This is one of my favorite books and it's fun to read for anyone interested in the AI consciousness debate. https://hpmorpodcast.com/blindsided-00-announcement/ is a podcast that read the book last year. And https://blindsight.space/ is a Watts' approved website that has a short film/movie trailer for the book.
The marginal / ancillary discussion of the usefulness of people in a post GAI world was really interesting. The best part of this discussion was that the protagonists entire job is to translate ideas that are too hard to understand into a tangible/actionalbe "surface area". Essentially - a policy-maker interface that treats superintelligence as a "black box".
The discussion about non-conscious intelligence was less so (I see ants every day!). But this is a new idea dense book to say the least - if you love worldbuilding, please pick it up.
Permutation City is not "far more interesting", it is a complementary exploration of consciousness and the nature of reality. Both are excellent (also both very relevant i-pumps). Permanence by Karl Schroeder is another really good complementary exploration of the idea of consciousness as transitory, a symptom of not being good at the thing that is being consciously cogitated. A cat is so good at being a cat, it does not need to waste resources on clumsy meta-aware calculations on how to cat.
I read Blindsight long before modern LLM AI came about and at the time I thought the aliens being intelligent without being conscious was fascinating and gave me a different perspective that those things could be separated but it didn't have and direct application.
Learning how modern AI's respond immediately made me think about how Rorschach was communicating with the crew and how current LLM AI's might be considered intelligent while not conscious.
This is one of the books that left me with the most profound sense of unease. And it deserves very high prait for being able to do that.
While people might remember it for other more striking ideas, I was impressed with how it expounds the theory behind the claims that "intelligence implies violence". That entire narrative was quite chilling.
That, and the way the author explains how to establish a means of communication using just... pain.
I read it every couple of years and it makes me feel weird for several weeks at a time. Like nothing is real, nothing matters, I'm not really here. I eventually snap out of it, but it's an odd feeling.
For a dissenting opinion: boring, marginally pretentious book. Tries to bring up some interesting ideas, but loses the plot along the way. Also random Dracula in space. Couldn't get myself to finish it.
Watts did a whole academic presentation on the science of vampirism in the book's context. It's a fun watch and makes it feel much less random. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEOUaJW05bU
If you want a really shoehorned scifi vampire, there's a David Weber book in which it comes out of fucking nowhere towards the end.
Best explanation for vampires not liking crosses I have ever seen. I always enjoy vampires that are explained scientifically for some reason in fiction, its like some sort of challenge and they usually avoid the whole dislike of crosses, not here, thought it was a decent attempt along with many other ideas in the book, very enjoyable to me.
My favorite explanation for it - and I forget where it's from, but it probably isn't uncommon - is that vampires who were humans raised in Christian cultures believe themselves to be damned by God when they turn because that's what the folklore says, and that belief and self-hatred manifests as a phobic aversion to religious symbolism.
Not bad, think I still prefer that their visual cortex was more advanced such that they could easily perceive multiple perspectives (necker cubes) and maybe even higher dimensions but they had a "crucifixion glitch" such that too much euclidean geometry in the visual field of view caused seizures which doesn't normally occur in nature.
This helped explained their downfall with man creating euclidean geometry everywhere and was taken advantage of when they where brought back as they where very good at certain tasks while also requiring anti seizure drugs which kept them in control.
I felt similar. I finished it but couldn’t finish the sequel. The primary idea was “intelligence can take different shapes” and I kept reading to get insightful descriptions of these different shapes but they never really came. I don’t disagree with the premise it just didn’t really get across the message very well.
The book makes pains to draw a line between consciousness (or meta consciousness) and intelligence. I don't think he really argued that intelligence is maladaptive, but does argue that meta consciousness might be.
Yea I took it as consciousness was maladaptive and sort of a local maxima that humans were trapped in which prevented them from gaining higher intelligences.
It felt to me like he wanted to write a treatise on the nature of intelligence and also space vampire fiction and for some reason decided to put them in the same book.
Unfortunately I have to agree with you. I finally got round to this to see what the fuss was about, and was very disappointed.
Oblique to the point of baffling and unlikable characters aplenty.
Blindsight has "space vampires" in much the same way that Lord of the Rings has "crystal balls". (Or Tamsyn Muir's Locked Tomb series has "lesbian necromancers in space".)
The space vampire really felt like an unnecessary add to the entire thing. Could have established similar sci-fi woo-woo with a super-intelligent test-tube baby who might have some lingering trauma from that development.
I don't think that would have fit as strongly thematically. Thematically, vampires being ancient, human hunting predators, who are basically the answer to "what happened if you tried creating maximally anti-social humans", and who "accidentally" got wiped out is just another another round in Watt's repeated hammering home the idea that self-awareness/consciousness is not a pinnacle.
The idea that human kind would in its moments of fear and panic reach back and put an anti-social predator in charge is also thematic. In traditional conceptions of hierarchy of "thinking", we would perhaps imagine the self/meta conscious self as being "the top layer", with the layer represented by vampires perhaps being a lower layer (we would imagine it being above "the reptile brain" though). Yet here, humanity (or human command) has chosen to invert the order. The self-awareness layer is capable and does "let go", because while it loves to take the credit for what the mind actually does, it does in fact understand self preservation (generally), and does understand that sometimes, it just needs to... not really be in control.
Final spoilers - and then there's the extra twist which is that the vampire captain was apparently being puppeted by a computer AI system (also implied to be not self aware) the whole time anyways.
