Blindsight (Firefall, #1) in The Alternative Worlds

Sep 01, 2011 mark monday rated it really liked it

Shelves: new-dimensions, scifi-modern

what is Consciousness? how did the silly human race evolve beyond the herd instinct, beyond our reptile brain? how, and why? what is the purpose of our individuality, what is the need for our sense of self, what use is Human Connection, why are we even equipped with Empathy? for some naive, kinda-sorta spiritual folks (like myself), these things may explain the existence of God. but that's rather besides the point of the question. does empathy help us in the long run, does the ability of humans what is Consciousness? how did the silly human race evolve beyond the herd instinct, beyond our reptile brain? how, and why? what is the purpose of our individuality, what is the need for our sense of self, what use is Human Connection, why are we even equipped with Empathy? for some naive, kinda-sorta spiritual folks (like myself), these things may explain the existence of God. but that's rather besides the point of the question. does empathy help us in the long run, does the ability of humans to connect with each other truly offer anything besides constant discomfort and potential danger? is a psychopath who does not experience empathy somehow less than human? how would a highly developed species that has somehow evolved without empathy or individuality react to a species like ours - one that is contantly talking to itself, connecting, empathizing, exploring, throwing itself and its messages out into the void, to seek, to find, to understand, to know?

exploring all of those questions is the purpose of Peter Watts' superb Blindsight. the novel is about one of those Ambiguous Threats Appearing in the Outskirts of Known Space. future Earth is a fucked-up Earth, no surprise there. humans regularly 'ascend' into a fake-sounding cyberheaven. vampires - apparently an extremely predatory offshoot of the homo sapien, complete with an anti-Euclidean mental bias that explains their phobia of crosses - have been revived and now serve the human race (the inclusion of vampires may sound cheesy, but believe me, it is one of more absorbing things about the novel). there is some deadly construct called the Icarus Array located somewhere near the sun, stationed there to "protect" us. sex is an outdated activity (perhaps the sole unconvincing part of the novel). genuine human contact rarely takes place face-to-face. your usual Cold Techno-Dystopia. the Ambiguous Threat is noted shortly after a startling "Firefly" effect occurs over the earth - an effect that appears to be the Ambiguous Threat's way of taking long-distance pictures of human shenanigans.

so the silly humans decide to fling a crew of misfits out into the void to engage with said Ambiguous Threat. there's a woman who has compartmentalized herself into 4 different and distinctly individualistic personalities. there's a military type armed with slaved drones whose biggest flaw/greatest attribute is her ability to empathize with her enemies. there are a couple guys who project their consciousness through machinery, all inputs mediated by that machinery - all the better to study the world around them. there is the ship's captain, a sociopathic vampire mentally bonded to his ship's computer brain. and then there is our hero - a sort of minister of information, missing half a brain, trained to avoid all forms of true connection, unwilling to engage in basic empathy. this fascinating crew finds much to be fascinated with when confronting the Ambiguous Threat. for one, a spaceship that looks like it's from Dante's Inferno. aliens from, well, the Alien films, with some upsetting Predator type invisibility to boot. hallucinations and corresonding loss of self within those hallucinations. strange communications that sound full of villainous bravado - except those communications feel oversimplified, threatening in the most obvious of ways, purposely dumbed-down...to what end? the Ambiguous Threat appears capable of automatically healing its own hull, controlling thousands of asteroids at once, and harnessing the power of a gas giant... yet seems oddly powerless, even uncaring. things don't add up. despite all the crew sees and analyzes, the Ambiguous Threat has a rather terrifying lack of signifiers.

the author is clearly a highly intelligent sort, PhD and everything, and the novel is full of Exra Hard Science Action. but i think folks are really mislabeling Blindsight if they consider it to be genuine Hard Science Fiction. to put it in the corniest of terms: this is a novel about the human condition. look at the dystopic details of this future Earth, review the cast of characters... Blindsight is built on examining all of the different options for humans and nonhumans to connect or not to connect, all the ways that individuals can reach across their individual sense of self to connect with another person's reality. the nature of the Ambiguous Threat and the root of our protagonist's problems are disconcertingly connected: a rejection of individuality; an inability to connect with others. the novel is elegantly constructed so that form follows meaning rather than narrative. this may be frustrating to folks who eschew literary novels in favor of genre fiction. that's understandable... "narrative tension" is definitely lost by the constant switching back and forth between parallel storylines. on the one hand, the protagonist's past life of non-communication and deliberate avoidance of empathy (shades of Dying Inside); on the other hand, the mission into the void (which itself is rife with pointed character flashblacks). but for Watts to have structured Blindsight in any other way would have been to lose the point of it all. the novel is not really about a dark space adventure. it is about the importance of empathetic connection, its value and its dangers, how it condemns us with one hand and lifts us up to a higher place with the other.

