Blindsight

Peter Watts

Oct 2006 · Firefall Book 1 · Sold by Macmillan

About this ebook

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.

At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Ratings and reviews

(I fed the cats) (I won't let any content slip, the above is already enough of a spoiler) It has been a few days since I finished this book and I still find myself thinking about some of the consequences. This is seriously the best book I've read this year by far. It forces you to reconsider, experience new views, defend your intuition. And you ultimately fail at that last part. Didn't really warm up to the caracters (except Sarasti, this faction needs to get a spin-off!), but the story is really not letting you off the hook. Sometimes you wonder whether you got that last page right, sometimes you reread half a "chapter". Sometimes you wonder about the 'jumpiness' of it all, and at least I felt like the saga isn't finished with the last page. Believe me, it is worth it..

Great book. Don't let the word 'vampire' scare you away, this is about transhumans and posthumans of various stripes trying to contend with one of the most alien intelligences in all of SF/F. I do not recommend to anyone who isn't ready for a heavy tale.

If anything, this book taught me that Hard Science Fiction is not for me. The descriptors are so scientific that it makes it even harder to picture/imagine, and half the time I don't even know what's going on. The bit of plot that seeped through in regular human language was interesting, I just wish I was intelligent enough to understand it on a whole. The characters are confusing at first and it took me until the halfway point to figure out who was who; the use of first names, last names, nicknames & titles are thrown around individually and it's hard to figure out who's saying what. Overall it was a decent story, and I'm sure it's a great book for some, but it's way above my reading level.

About the author

Peter Watts is a former marine biologist, flesh-eating-disease survivor and convicted felon whose novels—despite an unhealthy focus on space vampires—have become required texts for university courses ranging from Philosophy to Neuropsychology.

His work is available in 21 languages, has appeared in over 350 best-of-year anthologies, and been nominated for over 50 awards in a dozen countries. His (somewhat shorter) list of 20 actual wins includes the Hugo, the Shirley Jackson, and the Seiun.

Peter is the author of the Rifters novels (Starfish, Maelstrom) and the Firefall series (Blindsight, Echopraxia).