Book review: Blindsight

TLDR: exciting but disappointing.

Wiki provides a reasonable summary; and as usual Goodreads will provide opinions. Author: Peter Watts.

The basic setup is decent: someething alien has undeniably scanned Earth; and we send a ship to find it. There's some oddities in there though: why the aliens would choose to scan us to blatantly, and yet hide; why they would cunningly redirect their transmissions through a hard-to-detect indirect link, and yet be detected. I think those needed to be more important for the plot, but they aren't, so they're just plot-candy. Unlesss they can be justified as camoflage, for the real plot? A sparer book would have made the real plot more obvious.

Another oddity: the aliens are hanging waay out, but our characters never show any interest in how long they've been there. Is "Big Ben" moving wrt to the Sun? This is never asked. Did the aliens hitch a lift on it, or did they just want the mass, and so choose to settle there and eat it? Possibly the latter, but the lack of discussion is strange. Are the aliens just one of a zillion ships that the alien species has sent out, or alone? Why, if the aliens can function happily out by Big Ben, do they are about the Earth at all? We never know.

The main cute idea is that the aliens are intelligent, but not conscious (whether this is even possible or not is of course not known, but that's OK: this is a story). I was disappointed by how quickly this becomes clear: it seems to be that the mystery could have been preserved longer; it feels impatient. This sort-of segues into / combines with various other issues of consciousness (the narrator, the vampires) in what feels a rather ill-disciplined way. Issues vaguely linked to consciousness (blindspots, saccades) are kinda linked into the story line but in a wallpapery way, that only disguises the fundamental lacks, without contributing anything to the ideas.

Although it sort-of purports to be a "discussion of consciousness" it isn't; it is just a humble sci-fi story. The "discussion" comes via the central character trying to make sense of things; but this is a combination of asserting implausibilities (consciousness is evolutionarily useless and costly; can you see the problem with that?) and lots of incomplete sentences and half-seen side glances.

I don't mind the vampires, though they do feel like an idea too many. But I'm sure I've read the "crucifix glitch" idea elsewhere, many years ago.