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zhengsterz's review against another edition
adventurous
mysterious
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.5
Science fiction book about how genetically altered humans and vampires encounter aliens and the subsequent fall of civilization at the hands of this superior alien race.
First half had a protagonist in Siri Keeton, a man who acts as a translator between higher order humans and baselines humans, forced into this field by childhood disfigurement which we later learn was a result of his father's involvement in clandestine military activities which impacted his development in the womb. He is sent on the suicide mission to meet with the alien ship and ends up being the only survivor beeming back his finding to earth on his transit back.
Second half follows Daniel Bruks, a guy who refuses to get augments and is a baseline. Manipulated by the very end by the higher order beings around him to join them on a trip to find out what happened to the original crew, he ends up being infected by something alien allowing him to even best a vampire by the end of the novel, once they end up back on earth.
First half was better with a more endearing crew, writing style was not really that nice, really cool ideas about vampires.
First half had a protagonist in Siri Keeton, a man who acts as a translator between higher order humans and baselines humans, forced into this field by childhood disfigurement which we later learn was a result of his father's involvement in clandestine military activities which impacted his development in the womb. He is sent on the suicide mission to meet with the alien ship and ends up being the only survivor beeming back his finding to earth on his transit back.
Second half follows Daniel Bruks, a guy who refuses to get augments and is a baseline. Manipulated by the very end by the higher order beings around him to join them on a trip to find out what happened to the original crew, he ends up being infected by something alien allowing him to even best a vampire by the end of the novel, once they end up back on earth.
First half was better with a more endearing crew, writing style was not really that nice, really cool ideas about vampires.
alexgsmith's review
Blindsight
In the year 2082 sixty-five thousand objects of unknown origin fall through the atmosphere of Earth, burning. A ship and crew are hastily assembled and dispatched toward the estimated source, and what follows is one of the most original and compelling first contact stories I’ve ever read. The crew is composed of the bleeding edge of humanity; people that have willingly partitioned their brains into distinct selves, people so augmented they can see x-rays. A literal vampire captains the ship, an extinct predator brought back from the pleistocene, hyper-intelligent and controlled by their dependence on drugs that mitigate the seizure inducing effect of intersecting right angles (or the ‘crucifix glitch’).
One of the things I enjoy about science fiction is how through the alien, both in the sense of the futuristic and the other, it can explore reality in ways that may otherwise be difficult. Talking about this book is difficult without spoiling too much of the story, but it asks excellent questions about the nature of consciousness and what it means to be human. Dense with ideas but still very readable for such hard sci-fi, and while some language did stick out a bit awkwardly, overall it’s a definite recommendation from me.
Echopraxia
Echopraxia is set around the same time as Blindsight and follows events on Earth and elsewhere in the solar system. While the story in Blindsight served to explore and embody the ideas of that book, I didn’t find the same complementary relationship in Echopraxia. Here the plot seems more to be a way of jumping from idea to idea with nothing seemingly particularly fleshed out or cohesive to me; it was actually a bit confusing overall, really. There’s definitely some interesting stuff here that somewhat builds on Blindsight in terms of free will and the nature of existence, but I’d probably suggest picking up Blindsight standalone.
In the year 2082 sixty-five thousand objects of unknown origin fall through the atmosphere of Earth, burning. A ship and crew are hastily assembled and dispatched toward the estimated source, and what follows is one of the most original and compelling first contact stories I’ve ever read. The crew is composed of the bleeding edge of humanity; people that have willingly partitioned their brains into distinct selves, people so augmented they can see x-rays. A literal vampire captains the ship, an extinct predator brought back from the pleistocene, hyper-intelligent and controlled by their dependence on drugs that mitigate the seizure inducing effect of intersecting right angles (or the ‘crucifix glitch’).
One of the things I enjoy about science fiction is how through the alien, both in the sense of the futuristic and the other, it can explore reality in ways that may otherwise be difficult. Talking about this book is difficult without spoiling too much of the story, but it asks excellent questions about the nature of consciousness and what it means to be human. Dense with ideas but still very readable for such hard sci-fi, and while some language did stick out a bit awkwardly, overall it’s a definite recommendation from me.
Echopraxia
Echopraxia is set around the same time as Blindsight and follows events on Earth and elsewhere in the solar system. While the story in Blindsight served to explore and embody the ideas of that book, I didn’t find the same complementary relationship in Echopraxia. Here the plot seems more to be a way of jumping from idea to idea with nothing seemingly particularly fleshed out or cohesive to me; it was actually a bit confusing overall, really. There’s definitely some interesting stuff here that somewhat builds on Blindsight in terms of free will and the nature of existence, but I’d probably suggest picking up Blindsight standalone.
