Blindsight

One of the best scifi books I have ever read in my life. Goes straight to my top 3 ever. It is a “Rendez-vous with Rama” meets “Alien” and from there everything goes downhill (yes, going from “Alien” to something worse), but it is also a “Name of the rose” in the sense that it actually hids a ton on philosophy under the pretext of a great mystery story. Add to that plenty of original scifi ideas about how humanity might evolve (similar somewhat to Alastair Reynolds' scifi), grimness and darkness and almost military hard action, thrilling exploration, mindfucking spy twists, good focused writing, biology and physics and sociology and psichology and so on - and you get a really great and horrifying adventure, but also a cold, heavy, depressing one.

After such an amazing book description, it was a mega disappointment to sit down and read this novel.

All I could think while reading this book was that it was tiresome to read, disjointed, filled with flashbacks that you realize are pointless and not something the author put in to give you clues about anything, the characters are flat, and the story just didn't make sense. It was a meandering mess, and tries too hard to be both hard SF and literary — a combination that only wins if you're out to bore the shit out of people with stuffy, pretentious writing and wandering scenes. In addition, the author is so in love with throwing whatever technical or psychological factoid/know-how/whatever he had into the mix. This is my main complaint about a number of hard SF books — it's like hard SF writers write something just to get off on vomiting as much jargon as they possibly could, story or plot or characters be damned. I would be far more interested in learning or reading about whatever the heck technical crap is in your book if I actually gave a shit about anything you've written, but the way you write it means I don't, and then I get bored.

An interesting way to deal with consciousness.

There were a few things that were a bit annoying tho, like how the scenes of what was happening were described, as if something Watts was forgetting in the process of constructing the story. Confusing at times.

The other thing that will probably make this book not as enjojable a second time is the way one of the characters was basically clicking his tongue the whole time.

Apart from that, it's a solid book with a very intriguing and unique set of characters. The climax alone was worth the few hundred pages.

One of the toughest reads I did in along time. It is well researched and if you have the motivation to look up only half of the technical terms used in the book, it will bring to great little niches of science to delve into. While this actually didn't deter me, I did feel that the detailed descriptions of the surroundings actually were more confusing than helpful of painting a picture. It's great to read once of how big in kilometers the orbit is, but I dare anybody after reading this book to actually explain to me of how the ship interior looks like and how the endeavours to the alien ship worked out. With all that text, I was still lost.

I actually do think it was a brave choice by the author make the narrator incapable of empathy, and therefore very hard to sympathise for. He also removed almost any real interaction between the characters. Except for small exchanges between the protagonist and his girlfriend, there is no real communication between them. Mostly they are just stating scientific facts and offer expositional narrative. That may have been one of the core ideas behind the book, but for me it was tough to have no characters to latch onto. It made it a very draining book just because of the emotional emptiness.

I really did like the far reaching thinking of how much humanity can stretch itself with the help of technology and far it can bring us and remove us from ourselves. But unfortunately this is mostly embodied by technological or genetics gimmicks in of the characters, which are super interesting by itself, but also make the characters feel like archetypes as they offer little beyond their post-human technology, as they are lacking in emotional impact.

Especially the leader of the crew was one of the weaker points for me of the book, which brings me to the somewhat spoilery part of the review. The leader of the crew is a vampire. The year is 2082 and humanity found out through genetic engineering that actually, vampires did exist! They are far more superior in intellect than every other human being and of course they brought them back to live. Jurassic “Ann Rice” Park. Why does it have to be vampires? Not just genetically engineered beings? Nope, vampires. They did exist, and yes, they can't look at crosses, because their superior brain and superior pattern matching powers can't deal with right angles. They were wiped out when people build houses, so literally because of rectangles. So in 2082 they are swallowing “antiEuclidean” pills to make them feel round and whole. Every time that character appears, it is hammered into the readers mind, that he is superior, that he is a hunter and that the other puny humans of the crew are just his prey. I do understand that he is on the edge of what the aliens do represent (I don't want to spoil here) and I actually also think that he was actually the only character that was developed (if only in the last third of the book) but that whole vampire thing and the repetitiveness of the hunter-prey relationship really dragged the book down for me. In combination with the hard to follow descriptions made it out to just three stars despite its stellar ideas.

I generally enjoyed this book, but it was hard work at times.

What is wrong with telling a good story in plain English?

Un roman de science-fiction plutôt ardu à lire mais intéressant. Peut-être trop complexe tout de même pour que le plaisir de lire soit aussi grand qu'il pourrait l'être.

After hearing this one recommended everyday on Reddit, being a fan of first contact stories and seeing it on the Hugo nominees for it's year, I decided to give it a shot. It's what a lot of people consider “hard sci-fi”, but I'm slowly realizing is really just “hard to read” sci-fi. The story is very slow moving, with very little happening, and most of the exploration taking place in the descriptions of events, the types of beings and awareness.

There were a number of interesting ideas presented as well as some interesting characters, but in the end I wasn't able to connect with the story.

