Doesn’t sound pleasant and it isn’t, but somehow Watts plays his card masterfully: it may startle you at first as a story on dehumanization, but amazingly, it is a story on humanity. And above all, his writing style is somehow poetic at times: Starfish is Watts first novel and it shows to no small degree; while most of his work would benefit from a good editor, this one desperately needs one! That stated, this started off with a bang and for the first half of the book it I was enthralled, thinking this was going to be 5 stars all the way. Then, while it definitely did not fall completely apart, it did really lose focus and started to incorporate/add in/mix in/ a wide range of news ideas and plot strands that served (imo) to divert it from its original focus. It did end with a bang however! Bought a physical copy (of this book mentioned here and on r/books) and read it in 2 days. Although it had a fast pace I didn't like Watts' prose style. I skimmed past the sections about the protagonist's love life. Although Watts was pretty prescient with his description of 3D printing (in a book from 2006), none of the characters felt fully fleshed-out and one character's multiple personalities weren't properly introduced and could have been made more distinct (the male personality just seemed to appear out of nowhere). Of course, between the psychological pressures, insane real pressure, and creeping maladjustments, you might think this was already a great psychological thriller with enough transformed humanity to keep any SF fan thrilled... but he goes a bit further and gives us the basis and an amazing exploration of a clearly superior and truly alien life form taking up residence down in the trench.

After about - Oh 1,200 or so audiobooks I'll say this one really refreshed the medium for me (not so much in production style, which is fairly typical, but in the writing and the type of attention you have to give this work) Pacing overall is a weak point, and it’s weaker as the book goes on. From the abrupt reintroduction of minor characters to the odd turns of psychological development among the Rifters, it’s both jarring and somewhat unconvincing. Isaac Szpindel is the ship's primary biologist and physician. He is in love with Michelle, one of the Gang's personalities. And what a story. In general SF stories I split into dynamic epics (i.e. Dune, Starfishers, Culture, Polity etc), static epics (i.e Foundation, Culture (some of them are more on talk/philosophy than action)), crime/thriller/action (i.e. Robot series (including Caves of Steele), Neuromancer, Hardwired, Takeshi Kovacs) and existential ones (i.e. We, Brave New World, Hard to be God).

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The book is brimming with info on geology, biology and genetics. As the author says at the end, there is very little he made up in this book. Almost all details about the environment (3000 km under the surface of Pacific Ocean) are facts: the creatures – anglerfish, viperfish, giant squid, the hydrothermal vents, the tectonic movement of Juan de Fuca plate, and so on. The exploration of consciousness is the central thematic element of Blindsight. [6] [7] [8] The title of the novel refers to the condition blindsight, in which vision is non-functional in the conscious brain but remains useful to non-conscious action. [9] Other conditions, such as Cotard delusion and Anton–Babinski syndrome, are used to illustrate differences from the usual assumptions about conscious experience. [9] The novel raises questions about the essential character of consciousness. Is the interior experience of consciousness necessary, or is externally observed behavior the sole determining characteristic of conscious experience? [6] [7] [9] Is an interior emotional experience necessary for empathy, or is empathic behavior sufficient to possess empathy? [9] [10] Relevant to these questions is a plot element near the climax of the story, in which the vampire captain is revealed to have been controlled by the ship's artificial intelligence for the entirety of the novel. [9] [11]

I had a really formative experience with the [Peter Watts] short story “The Things.” The Thing is one of my favorite movies, and besides the fact that “The Things” is a brilliant story, it’s such a badass move to just be like, “I’m going to totally write fanfic about this IP, and I’m going to publish it, and it’s going to be amazing.” That was a big inspiration for me, because I also have a lot of strong feelings about The Thing, and I wrote a story called “Things with Beards,” which was also published in Clarkesworld, where “The Things” was published. It got a Nebula nomination, and it’s one of the things that I’m more proud of of mine. So yeah, Peter Watts gave me permission to write The Thing fanfic. When I heard “Audible hopes you enjoyed this program” I was left with that desirable, but all too rare, sensation that even though I just had a very enjoyable experience, there was so much more to discover. This book will require a repeat listen. It left me with the same feeling as some of the novels of Gene Wolfe—the book ends but, since there is no real closure, the story lives on in your head like a rogue subroutine awaiting a necessary command. Blindsight was recommended by Richard K. Morgan (author of Altered Carbon) as his, “If you only read one book this year,” endorsement. I can now understand. This will get my recommendation as well, even though I do not pretend to have more than a rudimentary understanding of it.

