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, ...
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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.
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"Blindsight," by Peter Watts, provides a reading experience that is rather difficult to describe. So, there are two things to say:
1) I was confused throughout much of the book...
2) But I still really liked it and will definitely return to it again someday for rereading.
These may seem like mutually exclusive circumstances, but this is a unique novel in that way.
It must be said that Watts jumps right in to the hard-science techno-babble, and thankfully I kept up enough with the biology and chemistry references that it sort of made up for my deficiencies in the physics arena.
However, it isn't so much the science terminology that made things difficult; Watts plays hard and fast with big concepts of sentience, consciousness, and intelligence. Then there is his relentless tendency to nickname everything so that I was constantly trying to remember what "Jack," "Big Ben," and "Burns-Caulfield," actually WERE.
There is something both frustrating and energizing about a book that asks so much of its reader.
I would recommend this book to readers who like to be challenged, and who enjoy working for a payoff. This book will not give one for free, but if the work is put in, the mind-boggling ideas and emotional revelations that are spring-loaded within its pages are quite powerful.
