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Blindsight, by Peter Watts
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Blindsight is the Hugo Award–nominated novel by Peter Watts, "a hard science fiction writer through and through and one of the very best alive" (The Globe and Mail).
Two months have past since a myriad of alien objects clenched about the Earth, screaming as they burned. The heavens have been silent since―until a derelict space probe hears whispers from a distant comet. Something talks out there: but not to us. Who should we send to meet the alien, when the alien doesn't want to meet?
Send a linguist with multiple-personality disorder and a biologist so spliced with machinery that he can't feel his own flesh. Send a pacifist warrior and a vampire recalled from the grave by the voodoo of paleogenetics. Send a man with half his mind gone since childhood. Send them to the edge of the solar system, praying you can trust such freaks and monsters 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 knew what was waiting for them. . . .
- Sales Rank: #48719 in Books
- Brand: Brand: Tor Books
- Published on: 2008-03-04
- Released on: 2008-03-04
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.13" h x .97" w x 5.49" l,
- Binding: Paperback
- 384 pages
- Used Book in Good Condition
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Canadian author Watts (Starfish) explores the nature of consciousness in this stimulating hard SF novel, which combines riveting action with a fascinating alien environment. In the late 21st century, when something alien is discovered beyond the edge of the solar system, the spaceship Theseus sets out to make contact. Led by an enigmatic AI and a genetically engineered vampire, the crew includes a biologist who's more machine than human, a linguist with surgically induced multiple personality disorder, a professional soldier who's a pacifist, and Siri Keeton, a man with only half a brain. Keeton is virtually incapable of empathy, but he has a savant's ability to model and predict the actions of others without understanding them. Once the Theseus arrives at the gigantic and hideously dangerous alien artifact (which has tellingly self-named itself Rorschach), the crew must deal with beings who speak English fluently but who may, paradoxically, not even be sentient, at least as we understand the term. Watts puts a terrifying and original spin on the familiar alien contact story. (Oct.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
Sf's best visionaries have played out the ever-popular theme of alien first contact in so many different ways that fresh variations are now in short supply. Yet Watts manages an entirely unique approach in this mind-bending novel. In 2082, with utopia waiting just down the electronic pipeline in a virtual domain called Heaven, Earth experiences the sudden shock of a baffling extraterrestrial visitation in the form of bright probes that surround the globe. Within days, the lights vanish, leaving only a faint signal of outbound communication near the Kuiper belt. Possessing few clues about the aliens' culture or intentions, scientists dispatch an unlikely exploration team that includes a linguist with multiple-personality syndrome, a cyborg biologist, and a spectral captain whose genetic code incorporates vampirism. Watts packs in enough tantalizing ideas for a score of novels while spinning new twists on every cutting-edge genre motif from virtual reality to extraterrestrial biology. Watts' fifth, finest, most-fascinating book. Carl Hays
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
“Watts explores the nature of consciousness in this stimulating hard SF novel, which combines riveting action with a fascinating alien environment. Watts puts a terrifying and original spin on the familiar alien contact story. ” ―Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"A brilliant piece of work, one that will delight fans of hard science fiction, but will also demonstrate to literary fans that contemporary science fiction is dynamic and fascinating literature that demands to be read.” ―The Edmonton Journal
“Astonishingly readable book. . . . [Watts is] one of the two or three best hard SF writers around, and this is his finest book to date.” ―Interzone
"Blindsight is fearless: a magnificent, darkly gleaming jewel of a book that hurdles the contradictions inherent in biochemistry, consciousness, and human hearts without breaking stride. Imagine you are Siri Keeton. Imagine you are nothing at all. You don't have to; Peter Watts has done it for you.” ―Elizabeth Bear, author of Hammered
“Peter Watts has taken the core myths of the First Contact story and shaken them to pieces. The result is a shocking and mesmerizing performance, a tour-de-force of provocative and often alarming ideas. It is a rare novel that has the potential to set science fiction on an entirely new course. Blindsight is such a book.” ―Karl Schroeder
“Blindsight is a tour de force, redefining the First Contact story for good. Peter Watts' aliens are neither humans in funny make-up nor incomprehensible monoliths beyond human comprehension -- they're something new and infinitely more disturbing, forcing us to confront unpalatable possibilities about the nature of consciousness. It's good, and it'll make your skin crawl when you stop to think about it. Strongly recommended: this may be the best hard SF read of 2006.” ―Charles Stross
“Blindsight is excellent. It's state-of-the-art science fiction: smart, dark and it grabs you by the throat from page one. Like a C J Cherryh book it makes you feel the danger of the hostile environment (or lack of one) out there. And unlike many books it plays with some fascinating possibilities in human development (I like the idea of some disabilities becoming advantages here) and some disconcerting ideas about human consciousness (understanding what action preceding though actually means). What else can I say? Thanks for giving me the privilege of reading this.” ―Neal Asher
“It seems clear that every second Peter Watts is not actually writing must be spent reading, out at the cutting edge of all the sciences and all the arts at once. Only that can't be so, because he obviously spends fully as much time thinking about everything he's read, before he sits down to turn it into story. His latest starts by proving that there are circumstances in which half a brain is better than one, or even a dozen-and then builds steadily in strangeness and wonder with every page. If Samuel R. Delany, Greg Egan and Vernor Vinge had collaborated to update Algis Budrys's classic Rogue Moon for the new millenium, they might have produced a novel as powerful and as uniquely beautiful as Blindsight. Its narrator is one of the most unforgettable characters I have ever encountered in fiction.” ―Spider Robinson, co-author of Variable Star by Robert A. Heinlein and Spider Robinson
Most helpful customer reviews
341 of 348 people found the following review helpful.
