Blindsight Paperback – Big Book, 21 April 2020

This will sound like a terrible review but it is actually wonderful. stay with me through the bad stuff and you will find the gems at the end.I grew up reading the likes of Carl Sagan’s “Contact” and as a sci-fi buff it set me alight. “Peter Watts” is not taking the easy track with this piece of hard sci-fi. In fact, he seems, at times, to wish for no readers. Even to such as I that has enjoyed Benford, Banks, Brin and Bear (do all the surnames have to start with a “B”) this is a difficult read. Many acronyms are used with no guide to their meaning unless you are really up to date on your physics, biology, brain chemistry and chemical psychology, which most are not. This book is made even more difficult to read because the author factors in a vampire, as a side shoot of the human genome. A predator that preys upon predators. All this aside and I agree that it is a great deal to put aside. You end up with a truly original book. So Finally, here are the good bits.Much as we all loved Carl Sagan, He was an optimist who wished for intelligent and thoughtful aliens that cared for and cosseted humanity. Peter Watts takes a far more realistic view, In my opinion. What is alien, is truly alien. No one person can imagine the meeting of minds in a first contact. I suspect that it will (if it ever happens) be even stranger than Mr Watts ideas. Mr Watts presents this book as a hard-sci-fi piece, which it truly is, steeped in the genre and wallowing there. Yet this book has more to offer upon the human condition than you may first expect. I would recommend this book to all readers that can stand the pretty much unreadable. Go on give yourself a challenge. After this I look back on “Iron in the Soul” by Sartre with fond enjoyment.

Bought this on a friend's recommandation. It's a "hard" SF story that takes place around 100 years into the future, with humanity's first contact event starting it with a bang... sort of. Certainly enough of a jolt to get me started and hooked for at least the first 100 pages.At that point, as as I progressed further into the story it felt to me that while the author has a very good grip on a variety of scientific and neurological-congnitive disciplines, he uses their jorgonised concepts very superficially a lot of the time, generously peppering the story with fancy words that will take a equally well-versed reader and science aficionado to understand - those that don't will be put off by it.Furthermore, the "action" parts of the whole affair are fairly pedestrian: Watts doesn't manage to convey the feeling of the utterly desolate environment they are in, so it ends up feeling like the characters are jumping from one tin can floating in space to another. Uninspiring.The interjected storyline-of-the-past tries to dissect the protagonist's psyche plauged by his bodily ailments, but doesn't do it especially inspiringly, and most of the time I felt like leafing past those passaged to get to the harder stuff.Lastly there as some parts of the action where the protagonists make some decisions that doesn't make much sense to me. (Omitted to avoid spoilers). These stuck in my head as I kept reading, and I couldn't shove them aside, much as I try to suspend disbelief to enjoy the story.Of positive note are the explanation of certain concepts irt. life in the universe, and the human condition, the concept of free will, and let us not forget the detail and innovation in the study of the story's antagonists, which is top-notch; a big thumbs up to Watts for those.All in all: A worthy attempt, drawn down by the jargon overload and the occasional feeling of text bloat. Recommended if the science appeals greatly to you (I think it is as 'hard' as that of Greg Egan or Stephen Baxter). If not, not so much (consider it a 3 star book) - buy it used or in the bargain bin.

I read this because I stumbled across a recommendation on Charles Stross's blog that it was the right way to do a vampire book. I agree. Moreover it's "vampire(s) in space" which is something I'd never had imagined.But it wouldn't do to overplay the vampire angle - while Watts gives a biologically and evolutionary plausible background for their origin and fate (I think - disclaimer - I'm no biologist), there is much more to his book than that. Much more. In many ways I think it's a rework of  2001: A Space Odyssey . Signs of alien life are seen - not just signs, but challenging ones. An expedition is sent deep into space to investigate, using the best technology Earth has. Out There, things get strange. There are more parallels than this but I won't risk too many spoilers by being more specific.Where the books differ, I think, is that 2001 is written in hope. Humanity has is plagued by political divisions, and may not live up to the ideals of the monolith builders, but they are essentially benign. In "Blindsight" the aliens are much less cuddly - because more alien. They are not hostile so much as... different. And on this difference, Watts manages to hang a riveting discussion of intelligence, sentience/ consciousness and human evolution, basically posing the question "Is our species a dead end?" He explores this through the narration of Siri Keeton, a misfit on the ship (though bear in mind that the rest of the ship's company are even stranger - "bleeding edge" humans, modified to have all sorts of strange abilities. And the ship itself is commanded by a vampire). Keeton is a lonely figure, the subject (victim?) of radical brain surgery as a child which has changed his nature and removed his ability to empathise. Perhaps the only jarring notes (for me) were the digressions back to his failed relationship with his girlfriend, which didn't seem to have much to do with the plot, but turns out, I think too be crucial, as one of the several dimensions along which Watts explores the consciousness question.If that makes "Blindsight" sound like a textbook or a dry read, be assured, it isn't either - simply an excellent read, bursting with ideas. 2001: A Space Odyssey

