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Notes -
So I read Blindsight in about 4 days ish. That was a ride. Waaaaaay less comfortable of a first contact story that Mote in God's Eye, which was the last novel I talked about which brought recommendations of Blindsight. Here, and also a buddy of mine who just lent me his copy.
I liked it... but I didn't enjoy it. Like, it was rich in concepts and took the story in directions I never saw coming. But I felt like it spent more time trying to fuck with me thanks to the layers of unreliable narrators than it did advancing a story. And then of course it's just a total downer from a humanist perspective. I feel like Blindsight is a better recommendation to go along with something from HP Lovecraft than an almost Star Trekkish "Rah Rah Humanity!" first contact story like The Mote in God's Eye.
I guess if you love hearing about how much we suck and are doomed and the universe will trample us with it's indifference, Blindsight is pretty good. But something in me says Lovecraft did it better. Probably a matter of taste.
That's Watts. I don't think his works are supposed to be enjoyed, unless you have a capacity of taking joy from existential dread and confusion about what anything ever even means. Like, I don't regret reading Watts, and probably will keep reading it if he writes more, but I am not sure I'd use the word enjoyed about it.
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There's a reason why the blurb/introduction has the following quote:
(Great book. Up there as an all-time fave.)
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Peter Watts is, in my opinion, a very original writer, but not a very good one. He introduces interesting concepts or combines concepts in interesting ways, but his misanthropy is downright monotonous, his characters are pretty much just "what if someone were extremely fucked up in this particular way", and the plots are always "everything's fucked and then it gets worse". Garnish with more or less novel scientific ideas, interesting to read, but not really good books as such.
My favorite flourish of his was in Echopraxia, where he casually dropped the non-bomb that reality in that book was proven to be a simulation, but it never comes up again and has no impact on anything.
I'll probably read anything he writes, if only to hear about his latest inventions.
Isn't the whole point of the novel thatGod is a virus, infecting our simulation ?
I'd say that's pretty plot relevant.
In fact, from a realism perspective, it is entirely believable that we might discover clear evidence that the universe is a sim, while simultaneously not being able to do anything about it. I assume the people with the capability to simulate an entire universe would have better sandboxing and intrusion hardening than AWS.
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Echopraxia was quite the mess. There were things I enjoyed about it, but it lacked a lot of narrative direction and also contained a lot of plot points that didn't make any sense at all just because the story had to happen.
I think in general Watts' short stories work better than his novels, since short stories lend themselves to the exploration of a single conceptual thread which is his clear strong point. With the exception of Blindsight and perhaps the Freeze-Frame Revolution I think things tend to fall apart when Watts is left to craft an extended narrative - there are often a whole lot of unrelated ideas not relevant to the story and there's a general lack of narrative cohesion. The lack of character depth also tends to become far more clear when he has more words to waste on them. Though, you don't really read Watts for his spellbinding characters.
My takeaway from the two books was this:
Beginning of Blindsight
Theseus arrives at Big Ben.
The Captain/Jukka Sarasti realizes almost immediately upon encountering Big Ben that all current life in the Solar System is fucked.
Big Ben is the alien. The Scramblers are just antibodies or pieces of the larger hivemind that is Big Ben/Rorschach.
The rest of the plot of Blindsight plays out, with The Captain knowing in advance that Theseus and its crew will be inevitably reprogrammed and consumed by the Scramblers.
The Captain executes a dead man’s hand strategy where whatever information Big Ben inevitably sends back down the telematter stream to Icarus is going to be edited/hacked.
End of Blindsight/Beginning of Echopraxia
Big Ben sends information back down the telematter stream to Icarus. Under normal circumstances, this would start the process of creating Big Ben 2, except now with access to all the matter and energy of the Sun, rather than the brown dwarf Big Ben 1 was found orbiting.
The Captain’s dead man’s hand strategy results in this information not beginning the process of making Big Ben 2, but rather Portia, which has similar capabilities to Big Ben 1 but is a competing organism. This hack was what the Captain was working on the whole time Theseus was engaging with Big Ben.
The Captain expects Portia to consume all life in the Solar System, but in a hivemind kind of way similar to the Bicams, thus allowing humanity and vampires to continue existing, sort of, while also being able to compete against entities like Big Ben.
End of Echopraxia
Portia is humanity. The human shaped bodies are just antibodies or pieces of the larger hivemind that is Portia.
Book 3 would be a war of super-intelligences between the alien Big Ben and the nearly as alien Portia, with all remaining human-esque entities caught in the middle.
I find it interesting to think that under this interpretation, the Captain is an exquisitely well-aligned super-intelligence. Its strategy is the only way to save anything of what humanity was, given the circumstances and universe as presented.
Anyways, to answer your question with my personal interpretation, the alien’s plan took a left turn when the Captain was able to execute some kind of Hail Mary man-in-the-middle attack on their information transfer to Icarus.