Blindsight is STUNNING
By Erin Kissane
Let's start with the cool factor, because that's what made me buy this the moment it came out. There's a protagonist with half his brain (the half that enabled empathy, apparently) removed, who makes his living reading other peoples' thoughts and intentions through close observation. Imagine a younger, colder, more focused Sherlock Holmes and then take away the drama queen tendencies, the social skills, and the cozy Victoriana; the part that's left might feel a bit like Siri. There are the intricately damaged altered-brain characters you might expect from Watts if you've read the rifters books. There's the space vampire who out-baddasses every other vampire I've ever encountered in a novel, and I know from vampire books. No gothy romantic hero here -- just a creature who has out-evolved you so thoroughly you can't even get your head around it.
Now let's talk about the ideas. Blindsight takes on the evolutionary benefits of sociopathic behavior, and the ethics of torture, the puzzle of sentience, and what it means to intentionally develop a simulacrum of empathy and conscience (and whether it's worthwhile to do so). These ideas have been explored elsewhere, but I've never seen it done so well. Blindsight isn't *about* aliens or vampires or the future of technology. It's about us: our moral choices, our short cultural attention spans, the mental shortcuts we use so we can function, and what happens when our reach exceeds our evolutionary grasp.
But I must digress, because it probably sounds like I'd describing something dry and obvious and preachy. Didactic fiction drives me up the wall. Heavy-handed exposition and self-important authorial philosophizing will make me drop a book faster than anything but bad dialogue. This book is none of that. Watts packs in so many thought-provoking ideas and so much straight-up SMRT that I'm still blinking, and he does it seamlessly, while keeping everyone in character, and without letting up on the pace at *all*. (I should mention that the book includes something that would, in any other book, be three-page infodump. Watts frames it so skillfully that it serves as an emotional climax instead. I goggle at the skill required to pull this off.)
It's completely engaging from the first page to the last, and it's completely readable. It's not reassuring or fuzzy, but it's not a self-indulgent emo fest either. It's not flawless, but its successes overwhelm its shortcomings. It's very cold, very dark, supersharp, ambitious as hell, intellectually satisfying, and astonishingly light on its feet -- and I stayed up till three am on a worknight to finish it in one eight-hour gulp. If any of that sounds like your thing, buy this book. Maybe if enough of us do so, more publishers will realize that there really is a market for books like this.
86 of 93 people found the following review helpful.
First Contact story with aliens who are....
By QuicksilverHg
First of all, you've got to love a novel with footnotes and a bibliography. I just wish I had the resources, not to mention enough gray matter, to ferret them all out, and see if they all exist. Or understand the joke, for those that don't.
Anyway, I digress. Watt's books make you think, and usually not happy thoughts. But it's not a far leap to see the world(s) his characters live in.
I don't think I would have liked knowing any of the characters. But life is like that. I mean seriously, would you live in a building wehere you had neighbors like Seinfeld's? But reading about them (and Lennie and her compatriots) is a toally different kettle of fish.
I learned a lot of biology reading his books. And now, I am willing to add Blindsight to the list of books that I keep in the back of my mind for those times when someone asks, "why do you read that stuff"? Its not just what you learn, and what you think, but also how you feel. Its complicated.
Trust me.
38 of 39 people found the following review helpful.
Scary aliens, the nature of consciousness, vampires -- fascinating!
By Richard R. Horton
Blindsight tells of an expedition to investigate the apparent arrival of aliens in the Solar System. A ship, crewed by four strangely enhanced humans and commanded by a genetically recreated vampire, arrives in the far Oort cloud, and discovers an unusual and environmentally hostile object. Attempts to communicate are ambiguous -- it seems to contain intelligent actors, but it offers no real information, and warns them off. Naturally, the humans refuse to leave, and we are treated to attempts to land on the alien "ship" or "device" or whatever -- again met with ambiguous but mostly hostile responses.
All this is interesting, but it hides the real interest of the book. The story is told by Siri Keeton, who is essentially autistic, and who "translates" the observations of the oddly altered specialists on the mission to terms that "normal" humans back on Earth can understand. So we learn something of the nature of these enhanced people: one is a vampire, one is a military genius of sorts, one has a cybernetic sensorium, and one, a linguist, has (on purpose) multiple personalities. In addition we learn of Siri Keeton's personal life: a mother who has retreated to a simulation, an often absent "spook" father, a love affair with a woman who specializes in tailored brain chemistry alterations.
The eventual point of all this, and of the eventually realized true nature of the aliens, is speculation on the nature of concsiousness. Is consciousness real? Is it really useful? Is it necessary for intelligence? How much of the world around us do we really perceive and how much do our brains "simulate" for us? What our our brains capable of? How would predators think differently? Is real communication with aliens possible?
Fascinating stuff throughout, wonderful "big idea" SF.
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