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[Monthly Book Club] February 2017 Book Discussion - Blindsight (Peter Watts) & next month's book announcement
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Author: u/callmesalticidae writes worldbuilding books*
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URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/7yb64q/monthly_book_club_february_2017_book_discussion/
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Score: 35
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Created: 2018-02-18T01:42:19
Post:
Because suggestions never "go bad", please suggest books for future book clubs here:
Perpetual Book Suggestions Thread
(You can suggest as many books as you like as often as you like, so don't be shy!
This month we read Blindsight, a hard science fiction novel by Peter Watts:
It's been two months since a myriad of alien objects clenched about the Earth, screaming as they burned. The heavens have been silent since - until a derelict space probe hears whispers from a distant comet. Something talks out there: but not to us. Who to send to meet the alien, when the alien doesn't want to meet? Send a linguist with multiple-personality disorder, and a biologist so spliced to machinery he can't feel his own flesh. Send a pacifist warrior, and a vampire recalled from the grave by the voodoo of paleogenetics. Send a man with half his mind gone since childhood. Send them to the edge of the solar system, praying you can trust such freaks and monsters with the fate of a world. You fear they may be more alien than the thing they've been sent to find - but you'd give anything for that to be true, if you knew what was waiting for them.
NEXT MONTH'S BOOK:
Title: The Pride of Chanur
Ebook cost: $2.99 (Consider using smile.amazon to send part of Amazon's profits to a preselected charity like Doctors Without Borders)
Page/Word count: 239 pages
Genre: Science fiction
Synopsis: No one at Meetpoint Station had ever seen a creature like the Outsider. Naked-hided, blunt toothed and blunt-fingered, Tully was the sole surviving member of his company of humans―a communicative, spacefaring species hitherto unknown―and he was a prisoner of his discoverers and captors―the sadistic, treacherous kif―until his escape onto the hani ship, The Pride of Chanur.
Little did he know when he threw himself upon the mercy of The Pride and her crew that he put the entire hani species in jeopardy and imperiled the peace of the Compact itself...for the information this fugitive held could be the ruin or glory of any of the species at Meetpoint Station.
Reasons /r/rational would like it: Aliens! The best aliens ever, according to one review of the trilogy.
Content warnings: None that I am aware of.
Next month's discussion will be posted by the superb /u/magicweasel on March 14th, or a few days later if we're a little behind in our reading.
Comments:
u/callmesalticidae [+11] writes worldbuilding books (2 minutes later)
My favorite worldbuilding line that wasn’t related to anything else in the story: “third-world medical missionary work [...] in Texas.”
Another thing that I love about Watts’ work: the abbreviations (we’ve got “TwenCen” and “WestHem” here, and off the top of my head “innersys” for inner system and “N’Am” for North America in other books of his). It feels very Philip K. Dick somehow, even if the rest of Watts' work doesn't really match up.
u/MagicWeasel [+10] Cheela Astronaut (3 hours later)
I noticed that part about Texas and I enjoyed it. So much of the US seems like a third world country with its lack of universal healthcare and whatnot, it's kind of fun to imagine what might have happened in the future...
u/callmesalticidae [+9] writes worldbuilding books (3 hours later)
Fun and depressing, though it's kind of hilarious how Canada (where Watts lives) is always doing much better than the US, even when Canada is also an authoritarian nightmare.
It's weird, though, how it's so easy to feel like you've stepped into an entirely different country just by going to another state. The gulf between, say, California and Alabama (which has a higher child mortality rate than some developing countries) is incredible.
u/MagicWeasel [+3] Cheela Astronaut (3 hours later)
And the recent articles on child marriages? Ugh!
u/tylercoder [+2] (a month later)
Yeah he seems a bit too nationalistic in that sense specially since canada's economics are not looking that hot these days. On the other hand texas is second only to california in economic power and its pretty high in a lot of business rankings.
u/callmesalticidae [+10] writes worldbuilding books (a minute later)
Maybe the Singularity happened years ago. We just don’t want to admit we were left behind.
I think that Blindsight is a great example of a weirdtopia--not a weird utopia, but a weird dystopia. The book doesn’t dwell on this overly much, but it was interesting to read the book through the lens that we’re sort of looking at the edges of something greater and that, for all that they think they’re part of the bleeding-edge, our characters are sort of cast-offs, the bits and bobs that didn’t get pulled along by the Singularity.
