A follow-up to the Hugo Award-nominated Blindsight, Echopraxia is set in a 22nd-century world transformed by scientific evangelicals, supernatural beings and ghosts, where defunct biologist Daniel Bruks becomes trapped on a spaceship destined to make an evolutionary-changing discovery.
If you like ideas more than… writing… this may be for you!
2 stars
I continued on to this after reading Blindsight, because even though I didn't love it I had some enduring questions. An error on my part. There were more deliberate ambiguities than plot points in this book.
I won't provide a plot précis. This has some compelling concepts and big ideas, but was frankly a mess. Characters' motivations remain inexplicable even at the end of the book.
Amusingly this AMA with the author seems to boil down to "you're reading it wrong". Authors, please get over yourselves.
The follow up to his 2006 "Blindsight", "Echopraxia" is yet quite a separate narrative from its predecessor. There is some connecting tissue, but this is quite a different tale, and you'd miss very little if you read it by itself.
The story is set in a triple aftermath. First contact has left humanity with species-wide existential angst; a separate set of crises have left the world (already reeling from climate apocalypse), struggling with a very science-fictiony, rather than horror, undead problem (two of them, actually); and more locally, a violent confrontation leaves the protagonist and a group of strange maybe-trans-human allies in a race across the solar system.
While "Blindsight" went outward, this book heads mostly inward, toward the sun, and a station upon which the world relies for its energy. And something's not quite right...
As with the first book, the tale here is one of disorientation. The protagonist …
The follow up to his 2006 "Blindsight", "Echopraxia" is yet quite a separate narrative from its predecessor. There is some connecting tissue, but this is quite a different tale, and you'd miss very little if you read it by itself.
The story is set in a triple aftermath. First contact has left humanity with species-wide existential angst; a separate set of crises have left the world (already reeling from climate apocalypse), struggling with a very science-fictiony, rather than horror, undead problem (two of them, actually); and more locally, a violent confrontation leaves the protagonist and a group of strange maybe-trans-human allies in a race across the solar system.
While "Blindsight" went outward, this book heads mostly inward, toward the sun, and a station upon which the world relies for its energy. And something's not quite right...
As with the first book, the tale here is one of disorientation. The protagonist is not able to understand or keep up with any of the other characters. While this provides the basis for exposition as he figures things out (slowly), it is mostly frustrating for us as there can be no sense of agency, just hopeless thrashing and occasionally being baled out by the much more capable and informed non-POV characters. The ideas are interesting, and often compelling, but the action is often painful, given the impossibility of agency.
Surely the best part of this novel was the author's notes section at the back of the book where all the scientific interests that inspired Watts to write this novel are listed and explored to some degree. In the novel itself, those are probably the only worthy bits. Watts excels at creatively expressing the realized points of speculative theories and Echopraxia is a successful Hard Scifi novel in that regard. Sadly, in all other regards this story cannot compare to Blindsight. He ditched emotional connection and chose interior lecture hall and the result was unsurprisingly easy for me to ditch altogether. If you are in the mood to contemplate the scientific underpinnings of this story and would rather set aside the mushy stuff of Blindsight (or, like, literature) then you will enjoy this book very much. His creative synthesis of theory into something like a plot is dazzling for its …
Surely the best part of this novel was the author's notes section at the back of the book where all the scientific interests that inspired Watts to write this novel are listed and explored to some degree. In the novel itself, those are probably the only worthy bits. Watts excels at creatively expressing the realized points of speculative theories and Echopraxia is a successful Hard Scifi novel in that regard. Sadly, in all other regards this story cannot compare to Blindsight. He ditched emotional connection and chose interior lecture hall and the result was unsurprisingly easy for me to ditch altogether. If you are in the mood to contemplate the scientific underpinnings of this story and would rather set aside the mushy stuff of Blindsight (or, like, literature) then you will enjoy this book very much. His creative synthesis of theory into something like a plot is dazzling for its creativity. If you want a novel full of the kinds of characters that made Blindsight so unique you might want to look elsewhere.
I read Echopraxia as part of the Firefall collection, so immediately after reading both Blindsight (although I did take a break to read The Colonel). Honestly, I was underwhelmed. It feels like it is trying too hard to be Blindsight. The sudden twists are there, just like Blindsight, but without any of the buildup. The characters are interesting, but many of them lack nuance. Some even do things just for the sake of being shocking. The ending made the entire book feel pointless. Ultimately, I'd only recommend reading Echopraxia if you just really want more of the Firefall universe.
