[Luis Dias]

Do it. Only then are you qualified to speak.

So the quotation doesn't live up by itself then?

I'm sorry it frightened you.

How could an hypocritical judgment like the one you brought up against mankind "frighten me"?

I've been there decades ago. I've lost my "Realism" virginity eons ago.

The vampires are completely serious, played totally straight and hard, and a critical part of the book's thesis.

The vampires as depicted in the novel are interesting, its historical justification is the chuckling part. Or I shouldn't be amused by it because you decreed what the right reaction should any reader have? Oh, I forgot you are outside of any human reference point. You're god, so you should know.

But yeah, if you're easily scared by the cold vastness of the universe and by the ramifications of some branchings of game theory, it will not go well

And when did you stop beating your wife, Battuta?


Apart from our bickerings, thank you for the reading. Perhaps I won't read it as you did, but that's the problem of vantage points.

[PsychoLandlord]

That was good, genuinely chilling read. I'll probably have to read through it again though, as it wasn't a style I'm used to, and, sadly, I believe quite a bit of the dialog went over my head. I think I go the gist of it though.

Thanks for pointing this out, Batutta. I'll have to look up some of Watt's other work now.

[NGTM-1R]

Me too.

Unfortunately, you are reacting to an entirely different faucet of the message than the one that seems most prominent to me.

(Also, I was pretty sure the first part of the book was more useful on the count you're arguing.)

Welcome to literature. Enjoy your stay.

[achtung]

I'm about halfway through, and I'm enjoying it so far. It just seems like it's a bit hard to follow in places. I didn't realize what the Gang was until about a quarter of the way through.

[swashmebuckle]

Holy crap, it's an assault on the intellectual masturbation of consciousness, packaged in the form of Sci-Fi intellectual masturbation!  My favorite part was the whole thing!

[Mika]

I'm halfway tempted to write a review of this, what sucked and what worked.








But I'm not sure if it would be worth the effort.



To put it shortly, I find this work uneven, at some instances it is actually well written and proceeding, while on some occasions it becomes total technobabble. And yet again I find that the most interesting part is the childhood of the protagonist that's missing half his brain.

Would this be a representative of what level of current sci-fi?

[General Battuta]

No, it's a representative of the work of Peter Watts. Science fiction spreads from Cormac McCarthy (The Road) to ****ty media tie-ins and no one work can represent it all.

There was, however, very little technobabble in Blindsight, which I found admirable. Almost all the neuro material (which is what mattered) was dead on. The whole idea of telematter was mostly a handwave but the appendices made it clear he did a good job of at least working for verisimilitude if not total realism.

[The E]

One mans respected and accurate science is another bloke's technobabble, please remember that.

[General Battuta]

The whole point of science fiction is to examine the impact science may have on the human condition. Hard SF can be difficult in that respect, but it's the fluent use of game theory and neurobio that makes Blindsight such a compelling argument.

[achtung]

Finished it. That was a fun read.

[Mika]

There was, however, very little technobabble in Blindsight, which I found admirable. Almost all the neuro material (which is what mattered) was dead on. The whole idea of telematter was mostly a handwave but the appendices made it clear he did a good job of at least working for verisimilitude if not total realism.

There was plenty of it, enough for me to skip several pages because of Blah Blah, Unnecessary or Just Plain Boring. I agree that the biological stuff sounded good, but I'm not the expert there. However, with Physics and Engineering, it isn't that convincing. Another open fracture in the immersion was when the vampires were introduced, even if author tried to describe them in a very serious way, it was still a bit too much to swallow. Surprisingly, these vampires weren't actually that different from Pratchett's vampires in my opinion. Perhaps making one a captain had something to do with foreshadowing the ending, but still, mythical beast from 1800s in space doesn't really knock me out so to say.

