If you hear the occasional thump during this review, don't worry: it's me punching and kicking myself for not reading this book twenty years ago.
It's ... wow. It's hard to articulate what I find so extraordinary about it, without going into deep and spoilericious summary. But, y'know, the book
is twenty years old, and if you haven't read it by now, a bit of spoliation won't kill you, so what the Hell.
1.
The setup. The narrator, Siri Keeton, after a brief flashback to childhood, is on a spaceship in the Oort cloud, looking for the cause of a disturbing event that took place shortly before the ship,
Theseus, was launched. On an otherwise ordinary day, a large number of
objects entered Earth's atmosphere and burned up. They were coordinated in a way that suggests that they were taking a holographic picture of the whole globe. But for whom?
2.
The characters. There are a lot of flashbacks to Keeton's past, but in the story's present, there are five main characters:
- Siri Keeton himself, who, as a child, had one hemisphere of his brain removed to stop a series of violent convulsions that would, in time, have killed him. He is a synthesist, trained (and amplified by devices in the emptied half of his skull) to observe, make connections, and report without becoming personnaly involved.
- Isaac Szpindel, biologist and cyborg who, as the blurb of the current edition puts it, "can't feel his own flesh.
- The Gang of Four, a woman (except for one of them) who deliberately induced multiple independent personalities in brain, not as competitors but as collaborators; together they are a crack linguist.
- Amanda Bates, a warrior who seeks to win without killing (or even fighting) wherever possible.
- Jukka Sarasti, a vampire, and the commander of the group.
This last perhaps requires some explanation, because this is very much a hard SF novel. But I think I'll let Watts explain it for himself, should you choose to read it.
3.
The story. Blindsight is, at the heart of it, a first contact story, but it refuses to act like one. It is, in another way, a Big Dumb Object story, except that it actually talks to the
Theseus crew early in the story.
The plot is tense in a way that reminds me of the way I felt when I read
The Andromeda Strain at the age of thirteen, over fifty years ago, and that's really the only comparison I can make here. More important, it takes twists and turns that I did not in any way expect but that made perfect sense — but only once I knew a lot more than I knew when they happened.
4.
The theme. And here's where I can't help getting a bit spoily. Watts is writing, here, about the mind, about consciousness, about what it is, what it isn't, and about whether or not it's beneficial to us as a species: he (or, rather, one of his characters) makes a pretty strong argument that it isn't.
Watts delivers intellectual punch after punch. This isn't to say that there is no emotional payoff — there certainly is — but another way this book plays back to classic SF is that its core is not emotional but intellectual: Big Ideas propel the story every bit as much as the characters who live through it.
I think I'm prepared to call this the first great SF novel of the twenty-first century.
Ten out of ten space vampires.
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