Book Review: Blindsight by Peter Watts

 

Blindsight by Peter Watts

384 pages, Hardcover

First published October, 2006

Hugo Award Nominee, Best Novel (2007), Locus Award Nominee, Best SF Novel (2007), Kurd-Laßwitz-Preis Nominee, Bestes ausländisches Werk (Best Foreign Work) (2009), Sunburst Award Nominee, Canadian Novel (2007), John W. Campbell Memorial Award Nominee (2007), Grand Prix de l'Imaginaire, Traduction (2009), Premio Ignotus Nominee, Mejor novela extranjera (Best Foreign Novel) (2010), Tähtivaeltaja Award (2014), Prix Aurora Award Nominee, Best Long-Form Work in English (2007), Seiun Award 星雲賞, Best Translated Long Story (2014)

 

Some novels, stories, or movies suffer from hype and hyperbole. For Blindsight the hype was real and I think if I read it without the constant refrain of “it will change how you view the world,” I would have liked it better. That is pretty high praise. It is not Peter Watts's fault that readers talk about his book like it is the most groundbreaking-ist Science fiction to ever science in fiction.

I can tell you right off the bat I was more impressed personally by Watts’s novel The Freeze-Frame Revolution. That is also a mind-bending science fiction novel that packs in more ideas and story into its 192 pages than some novels three times its length. One of the hardest parts of space-based hard sci-fi is for the writer to express the scope and size of the universe. Both books do that but I found the concept of FFR did it slightly better. When we look into the universe the distance and amount of years are beyond what most stories can contain. We can talk about distances that stretch thousands of light-years and journeys that would last thousands if not millions of years but it is a different challenge to create a narrative with such scope. That is the cool thing about this novel - it doesn't shy away from this reality.

In Blindsight as a hard SF take on first contact Watts doesn’t avoid the gulf not just between worlds but the vast space between beings that evolve on different worlds. This is a tough subject to capture some of the best examples Sagan’s Contact, Pournelle and Niven’s Mote in God’s Eye, or Lem’s Solaris. We will get back to Lem, as someone who has written (and finished the first draft) of a First Contact hard SF I am very interested in this topic.

Watts brings to the table an important ingredient. As a biologist that gulf between beings is at the heart of the story and for that reason there is one other novel it reminded me of. In this review, I am finding it impossible to think about Blindsight without thinking of the 70s Science Fiction novel His Master’s Voice by Stanislaw Lem. That novel is a masterpiece of speculative philosophy, that is held together by a threadbare story, that most modern readers will find boring and esoteric. Watts has created a masterpiece here (damn it I am doing it too) and unlike the Lem book, he has story and characters that you can relate to.

If you hear Watts talk in interviews he thinks he commits the classic sin of SF of being loaded with ideas and little character work. Maybe it is because I kept comparing these two books but Lem is far more guilty of it. The novel sometimes speaks to the reader for a very clever reason I will not give away but Siri is a linguist who has had surgery that removed part of her brain, giving her multiple personalities and making her ideal for the mission. Szpindal is the captain of the ship given the first contact mission and is a vampire, and that sounds cornier than it is.

The reality is the characters are built in the parallels and reversals of the story. They have to be there; they have to be who they are. The characters are woven into the story. His Master’s Voice by Lem was just an exercise for 200 hundred pages to say we are like dogs listening to a record. A species far off, and perhaps dead sent this message and we have no idea if they are even still there.  Blightsight has a point and message, like Lem’s novel but Watts still told a story. It is of course similar to Clarke’s Rama but again there is more thought to building a story with characters.

Blindsight starts when an alien probe takes a massive scan/photo of the earth and sends a signal back to a large ship that humans label Rorschach. I assume named after the test, not the band. The ship Theseus sent to connect with the vessel and make contact, and this is when the fiction gets super sciencey and suspenseful.

Blindsight is one that sits with you. I admit my first reaction was OK, it was good but why all the hyperbole? It is a book that sits with it. Certainly, writing about has helped me to see all the cool things it is doing. It is a first contact novel, that is where it starts, and like the Lem novel, it is speculative philosophy. The questions center as much of what it means to be human, alive you know little things.  I am not sure I can discuss anymore without spoiling the themes so let me say at this point I am pro this book that is part of Clarke’s Rama and Lem’s His Master’s Voice which is a highly readable work of modern SF that comes from a unique voice. It should be read but ignore the hyperbole and you’ll have a better experience.

