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A review by alexgsmith
Firefall by Peter Watts
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.