After hearing this one recommended everyday on Reddit, being a fan of first contact stories and seeing it on the Hugo nominees for it's year, I decided to give it a shot. It's what a lot of people consider “hard sci-fi”, but I'm slowly realizing is really just “hard to read” sci-fi. The story is very slow moving, with very little happening, and most of the exploration taking place in the descriptions of events, the types of beings and awareness.

There were a number of interesting ideas presented as well as some interesting characters, but in the end I wasn't able to connect with the story.

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.

Verdomme, Peter Watts, kerel toch. Zo enorm veel goede ideeën, en zo enorm veel gemiste kansen om er goede boeken van te maken.

Om te beginnen, maar daar kan noch Watts noch dit boek iets aan doen: ik was Blindsight enorm hard aangeraden, en de eerste plaats waar ik keek, werd het boek als “Rifters: 4” aangekondigd. Combineer dat met mijn (ongetwijfeld slechte) gewoonte om zo weinig mogelijk op voorhand te lezen over de boeken die ik ga lezen, en ik was ervan overtuigd dat ik best Rifters één, twee en drie ook las, vooraleer ik aan nummer vier begon.

Eén viel nog mee, twee niet echt en drie echt niet, waardoor ik al met wat achterdocht aan dit boek begon.

...en waardoor het des te harder aankwam toen ik na een bladzijde of vijf zes plots ging van “hey — ik héb dit al ooit eens gelezen!”.

Ik moet het boek ooit tot ongeveer de helft gelezen hebben, en dan opzij gelegd. Et pour cause. De op-het-eerste-gezicht premisse is recht uit Arthur C. Clarke (The Sentinel / 2001, Rama): plots komen er blijkbaar wellicht aliens toe, en er wordt een expeditie op poten gezet om op onderzoek te gaan.

Kleine twist: de expeditie bestaat uit een resem mensen die aangepast zijn of zichzelf aangepast hebben, en een vampier. Aanpassingen gaan van een halve hersenpan vol computer tot een soort super-synesthesie over een personage dat als “The Gang” bestempeld wordt omdat het eigenlijk een aantal verschillende personen in één is (in de toekomst is MPD geen syndroom of probleem maar een troef).

Ah, en de vampier is een mensensoort die eigenlijk een paar tienduizend jaar geleden uitgestorven is, die in zijn tijd een soort apex predator was, die jaagde op mensen, die in een soort winterslaap kon gaan, die allergisch was aan rechte hoeken en dergelijke — en die in de 21ste eeuw genetisch weer tevoorschijn was gemanipuleerd wegens zeer nuttig in sommige omstandigheden, waar hypersnel beslissingen moeten genomen worden en watnog.

Allemaal op een schip, in een soort gedehytrateerde vorm richting Oortwolk, ter plaatse gerehydrateerd en contact met de aliens. De aliens blijken in eerste instantie een soort zeer geavanceerde ELIZA te zijn: het is niet duidelijk of het om een computerachtig iets gaat waar ze mee communiceren dan wel met een buitenaardse intelligentie die zo anders is dat het communiceren moeilijk of onmogelijk is.

En dan komt het terrrrgend langzaam uit, wat er aan de hand is, en moeten we door pagina's en pagina's (en pagina's en pagina's) pseudo-interacties tussen personages die er geen zijn, allemaal spirograph-gewijs draaiend rond het centrale thema van het boek: enorm veel expositie over een ideetje, niet veel meer, over bewustzijn en intelligentie.

...en dan is het boek gedaan, en dan volgt, in appendix, het meest interessant stuk van het hele verhaal: Peter Watts die wetenschappelijke antecedenten en parallellen geeft, verwijst naar bronmateriaal, en in misschien twintig bladzijden duidelijk maakt dat hij betere ideeën heeft en betere research kan doen, dan hij boeken kan schrijven.

Het deed me denken aan Murasaki uit 1992, waar Poul Anderson met zijn hoed van wetenschapper op een hele wereld bouwde, die meticuleus omschreef, en daar collega's Greg Bear, Gregory Benford, David Brin, Nancy Kress en Frederik Pohl op losliet, om er verhalen over te schrijven. Machtig goede auteurs allemaal, maar ik vond de world building stukken interessanter dan wat ze er uiteindelijk mee deden.

Jammer, van Blindsight. Ik heb ondertussen gelezen dat veel mensen op het internet het een meesterwerk vinden, maar ik was teleurgesteld.

Finally done. This was a really tough read. I had to use my Kindle dictionary more than ever, haha!

But nevertheless the story held my interest enough to not give up. Blindsight was hands down the most hardcore sci-fi I've read so far. You have never heard something like this ever before. Most first contact books or movies are getting their ideas from something we humans can relate to. The aliens are looking and behaving like something we know, be it human or animal. But Peter Watts, boy does he fabricate something. Those aliens are really alien. Add this to a dark and hopeless picture of the future and toss some scientifically backed up vampires in the mix and your're set.