So yeah the themes…the set-up is smart that saying hi to aliens in this novel is not about, how scary and different those weird aliens are…I mean that is what it looks like for two hundred pages but it is not. What if we were the scary weird ones?

“So you don’t think Rorscach is hostile?”
Long silence – long enough to make me wonder if I’d been detected.
“Hostile,” Szpindel said at last. “Friendly. We learned those words for life on earth, Eh? I don’t know if they apply out here?”

This is the first time the novel starts to spell out the mission statement. It is the first of many misunderstandings that the humans in the story have. Playing with the conventions Watts knows the reader will be looking for the horror that this misunderstanding will put the characters through. In a typical Contact novel, the aliens would be planning an invasion or seeking to kill our heroes.

In this case, the major difference with the crew of the Rorschach is their very nature is different. Like much of the animal kingdom, remember we are still animals these aliens do not have the sense of self, or consciousness that 99.9 % of Science Fiction writers have assumed space-traveling aliens would have. Watts is right to remind us that just because it was part of how we got to space, an older species or just a different one could have a different path. Thus this presents a realization for the crew.

“How do you say 'We come in peace' when the very words are an act of war?”

So when readers say that Watts bent their minds or changed the way they see the world it is inherent in this part of the book. That questions the very nature of self-awareness.

“Evolution has no foresight. Complex machinery develops its own agendas. Brains — cheat. Feedback loops evolve to promote stable heartbeats and then stumble upon the temptation of rhythm and music. The rush evoked by fractal imagery, the algorithms used for habitat selection, metastasize into art. Thrills that once had to be earned in increments of fitness can now be had from pointless introspection. Aesthetics rise unbidden from a trillion dopamine receptors, and the system moves beyond modeling the organism. It begins to model the very process of modeling. It consumes evermore computational resources, bogs itself down with endless recursion and irrelevant simulations. Like the parasitic DNA that accretes in every natural genome, it persists and proliferates and produces nothing but itself. Metaprocesses bloom like cancer, and awaken, and call themselves I.”

We are the species on our planet-killing its ability to sustain life as we know it. Throughout the novel are characters who are transhuman in the sense that Siri’s mother for example has uploaded herself to become digital. Siri has been altered to think differently, and now has multiple personalities at war with themselves. While the sense of I has made humans dangerous even that basic condition is changing. This novel presents not only that this sense of personhood is weird but also makes us dangerous and seeing the effects of climate change it is hard to argue that point. Could we be better humans?

“Every concert pianist knows that the surest way to ruin a performance is to be aware of what the fingers are doing. Every dancer and acrobat knows enough to let the mind go, let the body run itself. Every driver of a manual vehicle arrives at destinations with no recollection of the stops and turns and roads traveled in getting there. You are all sleepwalkers, whether climbing creative peaks or slogging through some mundane routine for the thousandth time. You are all sleepwalkers.”

That is why the very act of saying hello we are here, this is language is an attack to these beings. That is why Blindsight is a thoughtful and important work of modern SF. So it si with great personal annoyance that as I continue to think about this novel long after I closed the book for the final time I admit the hype is real. A masterpiece even if my first thought was it is not all that. It is.

Book Review: What Mad Universe by Fredric Brown

 

What Mad Universe by Fredric Brown

Hardcover, 255 pages

Published by Dutton (first published 1949)

Like many SF fans, my introduction to Fredric Brown was in the story by credit of the Star Trek episode Arena. For many years I assumed that Fredric Brown wrote a story treatment like many writers that Gene L.Coon massively re-wrote. That is not what happened. Gene L. Coon wrote a story he thought of and someone in the office said – that sounds familiar.  I have a hilarious memo I got from the Roddenberry papers at UCLA where someone lists all the things the script and the story have in common. In the end, they decided to give Brown story credit.

I am sorry that this writer’s career gets reduced to this. That was one of the reasons I wanted to read this novel. The second reason was Robert Bloch in his autobiography talked about Brown who he was in a writing group with. Bloch and Brown were the two most successful vets of the 1930s Milwaukee fictioneers. Bloch thought Brown’s unique take on the genre was to add humor. So long before Vonnegut, Sheckley, or Douglas Adams, there was Fredric Brown. So I  decided I needed to know for myself if his stories were funny and as classic as Bloch said they were.  

