Blindsight

This is hard sci-fi. I thought Andy Weir's The Martian was technical and grounded in reality but it reads like an Ikea assembly manual in comparison. This is hard in every sense of the word and I'd need another reading just to digest half of what's going on here. As a first contact story it's more terrifying than the crew on the Nostromo encountering Giger's alien. This thing screws with you on an entirely different level that is at once entirely indifferent and yet hyper aware. I'm butchering this, I feel like a 3rd grader trying to explain the Kama Sutra - I'm just not equipped.

Self awareness as a costly evolutionary hiccup that wasn't meant to happen. Vampires need to take anti-Euclidean drugs so they don't have grand-mal feedback seizures when faced with right angles. Saccadal glitches in human vision, alien hand syndrome and a robust complement of end notes grounding story ideas in cited research. If you want a hefty dose of philosophy and mind-fuckery in your book this is the thing for you. ...and it's available for free on the web.