Echopraxia (Firefall)

The follow up to his 2006 "Blindsight", "Echopraxia" is yet quite a separate narrative from its predecessor. There is some connecting tissue, but this is quite a different tale, and you'd miss very little if you read it by itself.

The story is set in a triple aftermath. First contact has left humanity with species-wide existential angst; a separate set of crises have left the world (already reeling from climate apocalypse), struggling with a very science-fictiony, rather than horror, undead problem (two of them, actually); and more locally, a violent confrontation leaves the protagonist and a group of strange maybe-trans-human allies in a race across the solar system.

While "Blindsight" went outward, this book heads mostly inward, toward the sun, and a station upon which the world relies for its energy. And something's not quite right...

As with the first book, the tale here is one of disorientation. The protagonist is not able to understand or keep up with any of the other characters. While this provides the basis for exposition as he figures things out (slowly), it is mostly frustrating for us as there can be no sense of agency, just hopeless thrashing and occasionally being baled out by the much more capable and informed non-POV characters. The ideas are interesting, and often compelling, but the action is often painful, given the impossibility of agency.

It is worth it, for the ideas.

Surely the best part of this novel was the author's notes section at the back of the book where all the scientific interests that inspired Watts to write this novel are listed and explored to some degree. In the novel itself, those are probably the only worthy bits. Watts excels at creatively expressing the realized points of speculative theories and Echopraxia is a successful Hard Scifi novel in that regard. Sadly, in all other regards this story cannot compare to Blindsight. He ditched emotional connection and chose interior lecture hall and the result was unsurprisingly easy for me to ditch altogether. If you are in the mood to contemplate the scientific underpinnings of this story and would rather set aside the mushy stuff of Blindsight (or, like, literature) then you will enjoy this book very much. His creative synthesis of theory into something like a plot is dazzling for its creativity. If you want a novel full of the kinds of characters that made Blindsight so unique you might want to look elsewhere.

Much like Blindsight, this whole reading experience was pretty head scratching. Peter Watts really puts the 'hard' in hard science fiction. You have to pay meticulous attention to every sentence and detail during moments of action to maintain a grasp of what is actually happening. Paragraphs will be devoted to complicated exposition of the state of technology while narrative driving moments will be tacked on to the end of a sentence. The whole reading experience was exhausting, but that isn't anything new if you read the first book.

But with that being said, I did find this to be more comprehensible in its story and messaging than Blindsight was. The narrative was compelling and had me excited to see what would happen next. Watts is fantastic at weaving philosophy into his narrative and forces you to deeply reflect on the implications of the world he has built as well as our own world. Despite it being an exhausting read, I thoroughly enjoyed this and would recommend to science lovers and philosophy lovers, with a tentative recommendation to science fiction lovers ;)

Of roaches, bicameral, zombies, vampires--oh my.

I think this book could have started being interleaved between the pages of the prior book and it would have had a nice transitional set/segue. It stands alone but it also marries.

Where Blindsight captivated us in closed spaces and visions of the past to give character references for the moment Echopraxia keeps us in an adventure to the sun and back.

A world that has tipped beyond stress levels that humanity can handle. Wars, bioterrorism, ecology, power--the world on the brink of collapse and immolation. Wow.

So that's the gestalt of Earth as we follow the ants.. or the roach. We fall back from lots of contact with high-end humans (or meta) into the following of the unaugmented, unboosted individual of Bruks who seemingly gets pulled into the whirlwind (literally) of the modified monks, attacking zombies lead by a vampire, a third party that watches and mails it in from afar. So many pieces moving on a board we don't understand to an end we don't understand.

All we know is what we know in the moment, then we begin to question did we know it at all?

A total mind trip. The blindness of who we are. The programmability of what we are. Where science, psychology, mythology--god and the distant space between with our alien friends..

We learn that we are so naive in everything that we are. These books open a rift in the space of our connectivity tissue. It doesn't get to many answers but it prods you hard. Is the alien just a prop to make us think? Will there be a third book that exposes an agenda as the ending here is dark and little speculation into what is transpiring other than.. well.. It's not my place to expose that to you.

Once again though I am left in awe of an author who does great research and provides me with deep thoughts that can not be answered easily. Good stuff!