jethrien

Title: Blindsight
Author: Peter Watts
Genre: Hard SF
Thingummies: 4.5

Synopsis: Humanity was sliding into a virtual reality apathy when one day, out of the blue, alien devices took our picture. All of us. At the same time. Now there's something building on the edge of the solar system and it's talking to someone else and not to us. The best team we can send is so damaged as to barely seem human--from the linguist who deliberately induced multiple personalities to the biologists who gave up their biological sense to graft on more tools to the half-brained narrator who has spent his life trying and failing to teach himself to be human. They're commanded by a sociopathic predator on a ship with its own agenda, and they're about to find out that humanity is the evolutionary pinnacle of a very tiny island. Which didn't work out so well for the dodo.

Thoughts: Blindsight is hard science fiction, in every sense of the term. This is no space opera. There will be no pirates, no shields, no sexy women whose only difference is a funny colored skin. And it's difficult--this is probably one of the more densely written books I've read in some time. You know how sometimes, when you're on the train, say, you space out for a paragraph or two and then keep on going without much really damage? Not happening with this book. If you skip a sentence, you'd better go back and reread it because there's very little that's repeated and quite a lot that's just hinted at.

It's one of the best-thought-out and most rewardingly challenging science fiction books I've read in quite some time. The author's overall point, which I'm not going to directly discuss here as it's kind of a spoiler (although there may be spoilers in the comments, is not a happy one and this is not a happy book. The protagonist had half of his brain burned away as a child to cure a horrific case of epilepsy and the missing tissue replaced by hardware. In doing so, his sense of empathy has been completely destroyed to the point that he's really closer to a good Turing machine than a sentient human. He rebuilt his ability to fake human interactions by careful observation and building of rules. It makes him very good at his job of interpreting complex systems by reducing them to surface information, and very bad at interacting with people in the long run. One of the major questions of the book turns on whether he and his crewmates, all altered and expanded and warped well beyond the original definitions of humanity, still count as human, and whether they should want to.

So why read this very-not-happy novel? Because it's brilliantly put together. Because the worldbuilding is subtle and deep. Because the questions it raises about the nature of consciousness are rather terribly unpleasant to consider, but perhaps all the more worthy of consideration because of that. Enormous swaths of the ideas behind this novel are based on research done in the past few decades, as we understand more and more of the weirdness of how our own brains function and why they might work that way. The end includes an impressive set of citations.

Which leads me to the one thing that really bothered me about the book. Most of this is based in extrapolations of real science, with the appropriate papers quoted in the end notes. But quoted alongside real, existing papers (some of which I actually recognized) is a series of fake quotes shoring up a bit of research he completely made up.

His captain is a vampire.

In his universe, which for all other intents and purposes is ours some time in the future, they discovered that one of the evolutionary offshoots of humanity was a species of sociopathic predators with an inability to create their own version of a protein found in human blood that were driven extinct when a genetic drift-induced tendency to go into convulsions from their visual cortex failing to process right angles ran up against the burgeoning human passion for architecture. Scientists then reingineered the creatures and brought them back to life for their data processing abilities. (It does kinda make sense, but is too complicated to bother explaining here.)

Now, I understand why Sarasti is a vampire--it plays a major role in both the plot and the theme. However. It bugs me to no end. Everything else is completely plausible and data-backed. Nothing else in the past or the present was changed. This one element, however, requires rewriting evolutionary history. To insert one of the most overdone monsters in fiction, at that. And the fact that he has fictional citations makes a mockery of the good, real science he does use. Again, I can see why he did it. But I'm unconvinced, when he has such exotic characters already running around, why he couldn't find a way to make his point and his plot without adding in fake science. It cheapens his point and weakens his argument.

But it's still worth reading.