Blindsight

I was browsing internet forums for science fiction book recommendations, for what I should keep an eye out. Blindsight by Peter Watts appeared in few lists. One person described it as like watching Alien for the first time. That definitely piqued my interest but after reading the book, I wouldn't compare it to Alien exactly. It does have a first contact with an extraterrestrial life form, and I suppose it can be a bit creepy, but that's about it. Alien is horror in a futuristic setting whereas Blindsight is hard science fiction -- really hard science fiction.

According to Brandon Sanderson, authors usually have few ideas they build their novels around. And the longer the book is, the more ideas it has. Blindsight however has a whole lot going on yet is a sub-400-pages novel. Watts lists most of the many scientific papers he used as source material for the novel in an appendix which is quite lengthy. Each chapter also starts with an intertextual quote as an epigraph which I am always a fan of. I recognized quite a few of the quotes too.

The Finnish translation of Blindsight by J. Pekka Mäkelä is excellent. For instance, I liked the word 'häily' he made up for what the alien creatures in the book get named (apparently 'scrambler' in English). There are also many difficult scientific terms whose translations must have taken effort to look up or make up in case there was none.

The main theme of the novel is the nature of consciousness. What it is and how it is defined? Is consciousness like some stowaway sitting in our brain, observing the feeds from our senses? How useful is being self aware in terms of existing and advancing or is it an evolutionary dead end?

The title of the book refers to the ability of being able to react to visual stimuli despite one's conscious brain not receiving information from their otherwise normal-appearing eyes. Like when one of the novel's characters, who is blind, makes an unconscious attempt to grab a battery tossed at him.

One can consciously control one's body but it is really slow compared to doing stuff unconsciously. One of the examples presented in the book is how a ballet dancer will most certainly fumble if they start actively thinking about the performance they're in the middle of.

I have read and watched many scifi stories about a first contact with a species whom the author really tried to make different to humans. The stories are often silly or nonsensical, and in the worst case not even interesting or entertaining. Blindsight's hard science approach from research papers to a what-if situation is a success though.

Set in 2082, things are slightly more technologically advanced in the book's world than in the current day Earth but humanity's still tightly nested in the Solar System. Of all the different views on how other possible life in the universe might turn up, people have largely chosen not to care. Thus Earth is taken by surprise when thousands of alien probes in a precise grid burn up in the atmosphere simultaneously. These 'fireflies' are soon forgotten however, as nothing seems to follow them. Years later an odd signal coming from a comet is detected beyond Neptune though. Two waves of probes are sent to investigate and a third wave, a manned spaceship Theseus follows them.

The crew of Theseus is a colorful bunch and in their own way compete in weirdness with the aliens they're going to meet up. The novel's viewpoint protagonist is Siri Keeton. As a child he had half of his brain removed to fix epilepsy, I think. It left him fairly emotionless and he had to learn how to human again. That made him a talented synthesist, someone who with the aid of cybernetics excels at reading others' intentions. Siri is sort of an extra crew member, not critical for the mission; there just to observe.

Isaac Szpindel is the biologist and physician for the mission. He's the mentioned blind person but with the aid of cybernetics he works around his lack of sight and it barely even slows him down.

The Gang is the ship's linguist. She has three extra, intentionally created distinct personalities inhabiting her mind. Siri is always able to tell which one is on the surface without The Gang even saying anything. (I was amused by Mäkelä having translated 'The Gang' to Kopla. Somehow really fitting.)

There's also Major Amanda Bates who is probably the most normal of the crew. She's mostly there to command the robot soldiers that are 3D-printed from the antimatter that powers Theseus. In fact anything the crew needs is just created from the antimatter which is awfully convenient (though it is not unlimited). It's like the replicator tech in Star Trek.

The last crew member is the nominal leader of the group and he unexpectedly has a Finnish name: Jukka Sarasti. He's not exactly Finnish though; he's not even human but a vampire: homo sapiens vampiris, an extinct race brought back by technology for their usefulness. Jukka is the only one who communicates with Theseus's artificial intelligence called The Captain.

Watts uses the vampire character and race to introduce few interesting ideas, like how they're highly intelligent, being able to see both interpretations of the Necker cube simultaneously and how they never speak in the past tense. In my opinion though the whole vampire thing is stupid. I resented it so much. It's like a weird element of farce in the otherwise interesting and serious science fiction novel. Watts could've used something else and the novel would have been perfect. But bloodthirsty vampires? Seriously?

In this year's October a short film adaption of the novel was released. The visuals are nice but everyone sounds way different than I imagined. Theseus is also a lot more detailed; I pictured it pretty much as a featureless cylinder.