I can’t say I enjoyed this one, and I’ve been trying to work out why, because the premise is genuinely interesting.
A crew is sent out to make contact with something that has turned up at the edge of the solar system, and the book builds towards an argument that consciousness might be a liability rather than an advantage. You could have something enormously intelligent with nobody at all at home inside it. That is a strong idea, and it’s the reason the book has the reputation it has.
It just doesn’t have any weight for me. The characters are so isolated, from each other and from themselves, that I never found anything to hold on to. And then there are the vampires. Watts brings back a predatory offshoot of humanity through biotech and puts one in command of the mission. I can see what it is doing thematically. It still completely turned me off, and once it had, I never really got back in.
The one passage I marked is about vision:
“We don’t really see anything except a few hi-res degrees where the eye focuses. Everything else is just peripheral blur, just […] light and motion. […] your eyes jiggle all the time, did you know that, Keeton? Saccades, they’re called. […] It only grabs these isolated freeze-frames, but your brain edits out the blanks and stitches an […] illusion of continuity into your head.” He turned to face me. “And you know what’s really amazing? If something only moves during the gaps, your brain just […] ignores it. It’s invisible.”
That is the book working properly. Your brain is quietly editing out the gaps and handing you a smooth story, and something that moved only during the gaps would be invisible to you. That’s exactly the sort of unsettling Watts is going for. I just wish more of it had landed that way for me.
All quotes are from Blindsight by Peter Watts.