Remember what I might have said about writers' doing their background research? The downside of that is that there is also overdoing it; in that case the text appears to be trying hard to convince, and fails harder because of that. The parts of the story look like a typical case of that. From the language patterns on those parts, it is visible for me that Watts doesn't have a strong background in Physics or Engineering, but he is much more confident (and fun) in Biology and partially Psychology. Even if there is a specialist supporting the creative process, it is down to the writer to actually write it and describe it. This problem is actually prominent in quite a lot of modern books, historical incidents seem almost too eager to jump out of the story and it's impossible to avoid the feeling writer just put them there to gain some points on historical accuracy.

I found the main antagonist protagonist actually interesting, but can't avoid the feeling he was wasted in a story setting like this. My personal feeling is that a story placed on present day, or near future might have served him better; if I were to write a story about this kind of person, I would definitely write it in a more personal style from his point of view compared to his surroundings and relationships between close ones. But that's just my preference.

EDIT: Sometimes you get it right on the first time, sometimes you don't...

[General Battuta]

Perhaps making one a captain had something to do with foreshadowing the ending, but still, mythical beast from 1800s in space doesn't really knock me out so to say.

That's exactly what they weren't.

I found the main antagonist actually interesting, but can't avoid the feeling he was wasted in a story setting like this.

I don't think this story had an antagonist. Rorschach, maybe.

[Mika]

That's exactly what they weren't.

I know. But I simply couldn't avoid thinking the guy without a black cloak and a tuxedo. Made it look rather comedic at the same time.

I don't think this story had an antagonist. Rorschach, maybe.

Precisely

[General Battuta]

Yeah I'm sorry, you're not making any sense.

[NGTM-1R]

Yeah I'm sorry, you're not making any sense.

The first bit makes perfect sense; it's how one views a vampire being shaped by previous experience.

The second one is possibly an inept take that. I'm not really sure.

[Mika]

 

Wait did I really write "antagonist"?

Sorry, that was supposed to be "protagonist".

[General Battuta]

Oh okay, now you make sense.

[Luis Dias]

I agree that Siri was a lousy protagonist. He was always better at the parts where he was at home, with his girlfriend, his friend, or his family. And then in Theseus, he was the dumbest of all, always mindraped by everyone else. It's not that it had no sense, but it felt out of place.

And the quotation is, telepathically?, given by a vampire, not an alien, so it makes *barely* more sense than what it would have if Rorschach made such a point.

I loved the part of "conversation" being treated as a virus attack, and the notion that perhaps such a judgement would be quite common in the universe, as a big ***** you star trek*. Quite the self-hating treatise on how the mind is actually a perpetual senseless thing, which is utterly ironic, for it renders the whole novel as a senseless diatribe about the self, and according to itself, it passes judgement upon the novel itself as an useless virus.

It's the problem of self-contradiction, that made me irritated at the quotation in the OP, for its apparent hypocrisy. Only an ego would make such a vitriolic treatise against ego itself, and if that was made by an alien, it would have been remarkably stupid. As is, however, reads as the last remains of the ego trying to nuke itself out of existence. The whole book is. What remains? "Intelligence", it answers.

I'll have to ponder a little more about this.

[General Battuta]

And the quotation is, telepathically?, given by a vampire

No it's not. Not at all.

for it renders the whole novel as a senseless diatribe about the self, and according to itself, it passes judgement upon the novel itself as an useless virus.

No it doesn't. A realistic look at the advantages and disadvantages of self-awareness is the best strategy for a self-aware entity to cope. Being self-aware of self-awareness is one of the only tactics the self-aware have. Self-aware entities built Theseus, after all, which is the only agency in the story which can keep up with Rorschach.

The argument made about self-awareness is that it is sub-optimal. But a spectrum of strategies will still exist for the self-aware to cope. Pretending that self-awareness is not problematic is a more sub-optimal strategy than the alternative (embodied by science fiction novel Blindsight) of examining the weaknesses of self-awareness.

[General Battuta]

None of the characters actually really clicked for me, though I think part of that is down to the fact that they're each clearly meant to represent a posthuman archetype more than a living person. I thought Watts made an amateur mistake by naming James James and Bates Bates; the names are too similar and it had me confused right up to the climax.