It was really interesting but in the end it was just a bit to difficult and tedious to read for me.

Blindsight is at once a science fiction foray, a psychological exploration, and a pants-wetting horror story all rolled up into one. It has both strong characters and vampires. I know! We culturally forgot books could have both of those things in the last few years.

Let's start with the science. It would be very arrogant of me to say that I understood much of what was going on beyond the most basic elements. I had to constantly reread because I'd miss important things with the psychology, biology, or technical talk went on for too long. I was always better for those re-readings though because the book deals with some really interesting theories. It ranges from the plausibility of vampires (I enjoy the Crucifix glitch, although using the V word still through me off) to what it means to be sentient. I went back and forth on my own opinions of the scramblers and the rightness/wrongness of the crew's mission. Watts brings in a lot of phenomena that I have passing familiarity with, mostly during the hallucinations, and treats it all in a very unique way. He manages to pull off a scientifically plausible ghost story, and that deserves applause.

He wouldn't have managed if he didn't also have a firm grip on character. Siri, our intrepid sociopathic narrator is pretty amazing to watch. His disconnect, his analysis, his rationalizing the world around him makes him a 1st person narrator that I don't find cloying. Most of the time, I really dislike 1st person p.o.v. because we get so bogged down in that one person's emotional overload and I end up hating them because I get sick of their whining. That doesn't happen with Siri. We get to watch him process humanity, and eventually, painfully, discover it for himself. While I didn't like Chelsea or the concept of “tweaking” at all, her death scene where Siri is just searching helplessly for the appropriate words was heartbreaking.

The other characters resonate the more strongly for being filtered through Siri's Chinese room. I love Amanda Bates, especially after getting her backstory. I also love that she is never referenced as a “female general,” just a general because we don't need to make a big deal out of that. The Gang of Four is a pretty incredible concept and another idea that sets Blindsight apart from other science fiction. Szpindel provided some much needed humor while Sarasti kept everything on edge, even during the peaceful sequences.

Then there were the not-so peaceful sequences. Holy crap I was scared when they were on board the Rorschach. Actually, I was scared from the moment the ship called Susan by name. I knew what Watts was doing. I knew he was pointing out the inconsistencies in human thinking and our own ability to convince ourselves what is true, what is our will. I was still terrified during the “haunting.” It's one of those books I pray is never adapted to a film because this sequence would never be as scary and the whole point would evaporate.

Blindsight may err a little bit on the heavy side, being as it took me a whole week to get through a mere 300 pages, but all of those pages made me think, made me question my own ability to make decisions. I've heard the book criticized for not being “hard” science fiction, but I think that everything he describes has plausibility at the very least. He spends the last forty pages citing his sources, and even Sarasti gets a reasonable if not likely explanation. I'd recommend this book if you like a solid horror story and exploring the limits of the human mind, as long as you don't mind a vampire wandering onstage now and again.

Cool story, but fragmented and hard to follow at times. Vampires in space was a neat concept, +1 for that.

The last 15% of the book is an appendix and acknowledgments. Pretty interesting stuff back there, can't wait to go back and read through it all.

holy shit, mang.

This book was an interesting read, especially the “hard” science aspects of it... though I'm still not buying the whole “vampires in space” idea. In fact... you could have taken vampires out of this book entirely (or replaced them with werewolves or witches) and I'm not sure that it would have changed the story at all... that's how peripheral they seemed to me.

And the ending felt totally tacked on, and I'm still not very clear on the “why's” of some of the character's motivations.

I'm not sure what to say about this one. I had a really hard time getting into the story for perhaps the first hour and half. Part of that was the odd narrative structure and part of it was the recording. The narration itself was fine, but the recording was too close, too bass-y, too ... soft? I could hear but not understand what was being said, unless I raised the volume considerably. Eventually I started listening at double speed and found that made my comprehension a lot easier.

As for the story itself, without giving anything away, once I'd raced to the end, if felt like a short story. Blindsight is a full and complete story and yet it is just a snapshot of a time and place. I was pretty satisfied with the way everything was wrapped up until the narrator started putting a fable-ish ending on things... and suddenly I was wondering what the point was. Did anything that just happened actually have any real impact on the universe?

So, I liked Blindsight but it sure wasn't an easy read by any stretch.

Difficult, hard-sf, not for every taste. But wonderful if you connect with the story.

Reread 2/19/2015

I first read this book over 5 years ago. I rated it 4 stars, and in that time I have never stopped thinking of this book. It improves with a reread, and details and concepts I missed the first time stand out well in the reread.

Downside to this book is that I get so caught up with the concepts raised that I can easily spend more time thinking about about them than actually reading.

I'd also call this a very fine example of what I love about science fiction.

What this book is not:

This is not horror. Granted, it can be creepy as hell, but not for reasons most people would consider horror.

This is not and action or adventure. Don't expect lasers or battles. This is a book about concepts.

What concepts you may ask? Well I leave that up to the reader to discover. It is the discovery and realizations which are half the fun. :)