Blindsight by Peter Watts

As you can probably gather from a number of my SF reviews, I’m quite fond of the new space opera, ranging from that Vernor Vinge to the more edgy and extreme writers like Alistair Reynolds and Neil Asher (and many others in between). Peter Watts’s Blindsight sits on the spectrum near the later writers, it’s edgy (and often unlikable) characters and bizarre, sometimes nasty situations, at times reminiscent of parts of Reynolds or Asher, but with plenty of Strossian post-singularity perspective included, all combined in a way that seems fresh.

Several hundred years in the future, thousands of aliens objects gather around the earth, then burn in the atmosphere as they fall to earth. They seem to have been sent to survey the Earth, though it’s not clear by whom or for what. An old space probe, though, manages to pick up traces of a signal well beyond Pluto’s orbit. The spaceship Theseus is sent to investigate.

The ship is populated by a very strange cast of characters. The narrator, Siri, had half his brain removed as a child; he now is incapable of empathy, but can observe actions and understand motivations as well as predict what might happen next. The ship’s captain is a vampire, an offshoot of the human species that had been extinct since prehistoric times, but which has been revived. Vampire’s are more intelligent than humans, and have more acute mental perceptive abilities. The crew also includes a linguist who has had her brain surgically divided into separate “cores,” on which distinct individuals run, a biologist who has so many machine modifications that he’s more machine than human, and a professional soldier who is also a pacifist of sorts.

They find themselves in one of the most intriguing first contact situations ever. Far outside of the solar system, they are contacted by an alien vessel calling itself the Rorschach. It’s not clear though if the ship (which seems to be growing) is inhabited or whether the message they received was from an AI. And even as they try to investigate – under grueling radiation and intense magnetic fields, which interfere not only with perception but with cognition – but what they find doesn’t as much answer even their simplest questions but raise new ones.

The novel is an examination of the consciousness and intellect (and whether something can be “intelligent” but not self aware). It uses the modifications of the characters, the situations they are under, and the aliens they find to look at the various aspects of perception, cognition, and awareness. It doesn’t come to any easy answers – and some answers that it points toward are rather disquieting – but it raises a host of interesting questions. This is a very ambitious novel, one that really does try (and often succeeds) to break new ground.

Perhaps the weakest part of the novel is its characters. They are fascinating, but mostly interesting as examinations of extreme psychological states or glimpses at how the mind works. The only character who we see in much real depth is Siri, and even with him we felt hat we’re at a distance. We don’t really care much what happens to him or to any of the characters in the novel, even if we find what they are going through interesting in its own right. But perhaps there is no way around that in a novel of this sort.

Blindsight is on the Hugo ballot this year, and it is indeed a worthy book. Though in a year that featured three superb novels on the ballot – Eifelheim, Glasshouse, and Rainbows End (as well as the very entertaining His Majesty’s Dragon) — I don’t think it has much chance of winning (it will probably be fourth on my ballot). It was good enough though that I’m certainly going to look for more by Watts.

One minor quibble: the book includes an appendix that includes references to explain some of the science in the book. However, this appendix mixes sections on fictional science (the history/biology of Watts’s vampires) with sections of fact (many of the medical/psychological conditions explored in the book). The problem with doing this is that it causes the reader to question whether any of this is real. I don’t have much in-depth knowledge of psychology, and the only way I knew that the latter sections of the appendix were at least in part true is that I recognized a couple of the items he references in footnotes. But even so, I’m not sure if I should accept all that is listed in those sections of the appendix as true.