I had Martians Go Home on the shelf already, but the story for What Mad Universe which Bloch mentioned in his book as being about a multiverse-hopping pulp SF editor sounded too awesome to ignore. My library had it so I put a hold on it. What came was a battered first edition hardcover from 1949 that had not been checked out in decades. It comes with the perhaps the all-time greatest author photo on the back. 

The paper and the binder were super tattered and worn down so for me personally that really added to the reading experience. What Mad Universe came out with one year left in the forties. In the February 1950 issue of F and SF Boucher (shout out to Tony!) and McComas named What Mad Universe the best SF novel of 1949, citing its "blend of humor, logic, terror, and satire."

A novella version was in Starling Stories magazine, I can not speak to the differences with this his first Science Fiction novel.  He had been publishing short fiction in the genre for a decade. This was his third novel in two years, the other two were mysteries including Murder Can be Fun his first novel a mystery comedy.

“Here?
That word again. Where, what, when was here?
What mad universe was this that took for granted an alien race more horrible looking than the worst Bem that ever leered from a science fiction magazine cover.”

What Mad Universe is as out of date Science Fiction as it gets. While the aliens came from Arcturus a real star and planets like Proxima Centauri get name-dropped but the science is goofy, intentionally so at times. Keep in mind this is two decades before Apollo and the same year as Sputnik. So you will have to forgive Brown for a rocket launch unexplainably sending Keith Winton into another universe that looks like ours with major differences and some key minor ones.

For example, in this universe, his alter ego edits the same magazine but it is not considered Science Fiction but an adventure. Why because in 1904 a major change in the timeline happened…

The year nineteen hundred and three. Professor George Yardley, an American Scientist at Harvard University, had discovered the spacewarp drive.
Accidentally!
He had been working on, of all things his wife’s sewing machine, which had been broken and discarded.

Yes, this novel spends multiple hilarious pages devoted to the space warp sewing machine, so this might be a good time to ask if are you in for this novel or not. 88 pages in I think you must already be there but at this point, the lines are drawn.

His magazine writes so-called adventures because once humanity started using sewing machine parts to warp around the galaxy they got involved in a war with Arcturus. There are some interesting details about the blackouts in certain cities so Arcturus couldn’t target cities. They still took out London and Rome apparently.

Keith only starts to figure this all out when he is accused of being an Arc spy. After escaping the manhunt he figures out he is in another universe. In a neat little not he learns the History of this other universe from a Short History of the World by HG Wells, which is the same as he remembered until that sewing machine in 1904.

Once our hero makes it to New York city he tries to sell some Science Fiction stories to make some quick scratch, and WBI breaks down his door to accuse him of plagiarism. His counterpart had written the same stories. Indeed Keith ends up learning the ins and outs of this universe and has mad-cap adventures that comment on the genre and take him into space.

What Mad Universe has the same satire tongue-in-cheek love that a Galaxy Quest would perfect half a century later. What Mad Universe is a satire of the time working with the tools of the time. Fans of old-school out of date science fiction, who like exploring the future as envisioned deep in the past will have fun with this one.  Like I enjoy looking at how early punk was represented by the different bands and styles that came from certain towns and scenes. I am a midwestern guy and respect Brown being straight out of Milwaukee.
 
Just as Die Kreuzen represented that town in punk Robert Bloch and Fredric Brown did in horror and Science fiction. I really enjoyed this hilarious midwestern SF send-up that feels completely of it's time.

1930s Science Fiction podcast mini-series

 

1930s Science Fiction pod cast series - on Postcards from a Dying World 

 

Hello Folks, this series is going to be really fun, and here is the best way to enjoy it. You can read all these stories for free at the links below, of course I bought newer editions when possible. Several of these are still in print.

Episodes:

Shambleau by Catherine L. Moore (With guests SF historian Cora Buhlert and author Greg Cox)

Read it here in Weird Tales

CL Moore reads it herself.

Our podcast 

Alas, All Thinking by Harry Bates: Guests (Dickheads co-Hosts Anthony Trevino and Langhorne J. Tweed) *this will be a re-issue (with a new introduction) of an early episode of the Dickheads podcast about one of PKD’s childhood favorite SF tales.

