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A review by kblincoln
Echopraxia by Peter Watts
5.0
4.5 stars, actually.
This is the follow up to Blindsight, which blew my mind when I read it with its speculation about different kinds of human consciousness and very, very technical, science-heavy spaceflight descriptions. It had a plot I could follow, however.
Echopraxia was just...confusing. Like all the time. Oh, I can tell you the plot very easily: a biologist goes to Earth's spaceshift reactor with a vampire and some hivemind humans to encounter an alien lifeform.
Yep, that's it. That's the part that's easy to follow. However, as we see through the very human biologist's mind/eyes in this book, and everything about the science, the plots, and the motivations of the folks around him are complicated and layered, its super confusing.
It doesn't help that the author often uses quite poetic and lovely language to describe simple things like "the hatch opened" that requires re-reading to figure out. Nor that most of the dialogue are either metaphysical or science-heavy lectures about the incredible, detailed, amazing, hypothetical future of humanity and its relationship to a dying world, chance at immortality through various technical or medical processes, and theories about consciousness.
I got so lost in these expository bits that I couldn't retain what was actually happening. Even at the end, I only half-guessed what was going on and had to go to Reddit to figure out what I had read. As in Blindsight, Watts likes to set up a diverse cast of cool characters-- and then kill them off. This is a dark book in the end (and throughout, who am I kidding) but in the end it is worth reading despite all the confusion, despite the overly-laden scientific metaphor language, because the kind of futuristic postulations about the shapes humanity may take conversely shed light on what our society today assumes about consciousness, religion, science.
Folks who have read Blindsight will appreciate this look at what was happening on Earth during that book's timeline, as well as a possible explanation for how the vampires kind of took over. If you are not an astrophysicist or mechanical engineer or astronaut, I do recommend that you possibly risk spoilage and read about the book before plunging in, especially if you only half-remember the characters from Blindsight.
This is the follow up to Blindsight, which blew my mind when I read it with its speculation about different kinds of human consciousness and very, very technical, science-heavy spaceflight descriptions. It had a plot I could follow, however.
Echopraxia was just...confusing. Like all the time. Oh, I can tell you the plot very easily: a biologist goes to Earth's spaceshift reactor with a vampire and some hivemind humans to encounter an alien lifeform.
Yep, that's it. That's the part that's easy to follow. However, as we see through the very human biologist's mind/eyes in this book, and everything about the science, the plots, and the motivations of the folks around him are complicated and layered, its super confusing.
It doesn't help that the author often uses quite poetic and lovely language to describe simple things like "the hatch opened" that requires re-reading to figure out. Nor that most of the dialogue are either metaphysical or science-heavy lectures about the incredible, detailed, amazing, hypothetical future of humanity and its relationship to a dying world, chance at immortality through various technical or medical processes, and theories about consciousness.
I got so lost in these expository bits that I couldn't retain what was actually happening. Even at the end, I only half-guessed what was going on and had to go to Reddit to figure out what I had read. As in Blindsight, Watts likes to set up a diverse cast of cool characters-- and then kill them off. This is a dark book in the end (and throughout, who am I kidding) but in the end it is worth reading despite all the confusion, despite the overly-laden scientific metaphor language, because the kind of futuristic postulations about the shapes humanity may take conversely shed light on what our society today assumes about consciousness, religion, science.
Folks who have read Blindsight will appreciate this look at what was happening on Earth during that book's timeline, as well as a possible explanation for how the vampires kind of took over. If you are not an astrophysicist or mechanical engineer or astronaut, I do recommend that you possibly risk spoilage and read about the book before plunging in, especially if you only half-remember the characters from Blindsight.