eBook, 384 pages
English language
Published Oct. 3, 2006 by Tor.
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 …
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.
The ideas are compelling, and the inclusion of recreated vampires is a weird but interesting diversion. There's no emotional core though. In some ways that's by design - the primary narrative POV is of someone who's had significant, personality-destroying psychosurgery. I found myself asking why should I care about any of this throughout.
As someone on Peter Watts' own site is quoted, "Whenever I find my will to live becoming too strong, I read Peter Watts." Reader beware.
I re-read it just recently. This book fundamentally shifted my perspective on my own humanity, and maybe not in a good way. But it did a really good job! I think it took me a few reads to really get a handle on what was happening in the story and that only made the hammer blows of its conclusion stronger.
Has a permanent space on my shelf, except my copy keeps walking out of my house because I lend it out so much.
The author has started giving away this book, available here for free on his own site: www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm
But you might want to consider donating: www.rifters.com/real/donation.htm
Once you've read the book, check out this gorgeous fan-made film: blindsight.space/
