Set in 2082, Peter Watts' Blindsight is fast-moving hard SF that pulls readers into a futuristic world where a mind-bending alien encounter is about to unfold. After the Firefall, all eyes are locked heavenward as a team of specialists aboard the self-piloted spaceship Theseus hurtles outbound to intercept an unknown intelligence.
Release date:
October 3, 2006
Publisher:
Tom Doherty Associates
Print pages:
384
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With that classic opening line—spoken in the voice of Siri Keeton, first-person narrator—Peter Watts does not so much invite as abduct the reader into the experience of a Human being in the wrong place, at the wrong time, about to discover just how wrong the universe can really be.
Peter is crown royalty among writers of science fiction’s most difficult subgenre—that generally referred to as “hard” science fiction. His work is rigorous, unsentimental, and full of the sort of brilliant little moments of synthesis that make a nerd’s brain light up like a pinball machine. But he’s also a poet—a damned fine writer on a sentence level, who can make you feel the blank Lovecraftian indifference of the sea floor or of interplanetary space with the same ease facility with which he can pen an absolutely breathtaking passage of description.
Peter can write a paragraph about a spaceship course-correcting on a high-g burn that would make Herman Melville wring his hands in envy. He can also vividly ground the reader in the viscerality of a character’s experience, the physical sensations and emotions, and make even vastly unlikable people sympathetic and compelling.
His characters have personalities and depth, and if most of them aren’t very nice people, well, that’s appropriate to the dystopian hellholes they inhabit.
It’s my opinion that the book you hold in your hand is the best hard science fiction novel of the first decade of the twenty-first century—and I say that as someone who remains unconvinced of the correctness of its central argument.
Blindsight is the story of Siri Keeton, a man with half a brain, who is one member of the crew of the research vessel Theseus. The Theseus is crewed by a carefully selected group of technologically engineered superhumans, which—attempting to discover the source of a network of extraterrestrial probes—encounters alien life in a vessel that names itself Rorschach. While intensely dangerous, this alien life cannot even be described as malevolent, for it is as indifferent to Humanity as is everything else in the universe (except for Humanity itself). Blindsight’s contention is that this life form is better adapted to survival than Humanity in all imaginable ways, because it is not handicapped with this thing we call consciousness.
Which is to say, self-awareness, the I, the ability to observe and question our own actions—or at least to convince ourselves we are doing so.
That’s the first bit I have some quibbles with, based on my own interest in neurology. But you don’t have to agree with a novel’s premise or its thematic argument to find it a compelling work of fiction, and Peter has written a compelling work of fiction here. Also one that makes some well-thought-out, uncomfortable arguments.
It’s significant, I think, that every member of Theseus’s five-member crew is somebody who might be considered an alien—or a monster—in general Human society. They are all different from baseline—the cyborg, the vampire, the intentionally multiple mind, the mad scientist … and Siri Keeton: political officer. The person whose job it is to control the meaning, and the memes, in a world where meaning is an illusion.
Are they monsters? Are the aliens monsters? Or are they—and we—all just machines, and moral judgments utterly meaningless? As Siri himself wonders at a crucial part in the narrative—“Did he ever speak for himself? Did he ever decide anything on his own?”
In Blindsight, Peter gives us a universe that is capricious, agencyless, and coldly mechanical. He takes a rigorously behaviorist stance on Human neurology. His people are ticking clockworks—beautiful, strong, wounded, heroic ticking clockworks, with that perception familiar to so many of us of being trapped outside the course of our lives—observing, perhaps impeding, but not in control.
I keep returning to those words—Lovecraftian, indifferent—but Blindsight is also a brilliant argument for the inevitability of that same indifference. There’s an icy, logical nihilism at this book’s core that Watts never shies away from, that—in fact—he ruthlessly exploits. Horrible things happen for no reason, because the universe is like that, and Watts doesn’t give us the pretense of some higher meaning as a comfort.
His implacable alien monsters aren’t even really monstrous, any more than a plague is monstrous, or the pitiless vacuum of space. They’re just growing, because growing is what life does, and Humanity happens to be in the way.
In fact, some of the Human—or near-Human—people turn out to be, to coin a phrase, the real monsters here.
In its own way, though, that nihilism itself can be comforting, and this is another place where I quibble. If it’s all futile, we’re excused from trying. And not trying is so much easier than trying-and-failing. It’s soothing to have an excuse for hopelessness. And we do have a cultural bias toward believing that the most cynical response to any situation is the wisest and most knowledgable one.
The funny thing is, this quibble also does not detract from my assessment of this book as among the best of its kind. The fact that I find Peter’s argument insufficiently nuanced doesn’t actually change the fact that he makes it brilliantly, that his ideas are horrible and fascinating and glitter like a swarm of darkly jeweled beetle carapaces. In addition to cosmology and evolution, Peter hangs his plot on a hard-biology explanation for vampire legends that alone, in the hands of a lesser author, would be sufficient for a series of novels. Here, it’s just a subplot that reinforces the novel’s thematic argument: One more kind of instinct-driven monster to inhabit his monstrous world. One more creature that imagines itself real, confronted with an objective reality that is utterly oblivious to its existence.
This thematic freight—that all we see when we look out at the universe is our own selves reflected, because that is what we are programmed to see, and that our conscious minds may very well be holding us back and slowing us down (and making us miserable in the deal), and that we are all just part of the machine—is gorgeously developed on a dozen layers: in the choice of characters; in the biology and society (if you can call it that) of the aliens; in the unfolding of several timelines of plot and subplot; in the relationships between characters; in the exploration of grief and loss and unhappiness; in the relationships between the characters and their world, and their ship, and each other; and in Peter’s own language choices as, in the voice of Siri, he allows thematic statements to be made in a variety of ways.
Blindsight is one of those rare books that alters the reader’s perception of the world and of himself, if the reader is brave enough to tackle it head-on. The idea that consciousness is self-destructive is a heady one. I can think of exactly one other novel that even has the guts to take that one on: Kurt Vonnegut’s much-maligned Galapagos. But where Galapagos is a farce, Blindsight is a tour de force, a science fiction novel that should be able to make any alert reader question not only what just happened in its pages (or pixels), but exactly who is reading them.
And even more so, who is relating those events—and whether that person even exists at all.
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