Having mostly enjoyed my first Peter Watts toe-in-the-water (Starfish, the first in the Rifters Trilogy), it was definitely worth reading another. Blindsight is brilliant, better by far than Starfish. It is a completely original take on the first contact scenario blended with Watts' ability to portray multiple deep and complex characters. The physiology and motivations of the aliens are totally alien (although, coincidentally their morphology reflects the aforementioned Rifters novel) and while they are the key theme of the novel, the real star of the show is the mostly human crew of `Theseus' (nice little reference back to Minoan myth there). This is the first science fiction novel where I've encountered a vampire; not the soppy Twilight type, but a barely restrained savage predator whose genetic twists have been exploited by mainstream science. Also, Watts has given his own unique interpretation of multiple personality disorder; in this case an individual hosting deliberately engineered personas.The novel bowls along at a fantastic pace with never a dull moment and Watts' impeccably researched and inspired insight into the nature and purpose of consciousness marks him as one of the finest, though, sadly perhaps the least prolific, modern science fiction writers I've ever encountered.

Smart, Strange and SatisfyingA Review of "Blindsight" by Peter Watts"Science fiction?" my father liked to sneer, "Neither science nor fiction." It was a comment I disliked strongly at the time and am still not especially keen on, but I have to admit that there is an element of truth to the dig. Science Fiction is not science OR fiction. It is an amalgam, a fusion is which two distinct elements come together and form something uniquely different from either.At least, occasionally it is. Often enough the mixture fails, generally because the balance has tipped too far towards one side or the other. These days, with the increasing level of scientific literacy amongst readers, the more common failure is for the speculative element to subsume the virtues of characterisation and good, old fashioned story telling.Every now and then, though, you come across a piece of work in which all the elements come together in a brilliant harmony. "Blindsight" is one such work. Here, speculation, narration and characterisation are infused so thoroughly into one another that it would be impossible to separate any of the elements, and the result is a tale which grips and satisfies both intellectually and emotionally.If you've read the blurb on the book's description page you'll know the basic set-up: four characters, each of whom in his or her own way pushes our understanding of what it means to be human, are despatched to the chilly depths of the Oort cloud to investigate an alien artefact which has been discovered at the edge of our solar system.What is so pleasing about the novel is the way in which the freakish aspects of each of the main characters are not things which are simply thrown into the story for the sheer hell of it. Rather, they arise logically (more or less) from a well-thought out and depressingly plausible world. Technology, of one kind or another, shapes these people without being all that there is to them. In the same way, the philosophical concerns which drove the author to write the book in the first place, underpin the story while still leaving room for "excitement, adventure and really wild things."These are not (as Watts remarks in an afterword to the story) characters who are "especially cuddly". In particular, the protagonist-narrator Siri Keaton spends large chunks of the book acting as though from a deliberate desire to make himself as unloveable as possible. This is part of the point. Neither characters nor author rely on inherent likeability to make us root for them. They earn our affection and our admiration by the mix of courage and intelligence with which they deal with a genuinely strange and unsettling kind of alien.This is not a flawless novel. There is a certain degree of inconsistency in the way in which the aliens interact with the human characters at different points in the plot, and there is one narrative element in particular which Watts seems to have put into the book because he likes the effect it gives him and then quietly forgets when he wants to do something different. Nonetheless, this book with its mix of intellectual adventure, raw chills, and rather more human emotion than you think you are going to get to start off with is one which I can definitely recommend.