I really had no idea what I was getting into.
Blindsight looks like a hard science fiction first contact novel; it is a first contact novel. But there's so much musing and ideas on the nature of sentience and so many ideas stuffed into the story it made my head spin. The five characters (and one computer) sent out to meet the stranger at the edge of our solar system are far, far from humans we are used to seeing.
The viewpoint character, Siri Keaton, is a synthesist on board the spacecraft Theseus. Siri can measure people and things by their exteriors, somewhat similar to Neuro-Linguistic Programming techniques shown on television with Derren Brown. He judges everyone's mood and thoughts by observation to report back to Earth on the state of the mission. He's incredibly detached, unfeeling, and reminds me of Dexter from the series of the same name. The same constant litany of how he doesn't feel, how he learned mechanical routines to convince others he had emotional responses. Oh, and he had half his brain removed as a child.
The team's biologist is a cyborg who's medical gear is tied into his nervous system. Isaac Szpindel tastes blood and feels samples, his cybernetic body splayed across the ship's equipment. Szpindel is the most human of the crew in outlook; obsessed with work, tunnel-visioned, and distant that he is.
Linguist is a gang of four, or more – Susan James is the primary personality of multiple personalities in her body, all multitasking together and each having their own specialties and desires. She had surgery to divide her brain into a set of different cores but believes such fragmentation can be done naturally and at will someday in the future.
Amanda Bates is the military officer on the expedition. She, like Szpindel, is relatively human in outlook, though she can see and feel and command and fight through a distributed network of her 'grunts', robotic soldiers tied to her mind. She's also a pacifist and chafes under the command of the last two crew members.
The Theseus has a quantical computer on board, monitoring and deciding constantly, and could be in command if the powers that launched the mission didn't decide on a somewhat more human leader.
Sarasti is a vampire. Yeah. Vampire.
Watts worked out the biology and history of vampires in great detail, finding a way to make it work in a hard-SF setting. Vampires: a subspecies of humanity that went extinct about ten thousand years ago that was savant-autistic and predated on humanity due to an inability to produce certain neuro-chemicals. Tetra chromatic, dual-retina, resistant to prionic diseases, and capable of hibernation as it's prey replenished numbers over decades. Amazingly, it works as far as I can read the science.
Sarasti is the mission commander, and he doesn't suck blood. He eats brains. He's a predator ordering his food around, using his hunting mind to work the problem of first contact. He usually wears glasses to avoid spooking the crew.
So these are our representatives to the alien. The alien is far stranger than any of them. It chooses the name 'Rorschach' in first communications.
So, first contact is made, and then Peter Watts spins out every damn theory about consciousness he can in a mad rush of speculation, traps, pondering, torture, confrontation, and communication. The effects of EM fields on human minds. The usefulness of DNA. The distinction between empathy and intuition. The need for self-awareness. Viral talk. Dandelions as a model for space exploration. The last sentient being to exist. A strange, shambling host of mental defects throughout history. The blind playing catch. Blindsight.
The ending, as so often happens, is rushed, in a desperate climax once all the pieces are set in place. Really, the great joy is the ideas, the musings, the questions about what we are inside ourselves and just what is the use of ourselves, all brought up in a menagerie of humanity. The appendix alone is a trove of ideas, and reading all the references in the footnotes could keep you reading for a year.
Strangely, the most similar book I've read recently is 'Stumbling Upon Happiness,' also delving into the processes of our memery.
I'd recommend this book to those that like a hard-SF novel and those who love big questions. Blindsight is now available under the creative commons license at http://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm
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