oh, and one last thing... if that last sentence makes you think that this is one of those enriching spiritual journey type of books, think again. this awesome novel is about as bleak and pessimistic as they come. an important warning to keep in mind before approaching: this dog bites! ...more

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Jul 21, 2011 Terry rated it really liked it

Shelves: canadian, sci-fi, horror

Wow. This was a tough one. It was a very good hard sf book that I don't think I'll be coming back to anytime soon. As others have said: "abandon all hope ye who enter here." A well written, excruciating exploration of the human "problem" where it turns out that it really is a problem. How do you take a book whose central premise seems to be that the development of self-awareness in human evolution was a wrong turn that wasn't meant to happen at all? That it was in fact contrary to the entire dev Wow. This was a tough one. It was a very good hard sf book that I don't think I'll be coming back to anytime soon. As others have said: "abandon all hope ye who enter here." A well written, excruciating exploration of the human "problem" where it turns out that it really is a problem. How do you take a book whose central premise seems to be that the development of self-awareness in human evolution was a wrong turn that wasn't meant to happen at all? That it was in fact contrary to the entire development of intelligence throughout the rest of the universe that only occurred due to a fluke in the evolution of a competing species? Talk about being alone in an uncaring reality. Watts manages to take Lovecraft's primary hobby horse and make it work in a way that is truly frightening in its utter nihilism. This isn't a scary universe because Watts tells us so (as it would have been had Lovecraft wrote the tale), it's scary because he shows us so.

Our primary filter for information is Siri Keeton, a man with literally only half a brain. Due to a childhood trauma he was essentially lobotomized and given computer processors to make up for what was removed. Siri obviously lost a lot during the process, but "gained" the ability to be the ultimate "Chinese Room" for humanity...for all that was worth. His whole life he has been trying to understand even 'baseline' humans and his facility with doing so, with looking at the human enigma on the surface and from the outside, and parsing it correctly has led him to become a professional conduit between these baseline humans and the posthuman entities they have created and made to work for them. He is a uniquely appropriate narrator for this tale as his very mode of existence showcases Watts' entire argument in microcosm; and interestingly his entire development as a character is the reverse of the development of the story and even of the universe itself. Siri's story starts and ends as a very lonely one, but for very different reasons.

Another fascinating element of the tale is the fairly unique use of vampires as an off-shoot sub-species of humanity originally destroyed due to humanity's self-awareness and then brought back by high science to be our servants. These are probably the most frightening vampires I've yet come across in fiction, not only because of the pseudo-scientific "plausibility", but primarily because of what we eventually discover about them in the story's conclusion.

I will say very little about "Rorschach", the alien entity with whom humanity attempts to communicate in this tale of first contact, except to say that the Lovecraftian enigma of its seeming indifference to human existence is truly chilling in its implications. Far more than any dreaming Cthulhu, Rorschach is an entity whose strangeness is truly to be feared.

All in all this was a rewarding, though deeply uncomfortable, read.

Also posted on ...more

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Sep 07, 2009 Kara Babcock rated it it was ok

Shelves: science-fiction, from-library, hugo-nominee, posthuman, canadian-author, vampires, 2014-read

I鈥檝e had this book on my to-read list for several years now, and I feel like the me who added this book would have liked it more than the me who ended up reading it. One of the nice things about having 欧宝娱乐 to help me track my reading, what I鈥檝e read and what I want to read, is that sometimes I can remember why I鈥檝e put something on my list. In this case I can鈥檛, specifically, except maybe that I heard about Peter Watts or Blindsight somewhere, maybe io9, and it seemed like something I coul ...more

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Jul 30, 2007 Wealhtheow rated it really liked it

Shelves: sci-fi

Really interesting, chock full of ideologies, debates, and fascinating new technologies. It's great scifi. The only problem is that I completely disagree with the main premise of the book, which turns out to be that sentience is in fact a *problem* rather than Our Specialness. It's a cool twist to the usual first contact with alien life scenario, but unfortunately it makes no sense to me. I just don't get it. Yeah, a consciousness means that you second guess decisions and are slower to make them ...more

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Aug 14, 2008 bsc rated it it was amazing

Shelves: fiction, science-fiction, read-2008, favorites, cyberpunk, first-contact

This is a great science fiction book. Smart and entertaining with a great cast of characters. In my mind, this book ranks up there with the classics like Rendezvous with Rama, The Mote in God's Eye, and Gateway. Watts is incredible and is on his way to being one of the new great science fiction authors. ...more

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Dec 17, 2008 Terence rated it liked it

Shelves: speculative-fiction, audio-books

[Second read Octorber 2024 (audio)]

The author who kept running through my head while reading this was Julian Jaynes, whose The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind I read in March of this year. The alien, Rorschach is the kind of unconscious intelligence Jaynes believes humans were until quite recently. And Watts' exploration of consciousness, unconsciousness, identity and motivation were interesting.