So really, we have a pair of non-self aware intelligent systems probing each other. One deploying scramblers, the other deploying the human crew as end effectors.
All of the characters are weird, super humans with their own problems. At one point, the vampire freaks out and attacks the protagonist. Which leads to some plot ramifications. If you are to maintain that structure, you require a teammate to lose their cool at a pivotal moment when it has been established that the team leader was better and more logical than everyone else.
The in-universe vampire explanation gives a rationale for the scenario. This does not hold if you trivially swap out for a different character, so some kind of hard-wired trigger is required.
I liked the ideas in Blindsight more than I liked the book. The writing is heavy-handed (trying to be gentle here), especially given how interesting the underlying questions were.
Yeah, the end was in desperate need of another editing pass. He takes you by the head, smashes your face into the ground, and then drags you for half a mile.
Anyone who gets that far into the book doesn't need to have their hand held that much. I get that it's the entire point of the book, but everything until this point has been a challenging read.
Personally, I think it might have been interesting to rewrite the whole thing such that conclusion is ambiguous.
Blindsight is fantastic. The sequel, Echopraxia, is also excellent; it is very different, and I expect many people were disappointed that it wasn't just more of the same.
Also a big shout out to his less well-known novel, The Freeze Frame Revolution. It's about the crew of a "stargate"-seeding spaceship trying to stop the ship's AI, but being hampered by the fact that the AI is both near-omniscient and that they only work in short shifts before being put back in hibernation. He also wrote a handful of short stories set before and after the novel.
There's something very refreshingly direct, unvarnished, no-nonsense, and clear-eyed (some would say cynical) about Watts' style of writing. His prose tends to be tough (quite like early Gibson's noir style, with the punk attitude intact), but also beautifully cinematic. The only other write that I think comes close, aside from Gibson, is Dan Simmons with his Hyperion Cantos, but he's not nearly as darkly cynical.
Leaving aside "which book is better" (which is hard to answer), I'll say that The Freeze Frame Revolution is much more approachable for most folks. It's the one I'd recommend to my friends first, then I might recommend Blindsight if they liked it - along with other difficult to articulate factors. Perhaps the "recommend/don't recommend" choice is arrived at by non-conscious mechanisms ;)
I did not enjoy this book. It felt too try-hard edgy. If they dropped the vampire it would have been better.
Edit: another thing I didn't like was how the author just dumped pages and pages of his character-notes as background information for that character. At least that's how it felt on the multi-page flashback digressions. I skipped pages and pages of the book because it was irrelevant to the story.
The writing definitely felt try-hard, especially at the start where the first few chapters seem really obscure by design.
Also, while I enjoyed the philosophy, as someone who has also read all of Oliver Sacks's books and took several philosophy of mind courses in college, it really felt like he just wanted to put in every cool Oliver Sacks-ian case study he had ever read.
But they were also added in without much context. In my book club (of intelligent people) I had to re-explain nearly all of them, e.g. the blindsight scene (from which the title comes from) is practically the entire thesis, but if you haven't heard of it before you can miss it.
On my optimistic days I feel like we are living in a Zanzibar Shockwave Rider future. The rest of the time it feels like Sheep Look Up or Jagged Orbit. Highly recommend John Brunner
The universe, plot, and characters are all aggressively atheistic[1]. Meanwhile the prose is heavily infused with Christian religious language, references, and allusions.
Consequently, I'm not really sure who the book is for. I don't know any Christians who like atheistic hard scifi (although, I exist so there must be others). And I don't know many people into hard scifi who really care for the religious imagery.
Personally, I find the experience to be unique, so I think it's worth it if you can get into it.
Besides that (and to spoil the point of the book) the biggest flaw is that the author doesnt seem to trust the reader to get the point, which is that consciousness is an unnecessary (and detrimental) evolutionary dead end. Real intelligence is totally orthogonal.
As a software engineer who has seen very intelligent systems with no more consciousness than a paperclip for decades, I got on board with the premise as soon as it showed up. But then I kind of had to wade through case study after case study highlighting the idea.
[1] - this isnt atheism that's aggressive, but rather a universe where there's no doubt that there is no god with all of the consequences thereof.
Most atheists/Christians aren't as rigid as you imagine.
> a universe where there's no doubt that there is no god
The vast majority of scifi (and other genres) doesn't care or take a position either way. Nothing in Blindsight says "there can't be a God"; it has nothing to do with that.
> a universe where there's no doubt that there is no god
Do you mean that the universe itself provides clear, incontrovertible evidence there is no god? Or do you simply mean that in the universe portrayed, none of the people happen to have any doubt about the non-existence of god?
For better or worse Christianity is the shorthand language of Western culture since so much of art philosophy and media draw from it. Plenty of non-religious (and even irreligious) works employ it for symbolism or metaphor, or like Hideaki Anno putting Christian symbolism all over Evangelion, just for the aesthetic.
In the 2070s, on the cusp of the singularity, a swarm of alien drones takes a snapshot of the Earth before burning up in the atmosphere. A small crew of bleeding-edge posthumans, all with different physical or mental augmentations, is sent to the outer Solar System to investigate the source. The narrator, Siri Keeton, is an emotionally lobotomized "synthesist" tasked with monitoring the mission and interpreting it for the leadership back home.