They clenched around the world like a fist, each black as the inside of an event horizon until those last bright moments when they all burned together. They screamed as they died. Every radio up to geostat groaned in unison, every infrared telescope went briefly snowblind. Ashes stained the sky for weeks afterwards; mesospheric clouds, high above the jet stream, turned to glowing rust with every sunrise. The objects, apparently, consisted largely of iron. Nobody ever knew what to make of that.
gerbilreads's review
5.0
Utterly astonishing. This book has dared tread to places I’ve never even considered existed and managed it all with nail-biting tension. Watts explains concepts that are by their very nature post-human, post-homunculus, but does so in ways which are engaging and understandable for us basic humans. Where he got his ideas, I will never understand, regardless that he spells them out in detail in the post-script! Completely unique and masterful in scope and design.
fionagerman's review against another edition
Was trying to read on borrowbox but I do t think its the right book for that. O just couldn't get into the story. Will return to it. I am sure.
thearbiter89's review against another edition
4.0
Firefall is an omnibus collection of Blindsight and Echopraxia - two novels by Canadian sf author Peter Watts, and set in the same universe, that deal with a cataclysmic first contact event.
After the titular Firefall event, in which the Earth was surveilled by an unknown force using a grid of spaceborne objects that created a terrifying visual spectacle seen by millions, the planet embarked on a concerted effort to seek answers. The ship Theseus, staffed by Earth's best and brightest, embarked on a journey to the Kuiper Belt to investigate a mysterious signal - the story of Blindsight.
Meanwhile, back on Earth, a clandestine expedition is led by a coterie of cognitively-enhanced monks to the centre of the solar system to investigate similar anomalies originating from Icarus, a space station that taps on the sun's energies and beams power to fuel Earth's post-scarcity economy.
When first released, Blindsight was rightly regarded as a tour-de-force, a work of considerable imaginative power and philosophical weight. It was one of the seminal works to really try to simulate the posthuman experience, of being surrounded by people whose cognition and sensoria were technologically enhanced to the point of permanent divergence from the human baseline. Watts describes people who split their personalities to benefit from parallel multi-core processing, doctors who treat their surgical robots as extensions of themselves, and information processing specialists with implants in their brains to allow them to process informational typologies with a kind of synaesthetic abandon.
Then there's also the vampires, perhaps Watt's most original contribution to the annals of sf ideas to date. He posits that vampires were a real subspecies of human cannibals that evolved neural structures to excel at hunting and lateral thinking, but who existed as solitary hunters who developed the ability to hibernate for long periods of time in order to avoid decimating their main source of food. However, they evolved with a debilitating maladaptive trait - developing seizures whenever their visual cortices were subjected to right angles - the crucifix glitch, which drove them to extinction just as baseline humans were coming into their own. In the brave new world of the 2090s, vampires have been resurrected by mankind to act as their strategists, and one serves as the expedition commander of the Theseus mission, leveraging on their unique cognitive gifts. It's an interesting take on how to explain the origins of vampire mythology and incorporate it into a future history.
The thematic core of Blindsight is mediated through its strange, starfish-like aliens - aliens that exhibit intelligence without sentience, purposefulness without a sense of 'I'. Indeed, written in 2006, the book was quite prescient about the possibility - only now becoming more and more apparent, that advanced AI algorithms can perform feats of intelligence once thought to be the preserve of sentient organisms. But Watts pushes this even further - he posits that consciousness, as an epiphenomenon, is perhaps in itself an unnecessary evolutionary maladaptation - introducing doubt, self-consciousness, and response lag to processes that otherwise would perform just fine, if not better, without it.
This ties into the entire premise of blindsight - a real phenomenon where the conscious mind cannot perceive visual input but the hindbrain still reacts to the raw visual data with reflexes that precede and preclude conscious impulse. It also manifests in protagonist Siri Keeton's core competency - as a information processing specialist who doesn't need to consciously analyse the information he receives, but leaves it to implants that allow him to bypass consciousness and only derive conclusions from the abstract topologies that his augmented sensorium creates.
In that sense, there is a very strong thematic sensibility running through Blindsight - one which, in the best tradition of science fiction, raises mind-expanding possibilities amidst the backdrop of a wickedly evocative science fiction milieu. It's certainly not for the initiate to sf - it bandies around elements of the genre like a clown juggles chainsaws, and gets almost absurdly technical at times. But Watts writes beautifully and the bounds of his imagination know only the limits of what is describable by the outer limits of scientific plausibility.
