Which is to say, self-awareness, the I, the ability to observe and question our own actions-or at least to convince ourselves we are doing so.
Blindsight’s contention is that this life form is better adapted to survival than Humanity in all imaginable ways, because it is not handicapped with this thing we call consciousness. While intensely dangerous, this alien life cannot even be described as malevolent, for it is as indifferent to Humanity as is everything else in the universe (except for Humanity itself).
The Theseus is crewed by a carefully selected group of technologically engineered superhumans, which-attempting to discover the source of a network of extraterrestrial probes-encounters alien life in a vessel that names itself Rorschach. It’s my opinion that the book you hold in your hand is the best hard science fiction novel of the first decade of the twenty-first century-and I say that as someone who remains unconvinced of the correctness of its central argument.īlindsight is the story of Siri Keeton, a man with half a brain, who is one member of the crew of the research vessel Theseus. His characters have personalities and depth, and if most of them aren’t very nice people, well, that’s appropriate to the dystopian hellholes they inhabit. He can also vividly ground the reader in the viscerality of a character’s experience, the physical sensations and emotions, and make even vastly unlikable people sympathetic and compelling. Peter can write a paragraph about a spaceship course-correcting on a high-g burn that would make Herman Melville wring his hands in envy. But he’s also a poet-a damned fine writer on a sentence level, who can make you feel the blank Lovecraftian indifference of the sea floor or of interplanetary space with the same ease facility with which he can pen an absolutely breathtaking passage of description. His work is rigorous, unsentimental, and full of the sort of brilliant little moments of synthesis that make a nerd’s brain light up like a pinball machine. Peter is crown royalty among writers of science fiction’s most difficult subgenre-that generally referred to as “hard” science fiction.
With that classic opening line-spoken in the voice of Siri Keeton, first-person narrator-Peter Watts does not so much invite as abduct the reader into the experience of a Human being in the wrong place, at the wrong time, about to discover just how wrong the universe can really be.
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