I don't want to spoil its frightening twists, but suffice to say that it shapes up to be a cosmic horror novel where the horror is rooted in abstract ideas like human cognition and the nature of consciousness. The book is peppered with philosophical concepts like the Chinese Room and (real-life) neurological quirks like blindsight, all bent towards smart, existential horror. Like Lovecraft mixed with Oliver Sacks.
And while the ideas are solid -- the author is a marine biologist who fills the appendix with citations of evolutionary and cognitive research -- what I really love is the prose. Watts is a fantastic hard SF writer, filling every page with authentic, charismatic narration, cinematic imagery, and a way of talking about abstruse scientific concepts in a way that punches you in the gut and chills you to the bone. His style is like a horror version of Douglas Adams, mind-bending ideas and memorable characters with a compulsively readable flow to it.
Its biggest weakness is that one of the most compelling aspects sounds like a pulpy joke at first glance -- the ship is led by a "vampire." I can't imagine how many people read this on the jacket and took a hard pass on Dracula in Space. But it's not some fantasy gimmick -- it's the in-universe nickname for an ancient, predatory, sociopathically brilliant subspecies of humanity that's been resurrected, Jurassic Park-style, to help manage high-stakes ventures like the first-contact mission. The captain starts off intriguing, quickly grows frightening, and eventually advances one of the book's most disturbing and unforgettable arguments.
Overall, it's not just my favorite SF novel, but one of my favorite novels, period. The only book I've ever bought a dead-tree copy to be signed by the author. Highly, highly recommended.
I totally agree. Also one of my favorites. It has a real vibe that sticks with you for a while. It’s not just about whether you like the ideas or his particular prose, etc. He put together a complete work that as a whole really captures something unique and really cool.
The "vampire" thing was a bit cheesy to be honest, despite being scientifically explained. But conceptually it was quite key to the story. There would probably have been another way to do this.
Despite that, still one of my all time favorite sci fi books. A fantastic exploration of intelligence, conscioussness and first contact.
The book is layered with ideas and meta-ideas some of which are allusions and need to be deciphered rather than spelled out. Which is also I guess why the “smart idiots” don’t like it or think it’s pretentious and boring. It’s a work that rewards attention and deep contemplation.
Phenomenal deep book with layers upon layers of ideas. Not a easy read read for a single afternoon, this one really requires you to work for your meal; read, go back, reread with new context, ponder.
Probably a bit too heavy on ideas for most and those who are only used to lighter cost might find it boring. But for me one my all time favorite sci-fi books.
r/printSF is unconscionably obsessed with this middling work. It's just a collection of "isn't that cool" pop-sci phenomena randomly dropped into an Aliens (1986) space horror plot. Watts in his interviews just comes across as a fanboy hack. Interstellar travel is so difficult that spacefaring aliens must have deliberately set out to do it and are thus conscious! Triffids aren't going to grow their way to Earth!
Novelists should not be giving their work away for free like that. AI is bad enough, but writing a novel (even a bad one) is hard work. It just makes it harder for novelists to make a living.
So I saw two options. 1: Book tanks, nobody can read it; or 2) book tanks, anyone can read it. I saw no option where Blindsight would ever make money. So what the hell, thought I-- I may die poor, but maybe I won't die completely obscure. Told my editor I was going to set everything free under a Creative Commons license-- it would have broken the contract, but Cory Doctorow had been getting away with it for years and besides, I figured my writing career was pretty much kaput anyway. Editor asked me to wait a month, to see if things turned around. I waited. They didn't. Finis.
The week after I started giving Blindsight away, sales tripled. The rest is history.
Yes, I know that technique. I also know people who go for free books exclusively on Kindle. They don't want to pay for anything. That isn't helpful to people who are selling books in order to help support themselves and undermines the market for new book sales.
I know writers who tried giving their book away for free, and got almost no sales or good reviews afterwards. They aren't all selling terrible books either.
Would you seriously ask a taxi driver to give you free rides before they got paid? Or would you ask a teacher to work for six months unpaid in order to get a couple of years work later on?
I know this mentality is encouraged in some places with interns, but it is a luxury of people who can already support themselves.
I would not ask a taxi driver to give me free rides, but if I could invent and give away magical free teleportation, which would immediately obviate the need for taxi drivers, I would. If I could snap my fingers and conjure the revenants of past plumbers whose existence on the earthly plane served to do nothing but put plumbers out of business by providing services gratis, I'd do that too.
If I were a talented writer and had the ability to produce content as engaging as Peter Watts', I'd put it online for free.
Whatever 'harm' I might do to other authors or taxi drivers or plumbers with this practice is far outweighed by the good that is done to the world by its release.
Some people are just that brainwashed by the self-centered concept of immediate profit. They're unable to fathom any higher meaning or purpose to life/effort.
Do you tell your plumber or your electrician that they are self-centred when they come around asking to be paid? You might laugh, but that happens. I knew a builder a few years ago who only had half his bill paid, with the result he lost thousands on materials he had bought. It would have cost him a pretty penny going down the legal route. Rich people are often the worst for paying up. Novelists are not paid by the hour and many have to take on other jobs in order to support themselves.
Donna Tartt takes about ten years to write a novel. Some writers take a month or two. It is not an easy task, and very few people can pull it off, let alone in a short time. The internet is full of free music, art and writing, with the result that creative people struggle to support themselves, because they are being undercut, and professional work is being converted into a hobby. The tax authorities, electricity companies, and supermarkets are not interested in whether you are self-centred or not as you put it. They want to be paid. (If you are on unemployment benefit while writing the book, they will demand that you look for other work during that time... Or claim you are able to work.)
