Echopraxia (Firefall)

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.

It is worth it, for the ideas.

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.

If you asked me to talk about genre archetypes, I would respond with the following novels:

LITERARY NOVEL: East of Eden
ROMANTIC DETECTIVE: Hound of the Baskervilles
NOIR DETECTIVE: The Big Sleep
FAIR-PLAY MYSTERY: Murder on the Orient Express
CYBERPUNK: Neuromancer
SCIENCE FICTION: The Man in the High Castle
SPACE OPERA: Look to Windward

After that list, you would say "HARD SCI-FI". I would squint at you, trying to figure out your intent. And then we'd get into an incredible argument about whether or not I could nominate Blindsight and Echopraxia as a unit. You would have to toe a hard line, and you would have to wield the Starfish trilogy on top of Founation, and Ringworld, and your Vernor Vinge...

...and I contend that you would have taken the wrong side of a brutal, brutal fight, like taking the German Army in a WWI wargame...

...and I'm not 100% sure you'd win.