Review: Blindsight

Blindsight by Peter Watts
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

So many people really like Blindsight. I am not one of them, and I'm not 100% sure why. I certainly don't hate it, but there were so many flaws that I can't bring myself to love it.

Blindsight is hard sci-fi. The story is about a group of post-humans with various neural and cybernetic enhancements who are on a mission to investigate the first alien life to discover Earth. They are lead by a vampire (really - an ancient species that has lots of cognitive advantages over humans, resurrected by advances in genetics) on a really, really smart ship. The narrator, Siri Keeton, describes himself as a Chinese Room: his job is to observe everyone else - their duties, interactions, emotions - and report back to Earth, but he claims to have no understanding of either their fields or their feelings. He just takes in information and spits it back out so that others can understand it.

The crew wakes up from their induced slumber almost 5 years after their intended few-month trip, in a completely different solar system. While they were asleep, they were redirected to the source of the alien contact: a giant donut-shaped *thing* that orbits a large massive planet-thing. They investigate the thing, which is incredibly radioactive with super strong magnetic fields. Things go badly.

There are a lot of *things* in the story that are only described with very dense jargon, which means that the book either requires constant access to Google or a degree in astrophysics or engineering. Using jargon is not inherently a problem, but doing so to the point where it obscures the actual physical descriptions of the world, where it's hard to tell what is actually happening *is* a problem. Because when describing science fictional technology and aliens with jargon is two levels of obtuse, and doing through the eyes of someone who claims not to understand the meaning behind what he's seeing is a third.

There's also a pacing problem on the scene level, where important events are not given any particular weight. Spoiler - When the main character gets violently attacked by the vampire, it's unclear what has happened for several pages, because there's one sentence saying basically "my hand was bleeding and my back was on fire" and then a long sequence where that's not mentioned again, and given that everyone is experiencing a lot of hallucinations, it's hard to tell whether to take that literally or whether it even happened. I wasn't sure until the next scene, when he mentioned waking up covered in bandages. And this is a problem throughout. They make a decision to travel to the giant alien thing off-page and it cuts to the crew members traveling to it, where again, it's unclear what they're actually doing until you get to the physical description of landing on the alien thing (and even then, it still requires close reading because of the technological jargon).

It's hard to get invested in a plot when you don't know what's happening, but one of the highlights of the book was its characters. Those I was invested in. Siri's fellow crewmembers include: the Gang of Four, a group of four minds carved out of one brain (and again, not explained - Siri starts talking to Sascha, who hadn't been referenced, and you're left to figure out that this is a different character in the body of another character you've met) and whose speciality is linguistics (yay!) - the Gang of four consists of Susan Jones, the 'mom'/original, Michelle, a synesthete, Sascha, who is angry a lot, and Cruncher, a male who is quiet until he's provoked; Szpindel, a biologist who has had his senses re-wired so that he can feel the results of biological tests; Bates, a military woman who paradoxically believes in compassion for the enemy; and the vampire, Sarasti, whom everyone fears. Siri's main job is to listen to what these people are doing, what they're saying to each other and tell people on Earth how the job is going, and that aspect of the story is entertaining and funny and emotional. But since Earth is a lot farther away than they were supposed to be, his job is kind of obsolete.

The main point of the book is basically to ask what the nature of consciousness is. All of the crew are either literally not human or incredibly enhanced, and most have messed with their neural structures. The aliens they encounter appear to be conscious, but they quickly realize that even though the aliens are quite intelligent, they're not conscious (spoiler: so the third-act 'reveal' that the smaller alien things are not conscious is really confusing - why the hell is it a reveal? It's treated as a HUGE deal that changes the whole game, but they'd been acting on the assumption that they were non-conscious!). And maybe I'm not in love with this because I'm very familiar with a lot of the weird naturally-occurring disorders of consciousness that they spend a lot of time talking about - blindsight would be the obvious one, but they talk about a lot of stuff I'm familiar with thanks to my cognitive psych background. Very little of the cognitive science is new to me.

I don't know. I wanted to like this a lot. I loved the characters. I thought Siri's backstory was weak - and weird. He hates his mom and loves his dad, even though (seemingly because?) she was the one around when he was a kid and made efforts to make sure he was okay, and he vividly remembers (in his dad's favor) an incident when his dad chokes his mom. I thought maybe they'd indicate that the valence of those early memories was manipulated (because recalling that particular memory was during a conversation about how the memories associated with emotions can be changed)... but it doesn't seem like that was the point. I'm just really conflicted about this book. I don't think the story was strong enough, I don't think the science was particularly fascinating, and I think the writing actively worsened my experience, but I loved the characters and the big ideas and some of the science. I'll probably read either the sequel or try Watts's other trilogy, which is also sci-fi but set under the ocean.

View all my reviews