Daniel Darabos reviewed Blindsight by Peter Watts (Firefall, #1)
Review of 'Blindsight (Firefall, #1)' on 'Goodreads'
5 stars
It's free on the author's website! Fantastically generous! Thanks a lot!
It's also a great book. It feels like someone's first book: it is stuffed full of ideas one must have collected over a lifetime. (I've checked now and it's far from Peter Watts' first book. He must have saved up a lot of ideas!)
I think the hard sci-fi "first contact" is my favorite genre. I'm always so thrilled! Almost always I'm let down at the end though. The author has not really met aliens. I'm still just reading a human's thoughts.
But Blindsight did it for me. The interactions are very clever. The whole plot is so clever, half of it I didn't understand. I've discussed it with a friend who recommended it and together we have been unable to figure out the answer to a lot of questions. I'm pretty sure there are answers, but this is …
It's free on the author's website! Fantastically generous! Thanks a lot!
It's also a great book. It feels like someone's first book: it is stuffed full of ideas one must have collected over a lifetime. (I've checked now and it's far from Peter Watts' first book. He must have saved up a lot of ideas!)
I think the hard sci-fi "first contact" is my favorite genre. I'm always so thrilled! Almost always I'm let down at the end though. The author has not really met aliens. I'm still just reading a human's thoughts.
But Blindsight did it for me. The interactions are very clever. The whole plot is so clever, half of it I didn't understand. I've discussed it with a friend who recommended it and together we have been unable to figure out the answer to a lot of questions. I'm pretty sure there are answers, but this is still a slight negative. Even so there's so much in the book that I am fine without those answers.
I love the technical details, like the initial radio conversations with the alien station or the alien prison break. The focus of the story and the best part of the book though is the meditation on the role of consciousness. Vampires, AI, brain surgery, aliens. All that is about consciousness. Consciousness is what makes humans what we are. We never stop to think about intelligence and consciousness separately, until we read Blindsight. This topic will stay with me and makes for very interesting conversations.