Blindsight (Firefall, #1)

by Peter Watts

Hardcover, 384 pages

English language

Published March 19, 2006 by Tor Books.

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

(12 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

Marek 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

I have only just encountered Watts's work. This book is a crashing tangle of ideas, drawing from evolutionary biology, to (most particularly) cognitive science and philosophy of mind of the late 1990s.

A ship, whose crew are all variously transhuman in diverse ways, are sent to communicate with first contact. The newcomers, however, are deeply mysterious, alien in the realest sense. The result a disorienting experience in which none of the available main characters are quite someone you can wholly empathise with, and we remain uncertain throughout of just what the encounter will involve for the crew or humanity generally.

My perception overall is this book, with its extensive references and sources section, is the kind of thing you might get if Michael Crichton wrote space opera (though perhaps more disciplined and sharper). It is jam packed with well executed ideas. Ultimately, I found it quite difficult to get through in parts simply because of just how utterly out of their depth everyone was, and how desperate and hopeless the contact mission would seem to be. I suspect this is indeed Watts's intent.

While it was nice to see the richness of the cognitive science being drawn on, my own theoretical commitments also mean that none of what is in play with regards to human cognition is really tenable though. That's a very niche complaint that most of the world won't have. A little more broadly is the easiness of the some of the evolutionary psychology though - some of which is I think a little problematic.

Overall, though, this is a very solid, well written space opera thriller, if a little grim.

moving to outside.ofa.dog reviewed Blindsight (Firefall, #1) by Peter Watts

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 the mic. In the first half there's a really clunky tendency to do foreshadowing very explicitly, which intensifies the macho storytelling feel. And the narrator is consistently casually ableist, even though there are aspects of the overall story and the narrator's life history which push back hard on the same.

I'm glad I read it, but not sure I can really recommend it.

4thace reviewed Blindsight (Firefall, #1) by Peter Watts

Review of 'Blindsight' on 'Goodreads'

2 stars

I can't fault his cleverness in setting up the plot, but the style of writing is not really for me. I am having a hard time figuring out who these characters are, and the dialogue and prose seem kind of strained, making it hard for me to read. I have noticed this in other stories by Watts as well. I've gotten a little over halfway through and I think it's time to give up on this.