Overview
In 2082, a comet-load of alien probes lights up Earth's night sky and immediately vanishes. A ship. The Theseus. Is sent to investigate their point of origin. Its crew includes a linguist with four surgically-separated personalities, a biologist who has replaced most of her nervous system with machinery, a soldier with combat implants, and a captain who is a genetically resurrected vampire. The narrator, Siri Keeton, has had half his brain removed since childhood and observes everyone including himself from a permanent professional distance.
The novel Watts builds around this crew is a sustained argument that consciousness may be an evolutionary dead end. That self-awareness costs energy and buys nothing that unconscious systems can't do faster. The aliens they meet at the far end embody this thesis in a form that will crawl into your head and stay there. There is a scene in the third act, entirely conducted in flatline dialogue between two intelligences that do not fully understand each other, that is one of the most unnerving things I have read in fiction.
This is not an easy book. Watts writes in cold, technical, cascading prose; his footnotes at the back cite thirty pages of neuroscience papers; the emotional distance of his narrator is a feature, not a bug. But if you can meet it on its terms. And it is worth meeting it. Blindsight is the most intellectually provocative science-fiction novel published this century. Free to read on Watts's website. Buy the paperback anyway.
