Blindsight (Firefall, #1)

384 pages

English language

Published March 19, 2006

ISBN:
978-0-7653-1218-1
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Goodreads:
48484

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4 stars (22 reviews)

It's been two months since a myriad of alien objects clenched about the Earth, screaming as they burned. The heavens have been silent since - until a derelict space probe hears whispers from a distant comet. Something talks out there: but not to us. Who to send to meet the alien, when the alien doesn't want to meet? Send a linguist with multiple-personality disorder, and a biologist so spliced to machinery he can't feel his own flesh. Send a pacifist warrior, and a vampire recalled from the grave by the voodoo of paleogenetics. Send a man with half his mind gone since childhood. Send them to the edge of the solar system, praying you can trust such freaks and monsters with the fate of a world. You fear they may be more alien than the thing they've been sent to find - but you'd give anything for that to be …

2 editions

Big ideas but strangely hollow

3 stars

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.

An exploration of consciousness

5 stars

From sociopaths to truly alien aliens, from simulating empathy to seeing without perception, from unfeeling predators to semi-sentient AI, from multiple personalities living in one brain to brains replaced and enhanced by machinery, Blindsight explores how and why experience is conscious – or not.

And it turns our most important assumption about consciousness on its head – that it's the epitome of evolutionary progress. This is ultimately the question the book poses: What if it's not? To explore it, it resurrects vampires, narrates unreliably, poses alternately as a space opera and as hard sci-fi, and is at the end completely of its own kind.

If you're into mind-expanding science fiction, this is a must read – even if it is ultimately mind-deflating. (Which I won't explain further to not spoiler anything, so please, find out yourself!)

reviewed Blindsight (Firefall, #1) by Peter Watts

The uncertainty of first contact, amid the uncertainty of human contact.

4 stars

Content warning Mildly spoilery review, no details

Give me more!

5 stars

What readers love about AIs is that they often really want to understand humans and thus, observe them closely, and register all their body language signals etc. But we have no idea if an AI would be interested in humans. It's just good for human readers if it does.

In this book, Watts does something similar but without AI: there is this person who's lost half their brain by accident, so in order to understand humans, this person needs to observe them very closely and detect all their signals. Unlike we "normal humans" who get these signals subconsciously, this person evaluates all the signals consciously, right before our reading eyes. This was what I liked the most.

But the rest of the story is absolutely great, too. How the aliens move unseen etc. I really like Peter Watts and damn! Just accept the vampire because it's cool and makes sense …

Too much like pre 1970s sci-fi

2 stars

This book has some interesting ideas, but I really struggled with following the storyline, but more, this felt like something from pre-1970s sci-fi, with all the white maleness that contained, and some of the 'slang', such as 'spaz' are just appalling. The book was published in 2006 and there is no excuse for including such offensive and abelist language. These things made it not a great read and I stopped half-way through.

Very mixed bag of a book

3 stars

First things first, some content warnings about the book: it contains a lot of violence, a narrator who uses ableist language and ideas repeatedly, and a sort of sensory-illusion body horror that I thought was one of the book's strong points but could be deeply disturbing for the wrong reader.

I want to like this book. It does a great job of imagining aliens who are very deeply alien and in unsettling ways. And at it's best it's a tautly narrated story of the terrifying encounter with them. It also plays some amusing games with vampire tropes, and poses interesting questions about what counts as life, sentience, intelligence, etc.

But I found some of the author's tics grating enough to really put me off. The voice is irritatingly macho-male, to the extent that it makes me, a cis man, want to yell at the author to shut up and cede …

Review of 'Blindsight' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

This book is fantastic. It's just far enough in the future for the technology to be almost understandable. It throws you into the world without explanation, expecting you to pick up the necessary information as you go along. The characters are interesting. The concepts are wild. This is the first "hard" science fiction novel I've read, and if the others are anything like this then I will definitely read more.

Review of 'Blindsight' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

short review in ukrainian:
http://www.tivasyk.info/2010/08/blog-post_17.html
----->8-----
звісно, ім’я канадця пітера вотса невідоме пересічному українцеві. та й непересічному — зайнятому своїми сучукрлітськими справами — також. і це нормально: аж надто багато у світі пишеться й видається всього, тож будь-який менйстрім — це лише невеличкий шматочок жувальної гумки, штучно надутий рекламою та нерозбірливою аудиторією до розмірів величезної повітряної кулі. тим часом якщо трішки поцікавитися, виявиться, що вотс приймав участь в роботі над ігровими проектами homeworld 2 та crisis 2.

blidnsight — фантастична повість з дещо незвичним сюжетом: у віддаленому майбутньому на околицях сонячної системи люство реєструє невідомий об’єкт явно іншопланетного походження, найімовірніше космічний апарат, але велетенських розмірів… чи має він команду, і що собою являють прибульці? на розвідку людство посилає команду, кожного учасника якої важко навіть назвати людиною… але саме від них залежить, яким буде перший контакт. все просто? стривайте, автор готує сюрприз, вартий читання.

книжка доступна вільно на сайті rifters.com в …

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