Blindsight, by Peter Watts
Feb. 22nd, 2007 09:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexxkayI bought a copy of this for ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
kestrell when it came out, as she had been excited by some advace press it had gotten (probably from Charles Stross). It was her favorite book of 2006, but she loaned out her copy before I got a chance to read it. As it happens, the author has also released the book for free on his web site, so I loaded it up on my exocortex. On the way to Boskone, I finally started reading it.
This is a *great* book. It looks, on the surface, like a member of the Big Dumb Artifact sub-genre of SF, but it proves to be much, much more than that. It's got a lot of important, if scary insights into the human condition. The gripping suspense story and fascinating characters make it a pleasure to read. The scientific and philosophical discourse is expertly woven into the narrative with few noticeable intrusions of infodumps. This is the first book in years which, upon finishing, I immediately started over again from the beginning (though I then paused, so I could recommend it to y'all as soon as possible).
The story follows a motley crew of experts/freaks who have been sent out to the edge of the solar system for a First Contact with mysterious aliens. Some are heavily cyborged in a physical sense, others have unusual brain architecture. Oh, and one of them is a vampire. Yes, a vampire -- one of the *lesser* delights of this book is that it contains a Hard SF explanation for vampires.
And this book *is* Hard SF, make no mistake. Many of the most interesting science bits are neuropsychology, but they're no less hard for being about the squishy bits. There's even an extensive technical appendix, with lots of sources footnoted.
The 'human' characters are as strange and interesting as most authors' aliens. Which is a good warmup, because the aliens are much stranger still. The nature of those aliens forces the main question of the book, a question which I have rarely heard asked, and never heard answered so bleakly. It also, in passing, comes up with a new solution to the Fermi Paradox.
This is *not* a book with a traditional happy ending, or even a traditional plot closure at the end. The emotional and philosophical sides of the book *do* reach closure, in a most satisfying (if depressing) fashion.
If you like getting your mind opened to new vistas -- even if those vistas are disturbing -- then this book gets my highest recommendation. I especially commend it to the attention ofsiderea, who I expect to have a very polarized reaction to it, one way or another. (It talks about some of the same issues as that short story I loaned you, "Second Person, Present Tense", by Darryl Gregory.)
As mentioned above, the entire text is available for free, so you can give it a try for yourself. There are also lots of other cool things on his site, which can serve as either teasers or further appendices for the book itself. Check it out!
kestrell when it came out, as she had been excited by some advace press it had gotten (probably from Charles Stross). It was her favorite book of 2006, but she loaned out her copy before I got a chance to read it. As it happens, the author has also released the book for free on his web site, so I loaded it up on my exocortex. On the way to Boskone, I finally started reading it.This is a *great* book. It looks, on the surface, like a member of the Big Dumb Artifact sub-genre of SF, but it proves to be much, much more than that. It's got a lot of important, if scary insights into the human condition. The gripping suspense story and fascinating characters make it a pleasure to read. The scientific and philosophical discourse is expertly woven into the narrative with few noticeable intrusions of infodumps. This is the first book in years which, upon finishing, I immediately started over again from the beginning (though I then paused, so I could recommend it to y'all as soon as possible).
The story follows a motley crew of experts/freaks who have been sent out to the edge of the solar system for a First Contact with mysterious aliens. Some are heavily cyborged in a physical sense, others have unusual brain architecture. Oh, and one of them is a vampire. Yes, a vampire -- one of the *lesser* delights of this book is that it contains a Hard SF explanation for vampires.
And this book *is* Hard SF, make no mistake. Many of the most interesting science bits are neuropsychology, but they're no less hard for being about the squishy bits. There's even an extensive technical appendix, with lots of sources footnoted.
The 'human' characters are as strange and interesting as most authors' aliens. Which is a good warmup, because the aliens are much stranger still. The nature of those aliens forces the main question of the book, a question which I have rarely heard asked, and never heard answered so bleakly. It also, in passing, comes up with a new solution to the Fermi Paradox.
This is *not* a book with a traditional happy ending, or even a traditional plot closure at the end. The emotional and philosophical sides of the book *do* reach closure, in a most satisfying (if depressing) fashion.
If you like getting your mind opened to new vistas -- even if those vistas are disturbing -- then this book gets my highest recommendation. I especially commend it to the attention of
siderea, who I expect to have a very polarized reaction to it, one way or another. (It talks about some of the same issues as that short story I loaned you, "Second Person, Present Tense", by Darryl Gregory.)As mentioned above, the entire text is available for free, so you can give it a try for yourself. There are also lots of other cool things on his site, which can serve as either teasers or further appendices for the book itself. Check it out!