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A review by thearbiter89
Firefall by Peter Watts
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