'Blindsight' by Peter Watts is a hard science fiction novel that delves adjusted humans sent on a mission to investigate alien contact beyond Pluto. The book explores deep philosophical questions about sentience, consciousness, and the nature of humanity, all set in a futuristic world containing space travel, vampires, and alien encounters. The story is told through a unique narrative style, offering a gripping and thought-provoking exploration of consciousness and intelligence.
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Triggers include themes of mental illness, trauma, existential dread, and body horror, as well as encounters with potentially disturbing alien entities.
From The Publisher:
Hugo and Shirley Jackson award-winning Peter Watts stands on the cutting edge of hard SF with his acclaimed novel, Blindsight
Two months since the stars fell...
Two months of silence, while a world held its breath.
Now some half-derelict space probe, sparking fitfully past Neptune's orbit, hears a whisper from the edge of the solar system: a faint signal sweeping the cosmos like a lighthouse beam. Whatever's out there isn't talking to us. It's talking to some distant star, perhaps. Or perhaps to something closer, something en route.
So who do you send to force introductions with unknown and unknowable alien intellect that doesn't wish to be met?
You send a linguist with multiple personalities, her brain surgically partitioned into separate, sentient processing cores. You send a biologist so radically interfaced with machinery that he sees x-rays and tastes ultrasound. You send a pacifist warrior in the faint hope she won't be needed. You send a monster to command them all, an extinct hominid predator once called vampire, recalled from the grave with the voodoo of recombinant genetics and the blood of sociopaths. And you send a synthesist-an informational topologist with half his mind gone-as an interface between here and there.
Pray they can be trusted with the fate of a world. They may be more alien than the thing they've been sent to find.
Ratings (37)
Incredible (10) | |
Loved It (8) | |
Liked It (9) | |
It Was OK (3) | |
Did Not Like (5) | |
Hated It (2) |
Reader Stats (119):
Read It (38) | |
Currently Reading (4) | |
Want To Read (66) | |
Did Not Finish (2) | |
Not Interested (9) |
3 comment(s)
Why do putatively brilliant scientists insist on explaining simple shit to one another? Their sole purpose appears to be strolling out at key intervals of the story and expounding on pop science.
"Oh hi, did you know that according to Game Theory the most efficient cooperative strategy is reciprocal altruism?" Game theory may not be common knowledge, but it's hardly arcane either. The UK actually has
a TV show built around it.
Similar bleeding edge opinions on consciousness, neurology, and linguistics may sound recondite but are quite common even today, a century before the novel takes place.
One of the most hardcore sci-fi novels, Blindsight manages to be sometimes brilliant and often dull. It does so by telling the story from the perspective of a high-functioning sociopath, who is the best and worst of narrators. Mostly the latter.
DNF'd a couple chapters in. Writing is just plain
bad.
Intense
What can you read after
Blindsight?
About the Author:
Peter Watts is a former marine biologist and the Hugo and Nebula nominated author of novels such as Starfish, Maelstrom and Behemoth, and numerous short stories. He has been called "a hard science fiction writer through and through and one of the very best alive" by The Globe and Mail and whose work the New York Times called "seriously paranoid."
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