> Do you tell your plumber or your electrician that they are self-centred when they come around asking to be paid?
They are free to do with their labour as they please. That includes charging for it. It also includes doing it pro-bono if they feel like it.
The self-centered part is the idea that they would never want to do it pro-bono. Electricians, plumbers do sometimes do work pro-bono if they feel it is a worthy cause. That is what freedom is: the ability to choose for yourself.
> The internet is full of free music, art and writing, with the result that creative people struggle to support themselves, because they are being undercut
were you under the impression that creatives were well paid before the internet?
There is a vast difference between helping an elderly neighbour mow their lawn and dumping lots of free content online. I've been running a writing group for four years now. I'm not paid to do that, and I set it up myself, but it is not putting someone else out of a job, and we support a small business. It also helps the writers, and some of our number have been published and are making sales as a result of being in the group.
It is self-centred to expect everyone to work for you for free. That is why we now have AI destroying creative industries, because it has become normalised not to pay people for using their content.
In parts of Africa the local textile and clothing industries have been destroyed by large amounts of free clothing being offloaded onto them by the developed world. This has been done with good intent, but it means that Africans have been put out of work, and so that they cannot sell their clothes on the international market. If those areas could develop a clothing industry it would bring much needed money into their economy and make them less dependent on onerous bank loans.
"were you under the impression that creatives were well paid before the internet?"
Yes, they were being better paid. Musicians had unions for one. Spotify and YouTube do not pay fair rates for their music, yet rake in from advertising. Old radio stations paid better.
This has been a problem in bars and venues. They tell lies like 'it will look good on your CV/resumé" or "it will get you attention". But if many of them are willing do it unpaid, it means a lot of the pubs won't pay anyone to play.
"Screw that. People should be able to do whatever they want with their own work. That is what it means to own something."
That undermines other novelists who are in most cases making barely any money to begin with. I know people who specifically go for free books in preference to ones they have to pay for.
I submitted an article to a magazine some years ago, which I had spent WEEKS researching. They turned it down and it mysteriously popped up on a blog, uncredited, and only lightly rewritten. I had to threaten legal action. But it was sickening given how much work I had put into it. I am not wealthy, in fact I struggle to pay my life expenses. This year was the first time I was able to take a holiday away from home in several years.
"Are you also opposed to open source software?"
I think people should be paid for work. We have it arse backwards in this society. Parasitic megacorporations get paid exorbitant amounts of money for crappy products through their cartels, and barely pay any tax... Whereas other people are expected to work for nothing. Being able to work for free means that you have the time and money to do so. But unfortunately it means that people expect other people's labour to be for free even though that is not how the economy works.
Companies like Wikimedia, Duolingo, IMDB, social media and so on, are taking unpaid labour and making money off it. Wikimedia Wikimedia got $150M in donations during July 1, 2020—June 30, 2021. 67M wen on salaries, with 9M of it going to management, and apparently pocketed 50M. Needless to say, the bulk of Wikimedia's labour never sees a bolt in compensation.
> I know people who specifically go for free books in preference to ones they have to pay for.
Most people like things that are free. Obviously. I myself make good use of my library card.
> I submitted an article to a magazine some years ago, which I had spent WEEKS researching. They turned it down and it mysteriously popped up on a blog, uncredited, and only lightly rewritten.
That sucks. But is besides the point. The key is consent. You didn't consent to that. The author of this book chose to make it freely available. Just like you are making your comments on hn freely available. its all about choice.
> Wikimedia got $150M in donations during July 1, 2020—June 30, 2021. 67M wen on salaries, with 9M of it going to management, and apparently pocketed 50M. Needless to say, the bulk of Wikimedia's labour never sees a bolt in compensation.
As an active participant in Wikimedia movement, i'm very familiar with it.
Nobody "pocketed it". They keep a reserve for unexpected expenses or if fundraising goes poorly. There are plenty of things you can fault the Wikimedia Foundation for, but this seems like a stupid one. Obviously they are going to keep some money in the bank, just in case something unexpected happens.
This is one of my favorite books and it's fun to read for anyone interested in the AI consciousness debate. https://hpmorpodcast.com/blindsided-00-announcement/ is a podcast that read the book last year. And https://blindsight.space/ is a Watts' approved website that has a short film/movie trailer for the book.
The marginal / ancillary discussion of the usefulness of people in a post GAI world was really interesting. The best part of this discussion was that the protagonists entire job is to translate ideas that are too hard to understand into a tangible/actionalbe "surface area". Essentially - a policy-maker interface that treats superintelligence as a "black box".
I have an excerpt of the book explaining this here: https://jodavaho.io/posts/books-blindsight.html
The discussion about non-conscious intelligence was less so (I see ants every day!). But this is a new idea dense book to say the least - if you love worldbuilding, please pick it up.
And the authors blog/website is: https://www.rifters.com/crawl/
Second book echopraxia is good too
Imo Greg Egan's Permutation City is a far more interesting exploration of consciousness.
Permutation City is not "far more interesting", it is a complementary exploration of consciousness and the nature of reality. Both are excellent (also both very relevant i-pumps). Permanence by Karl Schroeder is another really good complementary exploration of the idea of consciousness as transitory, a symptom of not being good at the thing that is being consciously cogitated. A cat is so good at being a cat, it does not need to waste resources on clumsy meta-aware calculations on how to cat.