Unfortunately, Echopraxia, written almost a decade later, is a shadow of its illustrious predecessor. Watts overdoes his complexity shtick in this offering, driving the wagon off into a singularity of techno-verbiage. The thematic thrust - which, ostensibly is that of the fact that free will is an illusion - does not find as much purchase, and the narrative lurches from one scene to another through the disbelieving eyes of as baseline a human as they come - with the concomitant confusion that ensues when posthuman supergeniuses and implacable aliens face off in a multidimensional chess game.
One of the annoying things about Echopraxia is how Watts writes his posthumans. They're described as being so fiercely intelligent to the point of omniscience, and Watts treats them as such. This leads to plots where the inexplicable or the illogical is just passed off as being part of some greater intellect's recondite stratagem, which the baselines are not equipped to even apprehend. Even at the end of the book, it's not immediately clear to the protagonist what his little expedition was all about, apart from a few vague speculations. Watts is content to let the whole "too advanced for our understanding" thing explain the weirdness of the plot.
That's not to say there aren't any good ideas - the worldbuilding is arguably slightly better than Blindsight, and again stuffed with enough ideas to fill a while other sf trilogy. Whether it's hive-mind ascetics who induce tumours in their brains to bootstrap their intelligence into posthuman proportions, weaponized tornadoes, or self-replicating intelligent ooze, Watts never disappoints in that department. But it's a shame that Echopraxia doesn't seem to soar quite as high as Blindsight did in synthesising its many ideas into a thematically sound whole.
I give Blindsight: 4.5 out of 5 scramblers
I give Echopraxia: 3.5 out of 5 Bicamerals
After the titular Firefall event, in which the Earth was surveilled by an unknown force using a grid of spaceborne objects that created a terrifying visual spectacle seen by millions, the planet embarked on a concerted effort to seek answers. The ship Theseus, staffed by Earth's best and brightest, embarked on a journey to the Kuiper Belt to investigate a mysterious signal - the story of Blindsight.
Meanwhile, back on Earth, a clandestine expedition is led by a coterie of cognitively-enhanced monks to the centre of the solar system to investigate similar anomalies originating from Icarus, a space station that taps on the sun's energies and beams power to fuel Earth's post-scarcity economy.
When first released, Blindsight was rightly regarded as a tour-de-force, a work of considerable imaginative power and philosophical weight. It was one of the seminal works to really try to simulate the posthuman experience, of being surrounded by people whose cognition and sensoria were technologically enhanced to the point of permanent divergence from the human baseline. Watts describes people who split their personalities to benefit from parallel multi-core processing, doctors who treat their surgical robots as extensions of themselves, and information processing specialists with implants in their brains to allow them to process informational typologies with a kind of synaesthetic abandon.
Then there's also the vampires, perhaps Watt's most original contribution to the annals of sf ideas to date. He posits that vampires were a real subspecies of human cannibals that evolved neural structures to excel at hunting and lateral thinking, but who existed as solitary hunters who developed the ability to hibernate for long periods of time in order to avoid decimating their main source of food. However, they evolved with a debilitating maladaptive trait - developing seizures whenever their visual cortices were subjected to right angles - the crucifix glitch, which drove them to extinction just as baseline humans were coming into their own. In the brave new world of the 2090s, vampires have been resurrected by mankind to act as their strategists, and one serves as the expedition commander of the Theseus mission, leveraging on their unique cognitive gifts. It's an interesting take on how to explain the origins of vampire mythology and incorporate it into a future history.
The thematic core of Blindsight is mediated through its strange, starfish-like aliens - aliens that exhibit intelligence without sentience, purposefulness without a sense of 'I'. Indeed, written in 2006, the book was quite prescient about the possibility - only now becoming more and more apparent, that advanced AI algorithms can perform feats of intelligence once thought to be the preserve of sentient organisms. But Watts pushes this even further - he posits that consciousness, as an epiphenomenon, is perhaps in itself an unnecessary evolutionary maladaptation - introducing doubt, self-consciousness, and response lag to processes that otherwise would perform just fine, if not better, without it.
This ties into the entire premise of blindsight - a real phenomenon where the conscious mind cannot perceive visual input but the hindbrain still reacts to the raw visual data with reflexes that precede and preclude conscious impulse. It also manifests in protagonist Siri Keeton's core competency - as a information processing specialist who doesn't need to consciously analyse the information he receives, but leaves it to implants that allow him to bypass consciousness and only derive conclusions from the abstract topologies that his augmented sensorium creates.