On a related note, do you think it’s plausible for something that we would retroactively call “the Singularity” to occur without us realizing its significance as such till some time afterwards?
u/None [+4] (14 days later)
On a related note, do you think it’s plausible for something that we would retroactively call “the Singularity” to occur without us realizing its significance as such till some time afterwards?
I dunno about plausible, but if that happens, we definitely survived?
u/sickening_sprawl [+5] (a month later)
There's a subtext plot point in William Gibson's The Peripheral that touches on that. The book revolves around a piece of tech that was stolen from China, but is basically future tech to even the very advanced post-scarcity main characters. China basically turned into "unknowable intelligence", extremely advanced but insular. No one knows what's going on in China, and no one knows what will come out of China. I've made parallels of it before to something like Her, where the Singularity happens but the AIs just...leave us behind.
Blindsight also has a bit of this in another flavor, where there are the hyper advanced AIs that can solve physics but can't tell us how. Hyperion Cantos and I, Robot have the same problem, where there is the extemely advanced AI and you can't be sure what they're doing is what they say, because they're incomprehensible, and may be just stringing you along while they do their own thing.
u/tylercoder [+2] (a month later)
for all that they think they’re part of the bleeding-edge, our characters are sort of cast-offs, the bits and bobs that didn’t get pulled along by the Singularity
Pretty sure its the opposite, they have the latest tech and are constantly talking about not falling behind other humans since they're already losing against vampires and AI.
u/MagicWeasel [+2] Cheela Astronaut (3 hours later)
I read an article a while ago about how The Singularity has already happened with the huge technological advances in the 1900s. I wonder if future historians would look on the period between 1900-2100 as a kind of "industrial revolution 2.0"? Probably not - there seems to be some natural divides with the advent of electricity and then also the advent of computers, so probably thinking too hard.
EDIT: here's the article for your viewing pleasure: http://www.terrybisson.com/page3/page3.html
u/callmesalticidae [+7] writes worldbuilding books (a minute later)
As a subreddit, most of us find the idea of uploading to be appealing (or so it seems to me). What do you feel about the portrayal of “Heaven” in this novel?
u/chiruochiba [+12] (an hour later)
Blindsight focuses heavily on the idea of Transhumanism and the idea that humanity will eventually create their replacements. In that context, the characters who upload their consciousness to "Heaven" are perceived as copouts because they choose not to participate in that progress. It's definitely a very bleak view of that future, but something I could imagine happening in our own. I'm reminded of the Hob storyline from Dresden Codak: "I can give you anything you want, save relevance."
In the story going to "Heaven" is indistinguishable from death because those who do so stop progressing as individuals. Siri's mother, and a different character seen in Peter Watts' Echopraxia, each wrap themselves in self-fulfilling fantasies where no real personal growth is possible.
u/tylercoder [+6] (a month later)
They don't upload though, they go into pods and connect with the system matrix-style, the price to stay is letting the Vatican (which IIRC operates Heaven) use their brains as part of a massive datacenter.
One ugly detail is that when you stay too long and they have to find where the hell to put your body they start chopping pieces off so you will take less space, to the point you're nothing but a torso with a head.
Siri at one time mentions that uploading your consciousness to a machine is still not possible, but its being researched.
u/wren42 [+4] (4 hours later)
Bleak but fair. The vast majority of humans are already obsolete. Very few will remain relevant once there's strong AI as in the story.
I don't think it will be seen as a copout though, as even today most people don't contribute to humanity's progress.
u/awesomeideas [+6] Dai stiho, cousin. (a day later)
Heaven is not really uploading—they actually make a point about how there are all these people just sort of hanging around, waiting for technology to progress a bit so they can be actually uploaded. Heaven's more like really great VR.
u/callmesalticidae [+6] writes worldbuilding books (2 minutes later)
"Whoever these beings are, they don't even live in sunlight. No territorial overlap, no resource overlap, no basis for conflict. There's no reason we shouldn't get along just fine."
"On the other hand," Szpindel said, "Technology implies belligerence."
This is a recurring theme in Watts' stories, especially the ones with aliens in them, and is explicitly restated in another (unrelated) short story.
