Blindsight by Peter Watts

This was a Hugo Nominee in 2007 that I didn’t have a chance to read because it was still in hardback and I just didn’t want to pay $24.00 for a hardback....or it might not have been in print in the States...I forget which. At any rate, I didn’t have a chance to read it before the voting.

The other nominees in the novel category that year were:
Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge [Tor, 2006]
Glasshouse by Charles Stross [Ace, 2006]
His Majesty’s Dragon by Naomi Novik [Voyager, 2006; Del Rey, 2006]
Eifelheim by Michael Flynn [Tor, 2006]
Blindsight by Peter Watts [Tor, 2006]

I liked the Goodreads.com summary: "Two months since the stars fell....Two months since sixty-five thousand alien objects clenched around the Earth like a luminous fist, screaming to the heavens as the atmosphere burned them to ash. Two months since that moment of brief, bright surveillance by agents unknown. Two months of silence, while a world holds its breath

Now some half-derelict space probe, sparking fitfully past Neptune's orbit, hears a whisper from the edge of the solar system: a faint signal sweeping the cosmos like a lighthouse beam. Whatever's out there isn't talking to us. It's talking to some distant star, perhaps. Or perhaps to something closer, something en route.

So who do you send to force introductions on an intelligence with motives unknown, maybe unknowable? Who do you send to meet the alien when the alien doesn't want to meet

You send a linguist with multiple personalities, her brain surgically partitioned into separate, sentient processing cores.

You send a biologist so radically interfaced with machinery that he sees x-rays and tastes ultrasound, so compromised by grafts and splices he no longer feels his own flesh.

You send a pacifist warrior in the faint hope she won't be needed, and the fainter one she'll do any good if she is.

You send a monster to command them all, an extinct hominid predator once called vampire, recalled from the grave with the voodoo of recombinant genetics and the blood of sociopaths.

And you send a synthesistan informational topologist with half his mind gone--as an interface between here and there, a conduit through which the Dead Center might hope to understand the Bleeding Edge.

You send them all to the edge of interstellar space, praying you can trust such freaks and retrofits with the fate of a world.

You fear they may be more alien than the thing they've been sent to find. But you'd give anything for that to be true, if you only knew what was waiting for them...."


The few issues I had with the book were the beginning seemed to gloss over the whole "stuff fell from the sky! It's aliens!". I was reminded a bit of Spin by Robert Charles Wilson and The Singularity by Charles Stross. The author also bounced between first and last names, which in and of itself usually isn't a problem, unless one of your characters is actually four distinct personalities. That took a bit to keep straight and he seemed to do better cuing the reader in later in the book. And I confess, some of the science stuff went waaayy over my head. I was more interested in the human aspect of the story rather than the "how the aliens lived without oxygen".

Still, I recommend Blindsight.