Peter Watts's Blindsight: The Sci-Fi Novel That Asks If Consciousness Is an Evolutionary Dead End
Blindsight (Watts Novel)
Peter Watts's 2006 hard sci-fi novel Blindsight follows a crew of transhuman specialists—including a resurrected vampire commander and a linguist with multiple personalities—sent to investigate an alien signal from a comet. They encounter Rorschach, a vast alien entity that is superintelligent yet lacks consciousness. The novel explores identity, free will, and game theory, and was nominated for the Hugo, Campbell, and Locus awards, winning Japan's Seiun Award. It is available online under a Creative Commons license.
The novel raises the possibility that consciousness is, for humanity, an evolutionary dead end.
- sxp
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.
- hannofcart
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.
- tga
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.
- gtsnexp
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.
- atombender
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.