What do you think about this idea?
u/None [+3] (12 days later)
Technology implies conflict and you can have conflict without belligerence. It's a central theme in the man vs nature category.
u/tylercoder [+3] (a month later)
That story is actually older IIRC
u/callmesalticidae [+4] writes worldbuilding books (a minute later)
Blindsight is a story of broken people, from Siri and his half-missing brain to Isaac’s enhancements, the relationship between Siri’s parents (and their respective neuroses) and Pag’s biological imperfections. But then, one person’s trash is another’s treasure--is there anyone who you think was doing pretty well?
u/callmesalticidae [+6] writes worldbuilding books (3 hours later)
There are people who would think that Pag is the best out of all of them. It’s possible that Watts may share the sentiment, at least under particular conditions: in Blindsight’s “sidequel,” Echopraxia, the term “cockroach” is used as a kind of condescending compliment for unmodified humans: they’ll survive anything, because they’re running on hardware that’s got millions of years of stress-testing behind it, rather than the bleeding edge and all the exciting and problematic bugs which that implies.
u/callmesalticidae [+5] writes worldbuilding books (4 minutes later)
The biggie: did you enjoy this? I did, obviously, but I'm not the only reader.
There's another novel set in the same universe, during part of Blindsight (specifically, after "Theseus" and "Rorschach" but before Siri receives that message from his father in "Charybdis"). Would anyone be interested (or actively disinterested, for that matter) in reading that in a year or so? If you liked some aspects of Blindsight but thought that it was too slow or too light on the action, then you may like Echopraxia.
u/None [+7] (2 days later)
[deleted]
u/None [+3] (12 days later)
The only thing I've ever compared it too was the black ship storyline in Alan Moore's Watchmen.
u/MagicWeasel [+5] Cheela Astronaut (2 hours later)
I didn't. I had trouble keeping track of everything and the perspective jumped around too much; the multis were hard to keep track of though I liked the concept.
I felt like things weren't explained enough and I spent too long being confused.
Would anyone be interested (or actively disinterested, for that matter) in reading that in a year or so?
Now I understand the universe better I would probably enjoy the sidequel more, but the idea of it being faster and more action-y is probably not going to appeal to me.
u/callmesalticidae [+4] writes worldbuilding books (3 hours later)
The multis were hard for me to keep track of as well.
I guess I'll have to reread Echopraxia before I suggest it again, so that I can make an accurate pitch with regard to amount of explanations and so on.
u/coolflash [+3] (a day later)
I did. The first paragraphs of description in the style I have now seen in Watts' other books clearly said "slow down or this could become word salad". World-specific contractions, staccato abstract and allusive descriptions, and lots of camera-eye views. So I kept track of everything as the perspective jumped around by reading a little slower.
Actually it was the "weird" characters not seeming weird that threatened my immersion the most. Watts had to provide scientific background for the readers, and he gave it through the characters; structurally I think he did it very well, but it means they often seem to be lacking high-school knowledge. So I was creating my own scenes to hide that a lot. And, they're not very rational. Their thoughts are guided towards the book's main ideas so that the readers can follow along, but too slowly for smart people in such a situation. Therefore ironically, my immersion hurt my immersion. I think this is the main reason I find Echopraxia much easier to reread.
u/edwardkmett [+3] (a month later)
I really enjoyed Echopraxia a fair bit more than I liked Blindsight. I guess mainly because it felt like Echopraxia had some better questions, whereas the entire time I was reading Blindsight I was stuck on the fence about how I felt about the main space vampire hook.
u/callmesalticidae [+4] writes worldbuilding books (4 minutes later)
Siri’s mother used hormones to induce parent-child bond formation. In the book’s sidequel, Echopraxia, another character and her girlfriend voluntarily did something similar to each other. What are your feelings about this?
u/MagicWeasel [+7] Cheela Astronaut (2 hours later)
It's really creepy, but... also I'd kind of like it. I mean, as long as everyone's consenting, why not? And I think the issue was that Siri didn't consent to the hormones - though a kid needn't consent to medical treatment if the parent does, so....
u/callmesalticidae [+6] writes worldbuilding books (3 minutes later)
In a reddit AMA, Peter Watts is shown a glaring piece of continuity error that neither he nor his editor had noticed, and elsewhere he mixes up the names of two of his characters, and in a third place mentions that a tiny but crucial detail to a different book of his is missing because, on the fifteenth or so editing pass, he'd forgotten why he had put it there. This makes me feel less inadequate about my own writing, insofar as it reminds me that nobody is perfect. Peter Watts shouldn't feel like the World's Worst Author for these mistakes, I shouldn't feel the same when I make them, and (this is why I'm bringing it up, for my fellow authors) neither should you.
