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Contains SPOILERS
One of the things SF does really well, more so than any other genre I feel, is tell depressing stories. And Peter Watts' novel Blindsight does a better job of this than almost any other work of fiction - or non-fiction for that matter - that I've ever encountered. If it's not the most unremittingly grim story that has ever been written, it's certainly up there in the top ten. It's also, in my opinion, one ofthe best and most important SF novels of the century so far.
I went looking for my copy of the novel, to read again before I wrote this review, and it took me ages to find. I first suspected that it might have been taking advantage of my unconscious eye movements to hide from me in plain sight, much like the alien "Scramblers" our protagonists encounter on the Rorschach, but we're getting ahead of ourselves. It was either that or it had imploded into a black hole made of its own despair.
Or maybe it's just that I own too many books. The obvious solution to this last would have been to read the novel electronically – it's available to download for free, along with all of Watts' other novels and a selection of his shorter fiction, on his website http://rifters.com/
The plot recalls some of the great First Contact stories in its broad strokes - like Rendezvous with Rama or, more pertinently, Solaris and Rogue Moon. But the devil is very much in the details. In 2082 the Earth was treated to a cosmic fireworks display that answered, once and for all, the question of whether humanity is alone in the universe. Tens of thousands of alien probes have invisibly taken a snapshot of the Earth before spectacularly immolating themselves. Humanity, or rather post-Humanity, hastily sends its brightest and best to investigate in a state-of-the art,AI-controlled starship. There's the biologist who has so much machinery implanted that he can no longer feel his own skin, the linguist with surgically obtained multiple personalities, the pacifist soldier and her army of combat drones and the hyper-intelligent genetically engineered vampire. And there's also our first person narrator, who had half his brain removed as a child and is on the mission to allow an explanation of what occurs to be given to those back home who remain merely human.
We then get to see what happens when the team encounters an alien intelligence that undermines all the assumptions they have, both explicit and implicit, about what actually constitutes sentience. It, of course, goes horribly wrong and Watts vividly depicts the rapidly escalating nightmare that the massively over-matched and out-thought crew of geniuses soon finds itself in.
The book does, however, have a few problems that would preclude my feverishly recommending it to everyone I meet. This is Hard SF, amongst the hardest I've read; easily up there with Greg Egan's work (and at least one of his novels requires a working knowledge of General Relativity!). As such Blindsight may be No Fun At All for those without a passing interest in the philosophical and scientific concepts it explores. There is an awful lot of technical jargon in the book and few convenient infodumps to help the reader catch up; the characters don't bother explaining things they already know to one another. I'd hesitate to suggest that this is a book For Geeks Only, it's too well written for that, but it does come close on occasion.
This is a ferociously intelligent book that asks some extremely interesting questions about the nature of our place in the universe and what it means to be human. The scientific detail is extremely well drawn and the aliens themselves, when they finally appear, are a great feat of imagination. The characters are complex, possibly too complex at times, and not necessarily likeable, but the reader does find themselves invested in their fates. The book revels in an impressive and pervasive atmosphere of the dread of the unknown and has possibly the most downbeat ending I've read since Vernor Vinge casually destroyed the vast majority of the human race, as an aside, during the course of A Fire Upon The Deep.
I'll give it four and a half Incomprehensible Aliens out of five.
This post has been edited by stone monkey: 13 March 2011 - 08:16 PM