Read Blindsight by Peter Watt

Jukka Sarasti is a vampire and the crew's nominal (and frightening) leader. As a predator from the Pleistocene, he is alleged to be far smarter than baseline humans. Are they monsters? Are the aliens monsters? Or are they—and we—all just machines, and moral judgments utterly meaningless? As Siri himself wonders at a crucial part in the narrative—“Did he ever speak for himself? Did he ever decide anything on his own?” Theseus is propelled by an antimatter reactor and captained by an artificial intelligence. It carries a crew of five cutting-edge transhuman hyper-specialists, of whom one is a genetically reincarnated vampire who acts as the nominal mission commander. While the crew is in hibernation en route, the just-arrived second wave of probes commence a compounded radar scan of the subsurface of Burns-Caulfield, but this immediately causes the object to self-destruct. Theseus is re-routed mid-flight to the new-found destination of the signal: a previously undetected sub-brown dwarf deep in the Oort cloud, dubbed 'Big Ben'. You can also read The Colonel first, but it'll very slightly spoil Blindsight. Please note that Blindsight does not have a surprise ending; but reading The Colonel first may slightly change your viewpoint while you read Blindsight.

Echopraxia is a hard science fiction novel by Canadian writer Peter Watts. [1] It is a " sidequel" to his 2006 novel, Blindsight, and the two novels make up the Firefall series. In its own way, though, that nihilism itself can be comforting, and this is the place where I quibble. If it’s all futile, we’re excused from trying. And not trying is so much easier than trying-and-failing, it’s soothing to have an excuse. His implacable alien monsters aren’t even really monstrous, any more than a plague is monstrous, or the pitiless vacuum of space. They’re just growing, because growing is what life does, and Humanity happens to be in the way. Watts himself remain cautious, however. As he eloquently put it when we had the chance to interview him: “[T]he lesson is not necessarily ‘Give your stuff away.’ It’s ‘Get noticed.’”

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As can happen with hard SF sometimes (Clarke is a good example) the plot itself can be more of a scaffolding for the exposition of speculative concepts...so I think plot-driven reading isn't the best way to approach the read (not that there isn't a plot, just if you focus on the plot, you miss the goods and can misunderstand the pacing..the pacing and "payoff" is in the concepts, not the plot) His characters have personalities and depth, and if most of them aren’t very nice people, well, that’s appropriate to the dystopian hellholes they inhabit. All’s going well except that the operators begin to go native way down there and develop some unexpected side effects and behavioral traits. A less competent writer would not be able to pull this part of the story off, but this becomes one of the strongest elements of the narrative and kudos to Watts for putting this together so well. We end up with a hard science story with psychological and philosophical questions. And there is some alien stuff and some microbiological creepiness that would make Michael Crichton grow a couple more inches. When humanity's ever growing needs for energy entice giant corporations to build facilities along the Earth's deep ocean rifts where energy from the Earth's core spews out of sea-bottom vents ripe for harvesting, humans are needed to live down on the rifts to babysit the operations. Life on the rift is a strange enterprise; dark, isolated, claustrophobic, and bereft of many sensory stimuli which humans living on the Earth's surface enjoy. It also requires bio-mechanical and electro-chemical modifications to the body. "Rifters" sacrifice one of their air-breathing lungs to make room in their chests for machinery which allows them to electrolyze oxygen from their aqueous environment. They also bear other implants which regulate chemicals and internal pressure; modifications necessary to allow the Rifters to survive in their high-pressure, high-saline, ocean-floor homes. The Rifters aren't entirely human. Another author's description (in the introduction) of the author's way of writing a multi-G course correction as "Melville-esque" was pretty sycophantic. I was expecting a novel with a fleshed-out story but what I read may have been a scientific paper disguised as genre fiction.