, which might help.
I'm going to delay writing a full review other than to say that I really enjoyed this book and, more importantly, it has got me thinking and I'm not sure what I think yet!
