Archive for the ‘Peter Watts’ Category
Blindsight, by Peter Watts
Posted on: May 4, 2010
- In: Peter Watts | Review | Scifi / Fantasy
- 4 Comments
My original review for Blindsight was written a few years ago and posted here. I recently re read the book, and made some updates to the review. Suffice to say, the book knocked my socks off even more the second time around.
Remember the movie Alien? Now add some H. Beam Piper, some Event Horizon, some of Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris. Populate with freaky characters, voluntary (and involuntary) lobotomies, and one very shy vampire. Welcome to Blindsight, Peter Watts’ scarier side of first contact, where aliens are truly alien, and do not want to talk to us, no matter how nice we are.
I remember Peter Watts from a number of years ago, I read his novel, Starfish, the first novel in the Rifters Trilogy. It was a harsh read for me, I wasn’t sure how to react to the sociopathic characters, but I appreciated Watts’ background in marine biology. Blindsight gets away from the marine biology, and introduces us to a warmer, fuzzier breed of sociopaths, and their vampire captain. Thanks to an ingenius explaination of the evolution, extinction, and genetic recreation of vampires on earth, Sarasti and by extention Watts, have quite the cult following.
Blindsight is told through the eyes of Siri Keeton, whose childhood operation to cure his epilepsy took half his brain with it. Siri’s single hemisphere of grey matter adapted enough to allow him to live a semi-normal life. A savant of interpreting body language, Siri is the perfect objective observer, the perfect recorder. He’ll read your “surfaces”, and while you’re talking about computer programming, he’s reading your favorite color, if you liked what you had for dinner last night, and what your sexual preferences are. He might not be able to tell you what you said, but he can tell you exactly what you meant.
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