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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   3774 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for July 11, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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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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