In that sense, there is a very strong thematic sensibility running through Blindsight - one which, in the best tradition of science fiction, raises mind-expanding possibilities amidst the backdrop of a wickedly evocative science fiction milieu. It's certainly not for the initiate to sf - it bandies around elements of the genre like a clown juggles chainsaws, and gets almost absurdly technical at times. But Watts writes beautifully and the bounds of his imagination know only the limits of what is describable by the outer limits of scientific plausibility.
Unfortunately, Echopraxia, written almost a decade later, is a shadow of its illustrious predecessor. Watts overdoes his complexity shtick in this offering, driving the wagon off into a singularity of techno-verbiage. The thematic thrust - which, ostensibly is that of the fact that free will is an illusion - does not find as much purchase, and the narrative lurches from one scene to another through the disbelieving eyes of as baseline a human as they come - with the concomitant confusion that ensues when posthuman supergeniuses and implacable aliens face off in a multidimensional chess game.
One of the annoying things about Echopraxia is how Watts writes his posthumans. They're described as being so fiercely intelligent to the point of omniscience, and Watts treats them as such. This leads to plots where the inexplicable or the illogical is just passed off as being part of some greater intellect's recondite stratagem, which the baselines are not equipped to even apprehend. Even at the end of the book, it's not immediately clear to the protagonist what his little expedition was all about, apart from a few vague speculations. Watts is content to let the whole "too advanced for our understanding" thing explain the weirdness of the plot.
That's not to say there aren't any good ideas - the worldbuilding is arguably slightly better than Blindsight, and again stuffed with enough ideas to fill a while other sf trilogy. Whether it's hive-mind ascetics who induce tumours in their brains to bootstrap their intelligence into posthuman proportions, weaponized tornadoes, or self-replicating intelligent ooze, Watts never disappoints in that department. But it's a shame that Echopraxia doesn't seem to soar quite as high as Blindsight did in synthesising its many ideas into a thematically sound whole.
I give Blindsight: 4.5 out of 5 scramblers
I give Echopraxia: 3.5 out of 5 Bicamerals
tomistro's review against another edition
4.0
Ensimmäinen puolikas, Blindsight, 5/5. Toinen puolikas, Echopraxia, ehkä 3/5. Ei jotenkin yllä ideoidensa ja draamallisen jännitteensä puolesta samalla tasolle. Vaikka huippukohtiakin toki on. Samanlaista whoa-efektiä ei kuitenkaan aiheuttanut.
dr_ju's review
5.0
“I am naked as I type this. I was naked writing the whole damn book”. I have to comply with the protocol when writing the review too.
- “Living fourteen thousand years didn’t make me a genius, I just had time.
- Time... You can’t see it, you can’t hear it, you can’t weight it, you can’t... measure it in a laboratory. It’s a subjective sense of... becoming what we are instead of what we were a nanosecond ago, becoming what we will be in another nanosecond. The whole piece of time is a landscape existing, we form behind us and we move, we move through it, slice by slice.
- Clocks measure time.
- No, they measure themselves; the objective referee of a clock is another clock.
- All very interesting, but what has it go to do with...”
- This book? “Fifty thousand years ago there were these three guys spread out across the plain, and they each heard something rustling in the grass. The first one thought it was a tiger and he ran like hell, and it was a tiger but he got away. The second one thought the rustling was a tiger and he ran like hell, but it was only the wind, and his friends all laughed at him for being such a chickenshit. But the third guy, He thought it was only the wind, so he shrugged it off, and a tiger had him for dinner. And the same thing happened a million times across the thousands of generations. And after a while everyone was seeing tiger in the grass even if there weren’t any tigers because even chickenshits have more kids than corpses do. And from those humble beginnings we learned to see faces in the clouds and portents in the stars, to see agency in randomness, because neutral selection favors the paranoid. Even here in the twenty first century you can make people more honest just by scribbling a pair of eyes on the wall with a Sharpie. Even now. We are wired to believe that unseen things are watching us.
And it came to pass that certain people figured out how to use that. They painted their faces or they wore funny hats, they shook their rattles and waved their crosses and they said: << Yes, there are tigers in the grass, there are faces in the sky, and they will be very angry if you do not obey their commandments. You must make offerings to appease them, you must bring gold and grain and altar boys for our delectation or they will strike you down and send you to the Awful place.>>
And people believed them by the billions, because after all, they could see the invisible tigers.”
