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.