I read Blindsight long before modern LLM AI came about and at the time I thought the aliens being intelligent without being conscious was fascinating and gave me a different perspective that those things could be separated but it didn't have and direct application.
Learning how modern AI's respond immediately made me think about how Rorschach was communicating with the crew and how current LLM AI's might be considered intelligent while not conscious.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight_(Watts_novel)#Consc...
This is one of the books that left me with the most profound sense of unease. And it deserves very high prait for being able to do that.
While people might remember it for other more striking ideas, I was impressed with how it expounds the theory behind the claims that "intelligence implies violence". That entire narrative was quite chilling.
That, and the way the author explains how to establish a means of communication using just... pain.
It's a brilliant book.
I read it every couple of years and it makes me feel weird for several weeks at a time. Like nothing is real, nothing matters, I'm not really here. I eventually snap out of it, but it's an odd feeling.
There's a quote from James D. Nicoll, "Whenever I find my will to live becoming too strong, I read Peter Watts."
It's the closest thing to an infohazard that I know.
For a dissenting opinion: boring, marginally pretentious book. Tries to bring up some interesting ideas, but loses the plot along the way. Also random Dracula in space. Couldn't get myself to finish it.
Watts did a whole academic presentation on the science of vampirism in the book's context. It's a fun watch and makes it feel much less random. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEOUaJW05bU
If you want a really shoehorned scifi vampire, there's a David Weber book in which it comes out of fucking nowhere towards the end.
Best explanation for vampires not liking crosses I have ever seen. I always enjoy vampires that are explained scientifically for some reason in fiction, its like some sort of challenge and they usually avoid the whole dislike of crosses, not here, thought it was a decent attempt along with many other ideas in the book, very enjoyable to me.
My favorite explanation for it - and I forget where it's from, but it probably isn't uncommon - is that vampires who were humans raised in Christian cultures believe themselves to be damned by God when they turn because that's what the folklore says, and that belief and self-hatred manifests as a phobic aversion to religious symbolism.
Rings a bell for Netflix’s Stephen Moffat Dracula.
Not bad, think I still prefer that their visual cortex was more advanced such that they could easily perceive multiple perspectives (necker cubes) and maybe even higher dimensions but they had a "crucifixion glitch" such that too much euclidean geometry in the visual field of view caused seizures which doesn't normally occur in nature.
This helped explained their downfall with man creating euclidean geometry everywhere and was taken advantage of when they where brought back as they where very good at certain tasks while also requiring anti seizure drugs which kept them in control.
I felt similar. I finished it but couldn’t finish the sequel. The primary idea was “intelligence can take different shapes” and I kept reading to get insightful descriptions of these different shapes but they never really came. I don’t disagree with the premise it just didn’t really get across the message very well.
> The primary idea was “intelligence can take different shapes”…
IIRC, it was more "intelligence may be a maladaptive dead-end".
The book makes pains to draw a line between consciousness (or meta consciousness) and intelligence. I don't think he really argued that intelligence is maladaptive, but does argue that meta consciousness might be.
Apologies, you're right. I mixed the two up.
Yea I took it as consciousness was maladaptive and sort of a local maxima that humans were trapped in which prevented them from gaining higher intelligences.
It felt to me like he wanted to write a treatise on the nature of intelligence and also space vampire fiction and for some reason decided to put them in the same book.
Unfortunately I have to agree with you. I finally got round to this to see what the fuss was about, and was very disappointed. Oblique to the point of baffling and unlikable characters aplenty.
Agreed. Very edgelord-y right off the bat. Couldn't finish it.
Exactly my thought. It's hard to take any sci-fi novel with space vampires seriously.
Blindsight has "space vampires" in much the same way that Lord of the Rings has "crystal balls". (Or Tamsyn Muir's Locked Tomb series has "lesbian necromancers in space".)
This...coming from someone who did finish it. Such meh execution that it continues to baffle me whenever it makes front page.
The space vampire really felt like an unnecessary add to the entire thing. Could have established similar sci-fi woo-woo with a super-intelligent test-tube baby who might have some lingering trauma from that development.
I don't think that would have fit as strongly thematically. Thematically, vampires being ancient, human hunting predators, who are basically the answer to "what happened if you tried creating maximally anti-social humans", and who "accidentally" got wiped out is just another another round in Watt's repeated hammering home the idea that self-awareness/consciousness is not a pinnacle.
The idea that human kind would in its moments of fear and panic reach back and put an anti-social predator in charge is also thematic. In traditional conceptions of hierarchy of "thinking", we would perhaps imagine the self/meta conscious self as being "the top layer", with the layer represented by vampires perhaps being a lower layer (we would imagine it being above "the reptile brain" though). Yet here, humanity (or human command) has chosen to invert the order. The self-awareness layer is capable and does "let go", because while it loves to take the credit for what the mind actually does, it does in fact understand self preservation (generally), and does understand that sometimes, it just needs to... not really be in control.
Final spoilers - and then there's the extra twist which is that the vampire captain was apparently being puppeted by a computer AI system (also implied to be not self aware) the whole time anyways.
So really, we have a pair of non-self aware intelligent systems probing each other. One deploying scramblers, the other deploying the human crew as end effectors.
The space vampire was fun.