Incidentally, this all implies that almost all of the character actions in Blindsight are irrelevant to the plot, and even actively counterproductive, because the single most important thing occurring is the Captain making sure that Big Ben never susses out that there is another super-intelligence in the mix.
I actually kind of like this interpretation of the plot, that Rorschach initially intended to build another version of itself around the sun but Captain turned it into an advantage for itself instead. Actually a pretty good resolution of the apparent contradiction.
The crew in Blindsight even without this interpretation are mostly irrelevant to the Captain's plan - they spend most of their time following Captain's orders or being manipulated by Captain, and even then much of what they do doesn't end up directly contributing to the resolution of the story. Most of the events in the story were planned by Captain long beforehand. I actually think this is a theme of the story - your amount of actual agency in the plot inversely correlates with your level of consciousness.
Susan James is probably the most conscious individual on Theseus, and Rorschach easily turns her against herself and co-opts her for its own plans. Isaac Szpindel, who boasts a huge amount of augmented senses that elevate his sensory world far beyond an average baseline, gets unceremoniously killed early on in the book before he even has any time to put his skillset to use. Amanda Bates, the combat "specialist", is pretty much entirely useless and is just a glorified safety-catch to make sure her automated drones aren't as effective as they could be without her. Siri Keeton, the famously un-self-aware protagonist who does his job without realising how he does it, ends up being one of the least co-opted or affected by Rorschach, and ends up being a surprisingly relevant part of Captain's plan when it turns out his role is to play stenographer and relay all the information to the public (And how do they get him to do this? They break him to make him more human and more manipulable).
The critical revelation that the aliens are not conscious and are hostile was made by the vampire, who has a reduced level of consciousness compared to your baseline human - or Captain itself, depending on how you interpret their neural link. Literally everything else was planned by Captain, an automaton that likely operates in a manner not too dissimilar to how Rorschach itself does.
The fact that very few of the characters actually had any agency at all in Blindsight is a feature, not a bug. You're not reading about plucky oddballs making decisions and saving the world, you're reading about an extended game of 4D chess between two non-conscious gods in which the humans are a footnote at best. Theseus itself is an analogy for how the book says the human brain works, with the conscious actors being irrelevant at best and actively harmful at worst, and the non conscious actors being responsible for almost everything in spite of the fact they’re usually backgrounded in the plot.
Yeah, and this is where I will defend Watt’s writing in these two books, where Blindsight is his masterpiece and will probably go down as a classic of 21st-century science fiction. Sure, his characters are frequently more like plot coupons, but they’re not really the story. The story is about titanic forces moving around in the background, between the lines on the page, which is pretty cool when he pulls it off and the reader figures it out.
I think that’s basically the theme he’s always writing about, even his early Rifters series was like a first stab at that idea.
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I enjoyed the book so much I read it four times. Not that there aren't quibbles to be had with some of its storytelling, but the concepts and overall narrative are strong enough to overcome its deficits.
Vehemently disagree with this in particular. In theory Lovecraft would be something I'd enjoy, but I get pretty tired of his penchant for showing the reader incomprehensible unexplained creatures, then stressing endlessly how easily our world could be ended by them - IMO, that is trivially easy to achieve if no burden whatsoever is placed on the writer to explain anything or make it make sense. The challenge with this kind of fiction in my opinion is to introduce a concept inherently clever or terrifying enough to maintain that sense of starkness, alienness and cosmic horror even when the mystery box is opened fully. I get so tired of aliens where the entire point of their existence is to be alien for the sake of being alien - it's easy to write godmade horrors if you're just optimising for weirdness and incomprehensibility, it's not easy to write them if you're simultaneously trying to make them comprehensible and plausible while retaining the dread. The horror in cosmic horror comes from it feeling real enough such that the audience would actually entertain it as a possibility.
Blindsight's cosmic horrors are maybe the only ones in fiction that feel truly alien and scary to me. Most of the others I've encountered are basically souped-up elves with even less plausibility.
Strongly agreed. Blindsight is in my top 3 list, and Lovecraft? The man was afraid of miscegenation, his own shadow, and presumably, General Relativity, given how much he hates non-euclidean geometry.
I found the general concept of unknowable, eldritch entities interesting, but his execution lackluster. The Laundry Files does it way better, if we're sticking to the Mythos.
The laundry series is not half as scary as Scratch Monkey, his first novel.
Stross needs to be terrorized in real life to produce great art (e.g. Scratch Monkey was written while he was implementing credit card transactions..in Perl), and I'm seeing much promise here with the rise of nativism and Trump.
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It's not supposed to be enjoyable, but memorable.
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My feelings were similar. I appreciated it and respected it, but I didn't enjoy it and I've never felt the slightest urge to read it again.
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