I'd recommend this to anyone interested in those ideas, and for a stor ...more

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Aug 24, 2008 Sandi rated it really liked it

Shelves: 2009, sci-fi, library-books-read

Blindsight is one of those books that is strictly for fans of hard science fiction. It packs a lot of scientific ideas into a relatively short novel. Most of the time, I wasn't really sure what was going on. That may be because the narrator, a man with half a brain, didn't know what was going on. Ironically, AMC was showing the movie "Aliens" while I was reading this and there were a lot of similarities, especially in atmosphere. I think it's going to take a while for Blindsight to sink in. ...more

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Oct 30, 2012 Daniel Roy rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: sf, favorite

This is the hardest SF I've read in years. And I mean hard in the purest SF sense: it's filled with mind-boggling concepts deeply rooted in science, and it's got the jargon to match.

Blindsight tells the story of Siri, an observer on a space ship headed for what may or may not be a hostile alien life form. The crew itself verges so much on the posthuman that they are barely human themselves: they are the "cutting edge", as Siri puts it, Humanity's vanguard as it is faced with First Contact with a This is the hardest SF I've read in years. And I mean hard in the purest SF sense: it's filled with mind-boggling concepts deeply rooted in science, and it's got the jargon to match.

Blindsight tells the story of Siri, an observer on a space ship headed for what may or may not be a hostile alien life form. The crew itself verges so much on the posthuman that they are barely human themselves: they are the "cutting edge", as Siri puts it, Humanity's vanguard as it is faced with First Contact with a truly different form of intelligence. There's Siri himself, with only half a brain; the Gang of Four, composed of four different personality "cores" running on a single brain; and the commander of the expedition, a bona fide vampire.

Yep, you read this right: in the midst of a hard SF novel is a vampire, complete with fear of right angles. This felt like an odd choice at first, but damn if Mr. Watts didn't pull it off. His discussions on predator versus prey mental concepts were fascinating and fresh. Ditto the other characters, who genuinely stretch the limits of consciousness and identity.

And then there's the alien itself. I won't spoil any of it, because the pleasure of discovery is a big part of the novel. But suffice to say that this alien is the most dramatic departure from Humanity I've witnessed in SF in recent memory. They are so drastically different, as a matter of fact, that they raise questions about the role of consciousness in survival, and about the structure of the Self. There are moments involving the aliens that are genuinely, full-on creepy and thought-provoking. (view spoiler)

For all its coolness, though, the book does drag in the middle. It's also a hard book to read, but I can't decide if that's a good thing or not. Certainly, the book doesn't hold your hand through its scientific concepts, and some of its dialogues are hard to figure out. I was not always able to follow the many revelations and discussions about the nature of consciousness, and some of the character drama was opaque to me. Still, equipped with an Internet connection, I learned a lot just by googling up words. For instance, have you ever heard about ? It's a cool SF book that name-drops Sanduloviciu without explaining it.

A definite, enthusiastic recommendation for lovers of hard SF who don't mind exercising their brain and their scientific curiosity to make sense of a dense plot and complex, nuanced character interactions. ...more

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Jan 06, 2013 Christopher Ruz rated it really liked it

Look, I didn't understand half of what was going on in this novel. This first-contact/horror novel is so complex when it comes to its physics, psychology and biology that I was frequently left in a state of complete confusion. And yet, I devoured this novel. It was intellectual without being condescending, action packed without being oafish, and absolutely terrifying. The best first contact story I've read since The Mote in God's Eye. Highly recommended. ...more

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Jun 27, 2013 Ryandake rated it really liked it

what Daniel said. ...more

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Jul 10, 2011 Michelle rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: ebook, horror, sci-fi, book_club, free, war_is_hell

2.5 stars.

'blindsight' starts off very strong: it's the best parts of the haunted-house-on-a-spaceship story, leavened thickly with a whole bunch of post-modern thought experiments. an alien species does a presumed fly-by of the planet, and their (its?) foreignness is so outside our human way of thinking that we can't even figure out what just happened. clearly, the answer is to assemble an expert team of transhuman scientists to try and solve that mystery. each of these people isn't an off-the- ...more

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Jul 10, 2008 This Is Not The Michael You're Looking For rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: science-fiction, ebooks, fiction

A first contact book, but much more about the nature and philosophy of being than about first contact, per se. I found it to be very mixed. Parts were absolutely fascinating, while other parts were almost mind-numbing. I almost feel like the author tried to throw too many ideas into it, hoping some of them would stick.

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Sep 16, 2011 Jack Burnett rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Boldly inventive future-building, tackling transhumanism, truly strange aliens, group dynamics and resurrected vampires. If you can read only one book with those four elements this year, make it this one.

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