> might have some lingering trauma
Why does every character have to have some trauma? Just because the Oscar committee says so?
Spoilers
All of the characters are weird, super humans with their own problems. At one point, the vampire freaks out and attacks the protagonist. Which leads to some plot ramifications. If you are to maintain that structure, you require a teammate to lose their cool at a pivotal moment when it has been established that the team leader was better and more logical than everyone else.
The in-universe vampire explanation gives a rationale for the scenario. This does not hold if you trivially swap out for a different character, so some kind of hard-wired trigger is required.
I liked the ideas in Blindsight more than I liked the book. The writing is heavy-handed (trying to be gentle here), especially given how interesting the underlying questions were.
Agree. Near the end of the book I was starting to skim pages
Yeah, the end was in desperate need of another editing pass. He takes you by the head, smashes your face into the ground, and then drags you for half a mile.
Anyone who gets that far into the book doesn't need to have their hand held that much. I get that it's the entire point of the book, but everything until this point has been a challenging read.
Personally, I think it might have been interesting to rewrite the whole thing such that conclusion is ambiguous.
Blindsight is fantastic. The sequel, Echopraxia, is also excellent; it is very different, and I expect many people were disappointed that it wasn't just more of the same.
Also a big shout out to his less well-known novel, The Freeze Frame Revolution. It's about the crew of a "stargate"-seeding spaceship trying to stop the ship's AI, but being hampered by the fact that the AI is both near-omniscient and that they only work in short shifts before being put back in hibernation. He also wrote a handful of short stories set before and after the novel.
There's something very refreshingly direct, unvarnished, no-nonsense, and clear-eyed (some would say cynical) about Watts' style of writing. His prose tends to be tough (quite like early Gibson's noir style, with the punk attitude intact), but also beautifully cinematic. The only other write that I think comes close, aside from Gibson, is Dan Simmons with his Hyperion Cantos, but he's not nearly as darkly cynical.
Leaving aside "which book is better" (which is hard to answer), I'll say that The Freeze Frame Revolution is much more approachable for most folks. It's the one I'd recommend to my friends first, then I might recommend Blindsight if they liked it - along with other difficult to articulate factors. Perhaps the "recommend/don't recommend" choice is arrived at by non-conscious mechanisms ;)
I did not enjoy this book. It felt too try-hard edgy. If they dropped the vampire it would have been better.
Edit: another thing I didn't like was how the author just dumped pages and pages of his character-notes as background information for that character. At least that's how it felt on the multi-page flashback digressions. I skipped pages and pages of the book because it was irrelevant to the story.
The writing definitely felt try-hard, especially at the start where the first few chapters seem really obscure by design.
Also, while I enjoyed the philosophy, as someone who has also read all of Oliver Sacks's books and took several philosophy of mind courses in college, it really felt like he just wanted to put in every cool Oliver Sacks-ian case study he had ever read.
But they were also added in without much context. In my book club (of intelligent people) I had to re-explain nearly all of them, e.g. the blindsight scene (from which the title comes from) is practically the entire thesis, but if you haven't heard of it before you can miss it.
His Rifters books are great as well. Honestly I've never read anything from Watts that I didn't really like.
Rifters should definitely get more attention. A lot like Stand on Zanzibar, circa forty years later.
On my optimistic days I feel like we are living in a Zanzibar Shockwave Rider future. The rest of the time it feels like Sheep Look Up or Jagged Orbit. Highly recommend John Brunner
Rifters has some very, very yikes moments later on in the series.
The universe, plot, and characters are all aggressively atheistic[1]. Meanwhile the prose is heavily infused with Christian religious language, references, and allusions.
Consequently, I'm not really sure who the book is for. I don't know any Christians who like atheistic hard scifi (although, I exist so there must be others). And I don't know many people into hard scifi who really care for the religious imagery.
Personally, I find the experience to be unique, so I think it's worth it if you can get into it.
Besides that (and to spoil the point of the book) the biggest flaw is that the author doesnt seem to trust the reader to get the point, which is that consciousness is an unnecessary (and detrimental) evolutionary dead end. Real intelligence is totally orthogonal.
As a software engineer who has seen very intelligent systems with no more consciousness than a paperclip for decades, I got on board with the premise as soon as it showed up. But then I kind of had to wade through case study after case study highlighting the idea.
[1] - this isnt atheism that's aggressive, but rather a universe where there's no doubt that there is no god with all of the consequences thereof.
> And I don't know many people into hard scifi who really care for the religious imagery.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperion_(Simmons_novel) is a massive classic and is full of that stuff. The Matrix has The One die and be resurrected as a godlike glowing being.
Most atheists/Christians aren't as rigid as you imagine.
> a universe where there's no doubt that there is no god
The vast majority of scifi (and other genres) doesn't care or take a position either way. Nothing in Blindsight says "there can't be a God"; it has nothing to do with that.
> a universe where there's no doubt that there is no god
Do you mean that the universe itself provides clear, incontrovertible evidence there is no god? Or do you simply mean that in the universe portrayed, none of the people happen to have any doubt about the non-existence of god?
For better or worse Christianity is the shorthand language of Western culture since so much of art philosophy and media draw from it. Plenty of non-religious (and even irreligious) works employ it for symbolism or metaphor, or like Hideaki Anno putting Christian symbolism all over Evangelion, just for the aesthetic.
It's the same reason why Evangelion uses a lot of Christian imagery.
