It's been two months since a myriad of alien objects clenched about the Earth, screaming …
Hrm, not sure about this book. There's a sort of macho blather to the writing that is putting me off. It's clearly establishing the character of the narrator, but it's also just tiresome to read. Lots of interesting ideas and I am feeling some suspense, but I may just not make it through this one.
@eldang He actually used the word 'spaz', which is horrifying.
@Gwenfar [unless you've now read further than me] equally horrifyingly, I think I didn't notice that because it was such a routine part of my vocabulary growing up.
The book has me more engaged now, but while that means I'm more forgiving of its flaws those flaws are still there. And I'm not sure that I should forgive it for the really ableist shit, even when it is clearly in the mouth of a character we're meant to see as somewhat flawed.
Content warning Blindsight: minor spoiler for ~halfway through the book
@Gwenfar Ironically, there's a scene a little way into the Rohrshach section in which the narrator talks about the awfulness of the very passe [in the book's future time] prejudice against multiple personality, and how offensive it was to call it a "disorder". I can't tell if the author's intent is for that framing to make us even more disgusted with the narrator's casual prejudice about other kinds of non-neurotypicality (some of which is clearly internalised), or if the author's just oblivious to his own. But even if the former it's a risky enough game to play that I don't appreciate it.
Content warning Blindsight: minor spoiler for ~halfway through the book
@eldang also, if I woman had written like this, I cannot imagine it would have been anything but canned!
@Gwenfar I agree, but at the same time I really can't see a woman writing this book. I wish I could unpack what I mean by that more explicitly, but a lot of the worst things about the writing style feel intensely male to me, and that's even without the author having fallen into the really cliched male gaze type traps. That's a lot of why I specifically requested nominations not by white men for November.
@eldang This is a good point. The book reminds me of some of the earlier and much more sexist sci-fi books. They often had a colonialist feel to them, and all very straight white male.
@Gwenfar Oh, you're right. I was definitely getting an "older SF" sort of vibe from it along with generally thinking I'd have liked it a lot more when it came out. I hadn't connected those two thoughts, nor that the colonialist aspect of this one was so much of a piece with its other flaws.
I feel like it does some questioning of the colonialism, and at least has some female characters who have agency and aren't just there to be a foil for the men. But I am now thinking of it as sort of transitional: it represents some steps forward from bad-old-days SF, but not enough steps that I can enjoy it unreservedly today.
@eldang I've decided to give up. Too many niggles as we've discussed, and I'm really struggling with getting what is going on. I've liked 'hard' sci-fi in the past, but with the storyline not always being clear, and brain fog, it's too much of a struggle. I would like to know what happens, so if you get to the end, let me know!
Content warning Blindsight spoiler-o-rama
@Gwenfar I did finish it, and I think I'm glad I bothered, but the flaws definitely do continue, and there are things I'm still confused by at the end of the book.
Very quick summary (I'm not sure exactly where you left off, so sorry if some of this is repetitive): They start exploring Rohrshach, and gradually figure out that it's a complex lifeform itself. It makes very clear from the outset that it doesn't want them there, and basically mounts an immune response, but they're able to make repeated trips. In one of those trips Szpindel is killed, and so they reanimate the backup biologist, who is a complete dick and who I doubly hate because I found Szpindel by far the most likeable character.
Anyway, inside Rohrshach they find these very agile many-limbed creatures that they call "scramblers", and they capture a few. The first one doesn't survive, the next 2 they keep as experimental subjects and make them do increasingly complicated problem-solving to try to learn about their abilities and communication. At first the backup biologist insists that they can't possibly be intelligent because they don't have brains, but they massively outperform humans on a whole range of pattern matching and inference tasks so it becomes clear that they must be.
Eventually the crew pieces together a notion of Rohrshach as spectacularly intelligent without consciousness, which is also why talking to it felt like talking to a Chinese Room. And the scramblers are individually intelligent but don't have any sort of self concept, and they realise that they only got away with capturing those two alive because Rohrshach allowed them to be captured as spies. The captive scramblers also start to get weak because they depend on Rohrshach's magnetic field for some biological regulation.
There's a lot of arguing about what it means to be intelligent without consciousness, including a line of argument which I'm not at all convinced by in real life but made sense in the fictional context: that consciousness is actually an evolutionary drawback because conscious thinking is so much slower than unconscious decision-making.
Then two things that I'm still confused by.
1) I'm not sure what the actual order of events is here, but ultimately Theseus gets closer to Rohrshach, Rohrshach starts actively attacking the ship, and the crew except Keeton all agree to fly into the thing as a massive antimatter suicide bomb. 2) Sarasti gravely injures Keeton to make some point about consciousness. I didn't follow why. There also seems to be an implication that maybe vampires aren't really conscious, but that didn't quite make sense to me.
The book ends with Keeton in an escape shuttle on his way back to Earth, his mission now being to bring the whole account of what happened back with him. It's implied that the suicide mission worked so Rohrshach is gone, but it's also implied that meanwhile on Earth the vampires have rebelled and slaughtered humanity, so Keeton might be the last living human.