- I can see what you mean; every slice of our history is marked by chickenshits and tigers.
- “At some point in our evolution we started to make decisions consciously, and we’re not very good at it.
- Identity changes by the second; you turn into someone else every time a new thought rewires your brain. You’re a different person than you were ten minutes ago.”
- That was my line, Steve, I am the smart guy and you play the apprentice.
- I wrote those lines. You are just standing there naked taking credit for them. “You’re a stick-man, frozen in some perverse rigor vitae. I stand between the Wizzard of Oz and the man behind the curtain. I am the curtain. All kinds of animals come here, occasional demons too.” You are the demon that steals my ideas to post them sometimes on Goodreads.
- What do you want me to tell them, about sci-fi stuff, rewiring the brain in every way you can’t imagine? It’s not just the mundane sensory stuff; it’s not just feeling colors and tasting sounds. They can literally see time. Sci-fi is overrated, proving you can’t think outside the box is trending now; every time someone says “think outside the box” what he really means is “think bigger boxes”. Empty space scares us, dark always put fear into man, we build boxes and call them homes, and we invent names like stratosphere and call it Earth. We put mirrors inside our boxes and we look at ourselves, how we work, what consciousness is. We cannot imagine what is outside our tridimensional box. But you could get an idea by reading this book.
- “Living fourteen thousand years didn’t make me a genius, I just had time.
- Time... You can’t see it, you can’t hear it, you can’t weight it, you can’t... measure it in a laboratory. It’s a subjective sense of... becoming what we are instead of what we were a nanosecond ago, becoming what we will be in another nanosecond. The whole piece of time is a landscape existing, we form behind us and we move, we move through it, slice by slice.
- Clocks measure time.
- No, they measure themselves; the objective referee of a clock is another clock.
- All very interesting, but what has it go to do with...”
- This book? “Fifty thousand years ago there were these three guys spread out across the plain, and they each heard something rustling in the grass. The first one thought it was a tiger and he ran like hell, and it was a tiger but he got away. The second one thought the rustling was a tiger and he ran like hell, but it was only the wind, and his friends all laughed at him for being such a chickenshit. But the third guy, He thought it was only the wind, so he shrugged it off, and a tiger had him for dinner. And the same thing happened a million times across the thousands of generations. And after a while everyone was seeing tiger in the grass even if there weren’t any tigers because even chickenshits have more kids than corpses do. And from those humble beginnings we learned to see faces in the clouds and portents in the stars, to see agency in randomness, because neutral selection favors the paranoid. Even here in the twenty first century you can make people more honest just by scribbling a pair of eyes on the wall with a Sharpie. Even now. We are wired to believe that unseen things are watching us.
And it came to pass that certain people figured out how to use that. They painted their faces or they wore funny hats, they shook their rattles and waved their crosses and they said: << Yes, there are tigers in the grass, there are faces in the sky, and they will be very angry if you do not obey their commandments. You must make offerings to appease them, you must bring gold and grain and altar boys for our delectation or they will strike you down and send you to the Awful place.>>
And people believed them by the billions, because after all, they could see the invisible tigers.”
- I can see what you mean; every slice of our history is marked by chickenshits and tigers.
- “At some point in our evolution we started to make decisions consciously, and we’re not very good at it.
- Identity changes by the second; you turn into someone else every time a new thought rewires your brain. You’re a different person than you were ten minutes ago.”
- That was my line, Steve, I am the smart guy and you play the apprentice.
- I wrote those lines. You are just standing there naked taking credit for them. “You’re a stick-man, frozen in some perverse rigor vitae. I stand between the Wizzard of Oz and the man behind the curtain. I am the curtain. All kinds of animals come here, occasional demons too.” You are the demon that steals my ideas to post them sometimes on Goodreads.
- What do you want me to tell them, about sci-fi stuff, rewiring the brain in every way you can’t imagine? It’s not just the mundane sensory stuff; it’s not just feeling colors and tasting sounds. They can literally see time. Sci-fi is overrated, proving you can’t think outside the box is trending now; every time someone says “think outside the box” what he really means is “think bigger boxes”. Empty space scares us, dark always put fear into man, we build boxes and call them homes, and we invent names like stratosphere and call it Earth. We put mirrors inside our boxes and we look at ourselves, how we work, what consciousness is. We cannot imagine what is outside our tridimensional box. But you could get an idea by reading this book.
dorian_gray's review
2.0
If you like books with never-ending dialogue and under-explained technical detail, then this is the one for you.