beaneater
“How do you say 'We come in peace' when the very words are an act of war?”
Blindsight is such a unique book, not just for its plot but for the complexity of the philosophical questions the author raises. A spaceship of five, including a vampire as the leader, sets out on a mission to explore deep space beyond the Kuiper belt after the Firefall phenomenon happens on Earth. A synthesist and our main protagonist, Siri Keeton, guides us through the events of the mission. The story can become hazy and overwhelming at times, because Siri Keeton lost half his brain to an intensive medical procedure as a child, leaving him cut off from his own emotions. He can read and predict other people perfectly, but he experiences even his own feelings as something to observe from the outside rather than live from within. That distance, combined with his job as a synthesist (someone trained to translate and report on things he isn't required to actually understand) makes him a narrator you can never fully trust, not because he lies, but because he might not grasp the meaning of what he's accurately describing.
Peter Watts touches on some genuinely heavy philosophical questions for a sci-fi book: what is consciousness, and is it even necessary for intelligence? On top of that, Watts introduces vampires, not the Dracula or Twilight kind, but a scientifically reverse-engineered kind, where even the old folklore gets a cold biological explanation instead of being thrown out. They're unsettling in the same way the unknown source of the Firefall is unsettling, and in the same way everything in this book that makes you ask "why?" is unsettling.
“How do you say 'We come in peace' when the very words are an act of war?”
Blindsight is such a unique book, not just for its plot but for the complexity of the philosophical questions the author raises. A spaceship of five, including a vampire as the leader, sets out on a mission to explore deep space beyond the Kuiper belt after the Firefall phenomenon happens on Earth. A synthesist and our main protagonist, Siri Keeton, guides us through the events of the mission. The story can become hazy and overwhelming at times, because Siri Keeton lost half his brain to an intensive medical procedure as a child, leaving him cut off from his own emotions. He can read and predict other people perfectly, but he experiences even his own feelings as something to observe from the outside rather than live from within. That distance, combined with his job as a synthesist (someone trained to translate and report on things he isn't required to actually understand) makes him a narrator you can never fully trust, not because he lies, but because he might not grasp the meaning of what he's accurately describing.
Peter Watts touches on some genuinely heavy philosophical questions for a sci-fi book: what is consciousness, and is it even necessary for intelligence? On top of that, Watts introduces vampires, not the Dracula or Twilight kind, but a scientifically reverse-engineered kind, where even the old folklore gets a cold biological explanation instead of being thrown out. They're unsettling in the same way the unknown source of the Firefall is unsettling, and in the same way everything in this book that makes you ask "why?" is unsettling.