 Read it on page 6

Dickheads podcast on this story 

 

Rule- 18  by Clifford Simak ( With guests  Alec Nevla- Lee (Author of Astounding) and Seth Heasley of Hugos There Podcast

 

Read it in Astounding Magazine from July 1938:  p.32 July 1938 astounding

Rule-18 Podcast 

 

Who Goes There? by John W. Campbell (With Guests Brian Keene author of The Rising, Mary Sangiovanni The queen of Cosmic Horror, author of The Hollower trilogy, and Tim Lebbon author of The Silence)

Read it from Astounding August 1938 p. 60:read it here

Who goes There podcast 

At the Mountains of Madness by HP Lovecraft (with guests Cody Goodfellow (author of Unamerica and long time host of Cthulu prayer breakfasts) and Fred Lubnow (Scientist with Mythos interest)

Read it in Astounding from Feb. 1936 :read the first part here...

This was not the author preferred text in this case I suggest getting a paperback either buying the modern editions or borrowing from your local library.

Podcast 

Book Review Star Trek: Vulcan's Glory by D.C. Fontana

 

Star Trek Vulcan’s Glory by D.C. Fontana

Mass Market Paperback, 256 pages

Published July 25th 2006 by Star Trek (first published February 1989)

The night after the first episode of Star Trek aired the woman who opened the production office and started answering the phone was a secretary named Dorothy Fontana, She had worked with Gene Roddenberry in this role typing up memos, answering calls getting coffee on the previous show The Lieutenant. In her mid-20s  the young woman would go home and in her off hours would pull the typewriter and bang-out story treatments and scripts.  By the time Star Trek aired  D.C. Fontana had solid scripts for half a dozen shows around town.  Gene Roddenberry had shown her enough respect to show her the Star Trek series bible in 1964 and hired her to work on both pilots.
 
The first and most important woman in the world of Star Trek was given the chance to choose a story out of the bible to write a script. In the second aired episode, Charlie X had her special touch giving ST’s first god-like being depth to the story treatments that date back to the spaceship Yorktown under Captain Robert April didn’t have. 

She got that job the same way she got the others, she walked up to producers and said “Let me tell you a story.” She was a great storyteller and always found emotional hooks for exciting stories.  
I re-read this novel for a longer piece I am working on about Dorothy Fontana.  So I will save some of my thoughts for that article but we have to talk about this book. I dropped a line to Dave Stern who was the editor at Pocketbooks at the time and he told me he considered this a career highlight but he didn’t have many memories of the process.

It is obvious why you would ask this writer to do a novel about Spock’s first mission on board the Enterprise. While later novels like Vulcan’s Forge by Josepha Sherman and Susan Shwartz or Spock’s World by Diane Duane might come off as more elaborate Science Fiction takes built off deeper canon I think this novel is special.
 
At the time it was written ST book editors probably believed it was safe to tell a Captain Pike story and not step on canon because there is no way we would ever get a show about the early days of the enterprise. With the introduction of Strange New Worlds, this novel now has a different place. Now we have to read looking for the ways it can or cannot line up with the new TV canon.

I love Strange New Worlds, I don’t want to second guess the producers and for the most part, they did respect this novel making some things canon, like the Number One’s species, and her name from another later novel. That said there are a few times the two have trouble co-existing.  I don’t know if I was running that writing room, this book would have been required reading.

Dorothy Fontana is not just the mother of Star Trek but she did more to form Spock than Amanda  Greyson (who DF named). In two of the most important episodes of Vulcan lore, Fontana created Spock’s parents, his pets, and his childhood, and named the Vulcan Forge.  In a re-write of the episode This Side of Paradise, she wrote out Sulu she explores Spock’s interior hidden feelings in a way no one else on the show thought possible. Her relationship with Nimoy went back to an episode of The Tall Man that Fontana wrote called “a Bounty of Billy” and she knew he could handle it. 

That script got her the gig as story editor of Star Trek, and in a sense the job running the Animated series, and this novel. Just like that episode Vulcan’ Glory is an adventure story with A, B and C plots that all tie into the theme of Spock’s conflicted emotions. The C storyline of Scotty joining the crew and making the ultimate engine room hooch is hilarious and probably the one that doesn’t line up with SNW as Scotty has still yet to join the crew on the enterprise.  (maybe he was assigned elsewhere and it is Kirk who brings him back)

There is a lot going on in Vulcan’s Glory that might be pushed deeper into the alphabet with storylines but let me recap it a bit without giving deep spoilers. Spock is about to report to duty on the Enterprise when he called back to Vulcan for a meeting with his mother, who speaks for Sarek who refuses to speak with him. Spock is neglects his estate ie his arranged marriage to T’Pring.  This is the first major difference although it could be explained to match TV canon.