Religion aside, the imagery is undeniably cool. It goes hard.
No other reason is required.
If you haven't read the book, beware of spoiler warnings in this thread! It's pretty important in this case.
Easily my favorite science fiction novel. And you can read it for free on his website!
http://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm
My capsule summary:
In the 2070s, on the cusp of the singularity, a swarm of alien drones takes a snapshot of the Earth before burning up in the atmosphere. A small crew of bleeding-edge posthumans, all with different physical or mental augmentations, is sent to the outer Solar System to investigate the source. The narrator, Siri Keeton, is an emotionally lobotomized "synthesist" tasked with monitoring the mission and interpreting it for the leadership back home.
I don't want to spoil its frightening twists, but suffice to say that it shapes up to be a cosmic horror novel where the horror is rooted in abstract ideas like human cognition and the nature of consciousness. The book is peppered with philosophical concepts like the Chinese Room and (real-life) neurological quirks like blindsight, all bent towards smart, existential horror. Like Lovecraft mixed with Oliver Sacks.
And while the ideas are solid -- the author is a marine biologist who fills the appendix with citations of evolutionary and cognitive research -- what I really love is the prose. Watts is a fantastic hard SF writer, filling every page with authentic, charismatic narration, cinematic imagery, and a way of talking about abstruse scientific concepts in a way that punches you in the gut and chills you to the bone. His style is like a horror version of Douglas Adams, mind-bending ideas and memorable characters with a compulsively readable flow to it.
Its biggest weakness is that one of the most compelling aspects sounds like a pulpy joke at first glance -- the ship is led by a "vampire." I can't imagine how many people read this on the jacket and took a hard pass on Dracula in Space. But it's not some fantasy gimmick -- it's the in-universe nickname for an ancient, predatory, sociopathically brilliant subspecies of humanity that's been resurrected, Jurassic Park-style, to help manage high-stakes ventures like the first-contact mission. The captain starts off intriguing, quickly grows frightening, and eventually advances one of the book's most disturbing and unforgettable arguments.
Overall, it's not just my favorite SF novel, but one of my favorite novels, period. The only book I've ever bought a dead-tree copy to be signed by the author. Highly, highly recommended.
I totally agree. Also one of my favorites. It has a real vibe that sticks with you for a while. It’s not just about whether you like the ideas or his particular prose, etc. He put together a complete work that as a whole really captures something unique and really cool.
The "vampire" thing was a bit cheesy to be honest, despite being scientifically explained. But conceptually it was quite key to the story. There would probably have been another way to do this.
Despite that, still one of my all time favorite sci fi books. A fantastic exploration of intelligence, conscioussness and first contact.
The book is layered with ideas and meta-ideas some of which are allusions and need to be deciphered rather than spelled out. Which is also I guess why the “smart idiots” don’t like it or think it’s pretentious and boring. It’s a work that rewards attention and deep contemplation.
First the reading at bayesian conspiracy, now here? Own the novel, it was often hard to read, but kinda worth it for the novel concept introduced.
Phenomenal deep book with layers upon layers of ideas. Not a easy read read for a single afternoon, this one really requires you to work for your meal; read, go back, reread with new context, ponder.
Probably a bit too heavy on ideas for most and those who are only used to lighter cost might find it boring. But for me one my all time favorite sci-fi books.
r/printSF is unconscionably obsessed with this middling work. It's just a collection of "isn't that cool" pop-sci phenomena randomly dropped into an Aliens (1986) space horror plot. Watts in his interviews just comes across as a fanboy hack. Interstellar travel is so difficult that spacefaring aliens must have deliberately set out to do it and are thus conscious! Triffids aren't going to grow their way to Earth!
Novelists should not be giving their work away for free like that. AI is bad enough, but writing a novel (even a bad one) is hard work. It just makes it harder for novelists to make a living.
Heh. You picked the absolutely wrong author to say that. His making the book a free download tripled his sales in the first week.
Quoting from:
https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2enwks/iama_science_f...
So I saw two options. 1: Book tanks, nobody can read it; or 2) book tanks, anyone can read it. I saw no option where Blindsight would ever make money. So what the hell, thought I-- I may die poor, but maybe I won't die completely obscure. Told my editor I was going to set everything free under a Creative Commons license-- it would have broken the contract, but Cory Doctorow had been getting away with it for years and besides, I figured my writing career was pretty much kaput anyway. Editor asked me to wait a month, to see if things turned around. I waited. They didn't. Finis.
The week after I started giving Blindsight away, sales tripled. The rest is history.
Yes, I know that technique. I also know people who go for free books exclusively on Kindle. They don't want to pay for anything. That isn't helpful to people who are selling books in order to help support themselves and undermines the market for new book sales.
I know writers who tried giving their book away for free, and got almost no sales or good reviews afterwards. They aren't all selling terrible books either.
Would you seriously ask a taxi driver to give you free rides before they got paid? Or would you ask a teacher to work for six months unpaid in order to get a couple of years work later on?
I know this mentality is encouraged in some places with interns, but it is a luxury of people who can already support themselves.
I would not ask a taxi driver to give me free rides, but if I could invent and give away magical free teleportation, which would immediately obviate the need for taxi drivers, I would. If I could snap my fingers and conjure the revenants of past plumbers whose existence on the earthly plane served to do nothing but put plumbers out of business by providing services gratis, I'd do that too.
