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Tor Books

Blindsight (Firefall, 1)

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Hugo and Shirley Jackson award-winning Peter Watts stands on the cutting edge of hard SF with his acclaimed novel, Blindsight Two months since the stars fell... Two months of silence, while a world held 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 with unknown and unknowable alien intellect that doesn't wish to be met? 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. You send a pacifist warrior in the faint hope she won't be needed. 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 synthesist―an informational topologist with half his mind gone―as an interface between here and there. Pray they can be trusted with the fate of a world. They may be more alien than the thing they've been sent to find. Read more

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Tor Books


Publication date ‏ : ‎ April 21, 2020


Edition ‏ : ‎ Reprint


Language ‏ : ‎ English


Print length ‏ : ‎ 384 pages


ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1250237483


ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 84


Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.31 pounds


Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.37 x 0.96 x 8.31 inches


Book 1 of 2 ‏ : ‎ Firefall


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Top Amazon Reviews

    • Hard Sci-Fi with brilliant characterizations
'Blindsight' is a hard sci-fi novel well written enough for everyone to enjoy. Unique characters keep the mood while detailed descriptions set the atmosphere. First let me introduce you to the eclectic cast: Theseus - a ship with AI whose "body parts" (such as hatches) have reflexes. She's the Captain of the expedition. Siri Keeton - Half of Siri's brain was removed when he was young, a dramatic cure for epilepsy that left him incapable of emotions such as empathy. Through observation, he can almost psychically predict the actions and thoughts of others. He's known as a Synthesist. Isaac Szpindel - The crew's biologist, a mostly human looking cyborg Susan James - The crew's linguist with surgically induced multiple personality disorder (known as The Gang, including Susan, Sascha, Michelle (Meesh) the Synesthete, and Cruncher) Major Amanda Bates - The crew's "security", a professional soldier who's career defining moment involved consorting with the enemy. She shaves her head. Jukka Sarasti - A sociopathic, genetically engineered vampire with the ability of conjoined intelligence with the Captain. Robert Cunningham - Another biologist, also a cyborg, who doesn't use pronouns and chain smokes. After an event called Firefall on Earth, when thousands of probes fell from the skies, Theseus was sent out into space to follow the trail back to the source of the probes. The crew comes out of "the crypt" where they have been kept inert and death-like for the trip, near Big Ben - a failed disc-shaped, black star. Orbiting Ben's chaotic field is an alien vessel unlike anything ever seen before. Then the ship makes contact, speaking their language and calling itself the Rorschach. Susan and "The Gang" communicate with Rorschach until, unbelievably, Susan cuts off communication, announcing that it's not a sentient presence they are speaking with. So what exactly is Theseus and the crew dealing with? Sarasti, working with the Captain, decides to send the crew over to the alien ship though from every aspect they have viewed it from, the Rorschach seems uninhabitable, uninviting, and possibly unfriendly. What they find, or what they don't find, will keep you reading right up to the very end. Between Scramblers, vampires, constructs, and AIs, the crew has their hands full. The story is told in first person by Siri, and though it sometimes seems to slide to a different POV, its simply Siri using his talents as a Synthesist to project their thoughts through translating their speech and behavior. Believe it or not, Watts makes the concept work. There's even a first person glimpse from Theseus's POV. Siri also uses flashbacks to his relationship with his ex-girlfriend Chelsea to give us deep glimpses into who and what he has become after his childhood surgery. Within the book, intriguing issues of sentience and intelligence are brought up. What defines sentience or consciousness for that matter? Free thought? Self-awareness? Speech? Higher brain? Brain stem? Reproduction? What separates a dandelion from a human? The story is rich and complex without losing any entertainment value, even when delving deep into these subjects. The book is 362 pages, with acknowledgments following. There's also a section titled Notes & References, covering vampirism, human sight, "telematter", sun types (the "superJovian") Scrambler anatomy and physiology, Sentience/Intelligence, and misc notes. This section includes bibliography footnotes. I think it would be fantastic if they made a movie from this book. I highly recommend it, whether you're a fan of hard sci-fi or not. Enjoy! ... show more
Reviewed in the United States on August 19, 2008 by Schtinky
    • Love It, Hate It, with a Great Conceptual Twist
I really want to give this books 3.5 stars ... it's got a lot of short-comings, but maybe not all of those are entirely objective. And in the end, the plot twist and the science based mind, uh, screw, make it a very interesting novel, so I begrudingly upped the rating on this book. First, the bad: this is one of the densest, hardest to like books I've read in quite some time. The author seems to delight in needlessly upping the reading level on this book ... for example, there was a word I can't remember, and I've never seen before, that basically means "to give birth". Given how obscure and/or specialized this word must be (my Kindle tagged it as "ZOOLOGY"), I can only imagine the author must have had a Thesaurus at hand during the writing of this book. And some of the scenes get especially muddled with uncommon or rarely used jargon-ish words, so much so that at times it took me a minute or two to read through one paragraph due to having to look up a word in each sentence. There are times when, yes, a very technical or obscure term was warranted; there is, afterall, a lot of bleeding edge science talk in this book. At other times, when merely commenting on general events, the use of these words borders on pretentious. Second, editing is the next worst thing about this book. At times, the scene descriptions are aggravatingly obtuse. I found myself having to re-read ... and in some cases, re-re-read, events to understand what actually happened. Sometimes it's just a case of not enough detail. Other times it's that the author uses so many metaphors, and at times, metaphors on top of story-specific metaphors, that it was like peeling apart an onion and ... oh God, I just made a meta-review or something. Anyway, the author's style in this sense is on and off ... at times it's atrocious, and at others, it's just clever and creative. Final negative aspect: this is a space sci-fi book, but the author somehow found it necessary to re-invent the concept of the vampire. Yes, THOSE vampires. On the one hand, I have to give it to the guy: he presents possibly the most scientific, believable accounting of how vampires could actually exist I've ever read, bar none. He even explains why Crucifixes (or specifically, sets of intersecting lines) would be problematic for them. But on the other hand ... why? Why was this necessary? We know of lots of real-world animals with genes or biological tricks that allow them to survive near-lethal environments, or go into an "undead" state to conserve resources (the original reason for vampires as something to do with making people survive long treks through space, rather than doing the cliched cyrogenic thing). In fact, the author even expounds upon this at the back of the book, relenting that he kind of did the vampire thing just to be original. Well, it was original ... but also very non sequitor. But the thing that brought the whole story back around for me was the mystery and horror of the alien artifact in this story. Let me put it this way: if you've read Michael Crichton's "Sphere", it's a lot like that, but amped up and thrown into space. The plot twist surrounding the nature of the artifact is brilliant, and really I can't say much more without potentional spoilers, but the resulting intellectual exploration of humanity versus non-humanity ... brilliant. Let me just say it blew my mind. I can forgive the rest of the book's shortcomings just based upon the last third of this book. It's hard to get into ... like, really hard. The author doesn't make it a very approachable book, and part of that is needlessly throwing around high-concepts of a sci-fi future without providing a whole lot of needed context (if you have to provide a half-dozen explanations at the back of your book, chances are you were a little too dense with your concept presentation). However, I would urge you to push past the first few chapters ... or 10 ... of the book. If you can keep track of a lot of jargon, ignore some vague descriptions, and stick with it, this book is pretty good. ... show more
Reviewed in the United States on February 13, 2015 by AustinTiffany

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