Keep your eyes peeled for a cameo by /u/eaturbrainz in there!
u/None [+1] (an hour later)
So why are you the only commenter here? And expecting a cameo? Huh?
u/callmesalticidae [+1] writes worldbuilding books (an hour later)
So why are you the only commenter here?
Because I only recently made the post. (Presumably. It's also possible that no one else read the book for this month.)
And expecting a cameo? Huh?
While reading the AMA, I noticed that you made a comment there. Sorry for the confusion.
u/callmesalticidae [+3] writes worldbuilding books (56 seconds later)
From the very beginning, when Siri and Pag argue about the half of Siri’s brain that was removed, this story is about the mind. Anyway, did Siri die when they scooped out part of his brain? Discuss.
u/CeruleanTresses [+7] (6 days later)
I think when referring to Siri himself we can only say that half of him died, but since a single hemisphere can be conscious I don't think it's unreasonable to consider it a person. So, someone died, and that person was part of the gestalt that made up the original Siri.
u/callmesalticidae [+3] writes worldbuilding books (a minute later)
The choice to include vampires was a controversial one. I read some reviews that felt that it was an out of place marketing gimmick. What did you think about it?
u/callmesalticidae [+9] writes worldbuilding books (a minute later)
I’m utterly entranced by these human-shaped nonhumans. I am all about alien psychologies and this book is happy to supply, but I think that the most interesting of all is this being that appears human but is fundamentally, genetically, wired differently to us, rather than the rest of Theseus’ crew, who were all modified.
[For those of you who were wondering, Jukka Sarasti seems to be Eastern European in some respect. “Jukka” is Finnish” and “Sarasti” appears (to my limited googling) to be a Polish name.]
u/tylercoder [+3] (a month later)
Apparently vampires get named in honor of whoever is running the facility that birthed them. Valerie from Echopraxia got her name from the director of her facility.
u/None [+8] (12 days later)
I... A bit meta, but the surreality of my brain trying to cope with the fantastic elements of vampirism at the same time as the hard possibilities of the science fiction and the fucking footnotes contributed heavily to my experience with the book, with the feelings of being unbalanced,off my stride, and horrified.
As a technique, it worked fantastically.
u/MagicWeasel [+6] Cheela Astronaut (3 hours later)
It didn't land well for me; I'd have liked a novel that focused on the vampires or on the aliens, I didn't think they worked well together, and Sarasti seemed to... have been the computer's puppet all along? It was weird.
u/Frommerman [+18] (15 hours later)
The vampires were absolutely necessary as a conceptual bridge between humanity and the Chinese rooms. By demonstrating that just removing our capacity for empathy would create something entirely inhuman and arguably nonsapient, it gets far easier to understand what I view as the main points of the novel: that our assumptions about sapience may be entirely wrong, that the universe as a whole does not know the difference between sapience and nonsapience, and that coming at problems from familiar points of view has a reasonable chance of backfiring horribly if you don't understand all the moving parts first. It becomes far harder to see those things if there isn't something human-shaped to build bridges between our own existence and what is being said.
u/MagicWeasel [+3] Cheela Astronaut (20 hours later)
I don't know, Sarasti didn't form that function for me: when I read it, I didn't see him as having anything in common with the aliens, though now you explain it I do. I thought it was more a commentary on psychopathy and Siri possibly being a psychopath (but maybe that's what I brought into the book; I'm always feeling terrified I'm a psychopath, which I know is not how a psychopath would feel).
u/tylercoder [+1] (a month later)
Why be terrified?
u/MagicWeasel [+1] Cheela Astronaut (a month later)
Because I don't want to do evil/manipulative things. Again, it's basically evidence that I'm not a psychopath...
u/tylercoder [+3] (a month later)
Thing is psychos don't think they're doing anything bad, most think they are the good guys and others are stupid for not realizing it. The idea of the evil guy in a lair doing evil stuff "because evil" is cartoony at best and doesn't correlates with reality.
u/MagicWeasel [+1] Cheela Astronaut (a month later)
I know! It's a stupid and irrational thought but I have it anyway. The human condition. eh?
u/tylercoder [+1] (a month later)
The vampires are sentient and sapient, they are just like sociopaths and extremely territorial among themselves.