If I were a talented writer and had the ability to produce content as engaging as Peter Watts', I'd put it online for free.
Whatever 'harm' I might do to other authors or taxi drivers or plumbers with this practice is far outweighed by the good that is done to the world by its release.
Screw that. People should be able to do whatever they want with their own work. That is what it means to own something.
Are you also opposed to open source software?
Some people are just that brainwashed by the self-centered concept of immediate profit. They're unable to fathom any higher meaning or purpose to life/effort.
Do you tell your plumber or your electrician that they are self-centred when they come around asking to be paid? You might laugh, but that happens. I knew a builder a few years ago who only had half his bill paid, with the result he lost thousands on materials he had bought. It would have cost him a pretty penny going down the legal route. Rich people are often the worst for paying up. Novelists are not paid by the hour and many have to take on other jobs in order to support themselves.
Donna Tartt takes about ten years to write a novel. Some writers take a month or two. It is not an easy task, and very few people can pull it off, let alone in a short time. The internet is full of free music, art and writing, with the result that creative people struggle to support themselves, because they are being undercut, and professional work is being converted into a hobby. The tax authorities, electricity companies, and supermarkets are not interested in whether you are self-centred or not as you put it. They want to be paid. (If you are on unemployment benefit while writing the book, they will demand that you look for other work during that time... Or claim you are able to work.)
> Do you tell your plumber or your electrician that they are self-centred when they come around asking to be paid?
They are free to do with their labour as they please. That includes charging for it. It also includes doing it pro-bono if they feel like it.
The self-centered part is the idea that they would never want to do it pro-bono. Electricians, plumbers do sometimes do work pro-bono if they feel it is a worthy cause. That is what freedom is: the ability to choose for yourself.
> The internet is full of free music, art and writing, with the result that creative people struggle to support themselves, because they are being undercut
were you under the impression that creatives were well paid before the internet?
There is a vast difference between helping an elderly neighbour mow their lawn and dumping lots of free content online. I've been running a writing group for four years now. I'm not paid to do that, and I set it up myself, but it is not putting someone else out of a job, and we support a small business. It also helps the writers, and some of our number have been published and are making sales as a result of being in the group.
It is self-centred to expect everyone to work for you for free. That is why we now have AI destroying creative industries, because it has become normalised not to pay people for using their content.
In parts of Africa the local textile and clothing industries have been destroyed by large amounts of free clothing being offloaded onto them by the developed world. This has been done with good intent, but it means that Africans have been put out of work, and so that they cannot sell their clothes on the international market. If those areas could develop a clothing industry it would bring much needed money into their economy and make them less dependent on onerous bank loans.
"were you under the impression that creatives were well paid before the internet?"
Yes, they were being better paid. Musicians had unions for one. Spotify and YouTube do not pay fair rates for their music, yet rake in from advertising. Old radio stations paid better.
This has been a problem in bars and venues. They tell lies like 'it will look good on your CV/resumé" or "it will get you attention". But if many of them are willing do it unpaid, it means a lot of the pubs won't pay anyone to play.
You're jumping though hoops to ignore the original point. Maybe try re-reading how this thread began.
"Screw that. People should be able to do whatever they want with their own work. That is what it means to own something."
That undermines other novelists who are in most cases making barely any money to begin with. I know people who specifically go for free books in preference to ones they have to pay for.
I submitted an article to a magazine some years ago, which I had spent WEEKS researching. They turned it down and it mysteriously popped up on a blog, uncredited, and only lightly rewritten. I had to threaten legal action. But it was sickening given how much work I had put into it. I am not wealthy, in fact I struggle to pay my life expenses. This year was the first time I was able to take a holiday away from home in several years.
"Are you also opposed to open source software?"
I think people should be paid for work. We have it arse backwards in this society. Parasitic megacorporations get paid exorbitant amounts of money for crappy products through their cartels, and barely pay any tax... Whereas other people are expected to work for nothing. Being able to work for free means that you have the time and money to do so. But unfortunately it means that people expect other people's labour to be for free even though that is not how the economy works.
Companies like Wikimedia, Duolingo, IMDB, social media and so on, are taking unpaid labour and making money off it. Wikimedia Wikimedia got $150M in donations during July 1, 2020—June 30, 2021. 67M wen on salaries, with 9M of it going to management, and apparently pocketed 50M. Needless to say, the bulk of Wikimedia's labour never sees a bolt in compensation.
> I know people who specifically go for free books in preference to ones they have to pay for.
Most people like things that are free. Obviously. I myself make good use of my library card.
> I submitted an article to a magazine some years ago, which I had spent WEEKS researching. They turned it down and it mysteriously popped up on a blog, uncredited, and only lightly rewritten.
That sucks. But is besides the point. The key is consent. You didn't consent to that. The author of this book chose to make it freely available. Just like you are making your comments on hn freely available. its all about choice.
> Wikimedia got $150M in donations during July 1, 2020—June 30, 2021. 67M wen on salaries, with 9M of it going to management, and apparently pocketed 50M. Needless to say, the bulk of Wikimedia's labour never sees a bolt in compensation.
As an active participant in Wikimedia movement, i'm very familiar with it.
Nobody "pocketed it". They keep a reserve for unexpected expenses or if fundraising goes poorly. There are plenty of things you can fault the Wikimedia Foundation for, but this seems like a stupid one. Obviously they are going to keep some money in the bank, just in case something unexpected happens.