Two months since sixty-five thousand alien objects clenched around the Earth like a luminous fist, screaming to the heavens as the atmosphere burned them to ash. Two months since that moment of brief, bright surveillance by agents unknown.
Two months of silence while a world holds its breath.
Now some half-derelict space probe, sparking fitfully past Neptune's orbit, hears a whisper from the edge of the solar system: a faint signal sweeping the cosmos like a lighthouse beam. Whatever's out there isn't talking to us. It's talking to some distant star, perhaps. Or perhaps to something closer, something en route.
So who do you send to force introductions on an intelligence with motives unknown, maybe unknowable? Who do you send to meet the alien when the alien doesn't want to meet?
You send a linguist with multiple personalities, her brain surgically partitioned into separate, …
Two months since the stars fell...
Two months since sixty-five thousand alien objects clenched around the Earth like a luminous fist, screaming to the heavens as the atmosphere burned them to ash. Two months since that moment of brief, bright surveillance by agents unknown.
Two months of silence while a world holds its breath.
Now some half-derelict space probe, sparking fitfully past Neptune's orbit, hears a whisper from the edge of the solar system: a faint signal sweeping the cosmos like a lighthouse beam. Whatever's out there isn't talking to us. It's talking to some distant star, perhaps. Or perhaps to something closer, something en route.
So who do you send to force introductions on an intelligence with motives unknown, maybe unknowable? Who do you send to meet the alien when the alien doesn't want to meet?
You send a linguist with multiple personalities, her brain surgically partitioned into separate, sentient processing cores. You send a biologist so radically interfaced with machinery that he sees X-rays and tastes ultrasound, so compromised by grafts and splices that he no longer feels his own flesh. You send a pacifist warrior in the faint hope she won't be needed, and a fainter hope that she'll do any good if she is needed. You send a monster to command them all, an extinct hominid predator once called "vampire," recalled from the grave with the voodoo of recombinant genetics and the blood of sociopaths. And you send a synthesist—an informational topologist with half his mind gone—as an interface between here and there, a conduit through which the Dead Center might hope to understand the Bleeding Edge.
You send them all to the edge of interstellar space, praying you can trust such freaks and retrofits 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 only knew what was waiting for them....
From sociopaths to truly alien aliens, from simulating empathy to seeing without perception, from unfeeling predators to semi-sentient AI, from multiple personalities living in one brain to brains replaced and enhanced by machinery, Blindsight explores how and why experience is conscious – or not.
And it turns our most important assumption about consciousness on its head – that it's the epitome of evolutionary progress. This is ultimately the question the book poses: What if it's not? To explore it, it resurrects vampires, narrates unreliably, poses alternately as a space opera and as hard sci-fi, and is at the end completely of its own kind.
If you're into mind-expanding science fiction, this is a must read – even if it is ultimately mind-deflating. (Which I won't explain further to not spoiler anything, so please, find out yourself!)
This book fills me with awe. When I read lines from it, I want to scratch down the words on my arms and legs, tracing the pathways over and over again until it breaks through the skin and seeps into the blood.
This book could explain to you in great detail why zombies and vampires are better equipped at reality than you are, bogged down with the delusion that life, reality, existence, consciousness was anything more than the random electromagnetic twitchings of an underoptimized local processing array made out of the closest stable elements near to hand.