Before he leaves for the enterprise Spock meets with T’Pring. SNW viewers know in that show they have a steamy relationship and are trying to make the marriage work. In this novel, there meeting is cold and loveless.  Fontana draws a direct line between this meeting and the events of Amok Time., this is many years before the events of SNW, so it is possible that those kooky Vulcan kids could give it another go before T’Pring decides I was right the first to write off Spock.  Because that is what she does in the novel. Pay me the estate I am due and go run off to Starfleet.

*HUGE STRANGE NEW WORLDS SPOILER IN THE NEXT PARAGRAPH*

The first time the novel just can’t co-exist with SNW is Number One who DCF never gave a name something later Trek novels decided couldn’t work. The name is not the problem. “On her planet, ILyria, excellence is the only criterion that is accepted. She is technically designated as being the best of her breed for the year she was born.” DCF worked on The Cage so  I have no doubt this was the back story on the Cage and the reasons she is Number one as much as being the first officer. Which is problematic with the canon established later by the Khan storyline. In a very smart move, SNW respected this backstory while respecting the canon and making it a secret of Number One’s past, as genetic engineering is illegal in the post-Eugenics war Federation. The cliffhanger at the end of SNW season one is built on this reveal. SNW modified this and I think it was the right decision.

Spock makes it to the Enterprise and their first mission track down the crashed Vulcan ship that disappeared hundreds of years ago with A rare Vulcan gem on it, it is the title Maguffin. The first mystery finding the ship, the artifact, and then once they have it there is a murder on board, and the only suspect is a Vulcan.

One thing DCF does in this novel that made me uncomfortable was the number of Vulcans in Starfleet and 11 on the enterprise! I was always under the impression Spock was the first Vulcan in Starfleet, T’paul doesn’t count because she wasn’t Starfleet technically.  I realized that the show had a hard time portraying the hundreds of people on the enterprise as written and with hundreds 11 Vulcans we rarely see is possible.

One of those 11 Vulcans is T’Pris. That is your steamy Spock love story. T’Pris is a widowed Vulcan that Spock quickly falls in love. DCF writes Spock and romance very as always.

“If there are so few of us, then we must view each one as precious. Is that not so Mr. Spock?”
Spock paused, thinking it over, mulling the consequences of what he would reply. Finally, he nodded. “Yes, Lieutenant. I would say so.”

Later once their romance flourishes we see similar sexuality that Spock has in SNW, I know some fans were comfortable with but DCF  was not shy about it.

“Spock held up his right hand, fingers spread, and T’Pris matched it with her left. The tactile contact sent a flow of warmth through him. Their eyes locked, and the look went deeper, mentally chaining them together. He sent the first gentle probe along the bond, reaching out to her.
T’Pris opened herself to him, welcoming him, the merging of their feelings racing after the intimate mind touch.”

You get the idea. It is pretty hot steamy Vulcan stuff. DCF as thought a lot about this, as many nerdy fans has. She has actual angry memos about her script for Enterprise Incident while she tells other producers just how the Vulcans get it on two decades earlier. I think in 1989 she loosened up about it, maybe not as much as SNW folks did, but bottom line DCF knew what everyone else does Spock is the real heartthrob of Star Trek.

Random details I liked. How she wrote the transporter effect feelings, the size of the crew, and the general operation of the ship. DCF was thinking about how the shifts would work.  She was clearly thinking this through and I liked that. Spock is crucial to the solution of the mystery onboard the ship and also has to help Help with a mystery on the away mission. The Scotty storyline is very funny. You might guess where the Spock romance goes and the feelings are spot on as DCF portrays them.

Vulcan’s Glory is a top-notch ST tie-in for me. Modern Tie-in novels have the benefit of building off decades of canon building and fans who have thought about ST for decades. This novel can tell us what Dorothy Fontana the woman who sat in a room in 1964 with Gene Roddenberry talking about Star Trek thinks about how Spock came on the enterprise. That means more to me than a Short Treks played for laughs.

Dorothy Fontana is and will always be one of the most important voices in Star Trek and this novel should be respected as such. I feel that way 200%.