Still Siri thinks that eventually they will evolve towards non-sentience.
u/wren42 [+7] (4 hours later)
Even though it seemed off genre, I don't think it was a gimmick. They play a role in the world and story that helps further the ideas being explored so I didn't mind it in that sense. I wasn't going in for a robust and consistent universe, it was a thought experiment about the nature of consciousness and the mind for me.
u/awesomeideas [+8] Dai stiho, cousin. (a day later)
I definitely would have preferred that instead of creating an alternate history where evolution somehow speedily whipped up a twig of the human branch that has a suite of abilities and a special weakness, they had just made the vamps through genetic engineering or something.
I think the "ooh, vampires are real and they're our monster because we brought them back and they're super smart and they have spooky eyeballs and they're in space now" was a gimmick.
u/callmesalticidae [+5] writes worldbuilding books (a day later)
I definitely had a harder time suspending my disbelief for vampires than for any other aspect of the novel.
u/ricree [+3] (13 days later)
It really didn't fit. One of the major themes of the story was how technology was making humanity itself obsolete, so it struck me as really jarring to have a "natural" being, reconstructed or not, that was able to match or surpass all of those transhumanism creations.
u/tylercoder [+2] (a month later)
The vampires are build from scratch for pattern-matching and their brains are basically a bunch of brain "cores" put together running in parallel. Meanwhile transhumans are just humans retrofitted with stuff and as such are still limited by their own human brains.
u/self_made_human [+1] Adeptus Mechanicus (5 months later)
Exactly. No matter how smart it is, it's a biological entity that shares the overwhelming majority of its genes with humans, they're even capable of cross-breeding with us. Baseline humans already developed GAI, and we've got multicore multibrain hive minds in the next novel. I don't care how good the pattern matching on them is, there's no way that without some serious augmentation and tweaking that would also be applicable to other human offshoots, that they'd be able to just take over without some bigger post-biological brainchild of humanity giving them the finger. Especially take over the planet as the Blindsight's ending implies.
Now, it's a great book, and vampires are an interesting concept, just one that isn't really water tight once you look at it closely.
u/coolflash [+3] (a day later)
They did make the vampires through genetic engineering. Their limited knowledge sufficed to create something so different because of "vampires" already having existed, yes as an offshoot of humans. It's in the book...
u/awesomeideas [+2] Dai stiho, cousin. (2 days later)
because of "vampires" already having existed, yes as an offshoot of humans
The genetic engineering was mainly part of the process of resurrecting what was already there.
u/tylercoder [+1] (a month later)
I think it would've been better if the author called them anything but vampires.
u/CeruleanTresses [+5] (6 days later)
The vampires didn't bother me, because they're not gothic blood-drinking creatures of the night, they're human-adjacent predators that the humans of the story gave a thematically-appropriate name.
u/MagicWeasel [+2] Cheela Astronaut (3 hours later)
[META THREAD]
Next month's discussion will be posted by the superb /u/magicweasel on March 14th, or a few days later if we're a little behind in our reading.
Also March 14th happens to be my birthday, so it might be a little after that just because I'll be too busy
PARTYING(ha!).In more housekeeping news, next month the book suggestion thread is going to become archived. With the rotating "hosts" each month, and the work that goes into "hosting" and reading a book, we might become more insular in the choices we make as choosing the book is the privilege of the book club czar: so if you want to guarantee the book you're itching to talk about is chosen, well, volunteer to host one month!
Also, if people are interested in accountability, me and /u/callmesalticidae have a "book club email thread" that we use to prod each other into meeting our reading deadlines (and that contains at least one image of the lovely spot by the river I stop on my way home from work to squeeze some reading in if the weather's pleasant). So feel free to PM either of us to get in on that.
u/callmesalticidae [+2] writes worldbuilding books (3 hours later)
and that contains at least one image of the lovely spot by the river I stop on my way home from work to squeeze some reading in if the weather's pleasant
To sweeten the pot, I can promise to include a picture of Edgar Allan Crow and the other corvids that live on my university campus!
u/MagicWeasel [+3] Cheela Astronaut (3 hours later)
Yes, we'll make it an unofficial /r/rational instagram feed!! I'm sure that's what the people want!!! :D
u/hoja_nasredin [+1] Dai-Gurren Brigade (a month later)
I guess now it is time to finally read Blindisght