
Blindsight (2006) - jxub
https://rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm
======
saeranv
Probably my favorite hard sci-fi book. I haven't found the rest of the
author's books (Peter Watts) as good, but I'm hoping his upcoming books change
that. The sequel to Blindsight especially is a frustratingly opaque book, with
a stilted pace in contrast with Blindsight (although several fascinating
concepts are in there, if you take the time to read all the errata on the web
in order to properly understand it).

Also his blog is worth a read:
[https://www.rifters.com/crawl/](https://www.rifters.com/crawl/)

~~~
thesz
I lived through Chernobyl and I remember that radiation levels precluded
robots from operating with radiowave remote controls.

What Soviet engineers did is to operate robots with high voltage high
current... electrical currents through wires. Everything was pumped up, from
camera output to controls. My friend also prototyped well logging equipment
with PIC16xxx microcontrollers which also can be operated with (relatively)
high voltage (I remember 12V) and associated high currents.

Well logging and Chernobyl disaster have one thing in common - high level of
radiation.

I was reading Blindsight after I read Echopraxia and was already suspicious
about author (heck, vampires in E. have contradictory abilities - small
musculature and high power, for one example). But when I read about "aperture
leackage" I bursted out laughing and threw (PDF copy of) the book to the
farthest corner of my room. Engineers from end of 21st century completely
forget about experience from the end of 20th century. Nevermind relative cost
of high-voltage high-current wires versus optical links.

I divide fiction authors as being smart and being smartass (pretending to be
smart with various things that look smart and hoping that he will cover things
up somehow). Watts is a smartass by my classification as he thinks he can
throw so many "ideas" there that reader will be overwhelmed and won't be able
to find about true nature of his work.

So I will not hold my breath that Watts will improve.

Yet I found some concepts from Echopraxia interesting. For example, depth of
planning - how intelligence services are planning, how higher intellects would
plan. Echopraxia also made me thinking how and where Watts was (in fiction) or
will be (in prediction) wrong and why. It raised my interest to long forgotten
Noon series by Strugatskie brothers which serve as counterexample to what
Watts have in mind.

To conclude, Watt's work is conceptually very good science fiction that is
very badly executed. This is so because it provokes thinking and argumentation
(the sign of good literature) but is also so wrong in details (the sign of bad
literature).

Okay, I have to stop. Otherwise you will read a complete theory of everything
by Serguey Zefirov soon. ;)

~~~
saeranv
That's exactly what I found, but I think I'm more forgiving then your are. I
agree, Watts is a smartass for certain* concepts, however I thought it worked
in Blindsight because the story and concept is so original, and though-
provoking that I didn't mind. It may because I didn't catch the technical
contradictions like you did :)

Because of it's technical density, and thought-provoking concepts, I think
it's a book that rewards rereading (my favorite types of books). I've read
Blindsight twice so far, and the second time I was able to appreciate, and
understand better the massive amounts of technical detail he was pumping into
the book.

I may need a second reread of Echopraxia to get to a similar appreciation. In
my first read (only a couple of months ago) I felt as if Watt's desire to be
seen as smart starts coming off as a smartass. He buries every action in about
10 levels of subterfuge, and ambiguity, such that by the time I got to the end
of the book, I knew I was missing about 50% of what was actually happening.
What saved me was a Reddit thread Watts had done where he explained to his
confused fans all the intricacies of the plot that he had hidden. Once I read
through his explanation, I appreciated the book a lot more, and have to say if
it was rewritten to be more understandable it would be at an equal or higher
level of originality then Blindsight.

What do you mean the Noon series is a counterexample to what Watts had in
mind?

* I say "certain" because he has a PhD in marine biology, so I assume his biological concepts are very rigorous.

~~~
thesz
>What do you mean the Noon series is a counterexample to what Watts had in
mind?

Basically, Strugatskie's tried to anticipate what would happen if most of
horrors that are imaginable by 20th century SciFi authors are taken care of
and would not happen at all. Watts tries to extend horrors we are used to to
new lengths.

If you look close enough, you'll see that these transhuman intellects are
really parasites (trying to be symbiotes) that live on the body of humanity.
They can't live outside, at least, it is not shown how they can.

The Noon series talk about individual people at their peak as authors were
able to imagine at the sixties-seventies. They can be thrown into radioactive
wasteland and live and thrive there: Обитаемый Остров -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoners_of_Power](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoners_of_Power).
They posses extreme fighting skills: the same Prisoners of Power -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolf_Sikorski](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolf_Sikorski)
was able to avoid being injured when ambushed with twenty soldiers roughly of
mid-20th century average power, armed with machine guns and managed to destroy
them all; the main hero of
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_to_Be_a_God](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_to_Be_a_God)
managed to fight many medieval-level fighters and not kill anyone - basically,
all people in the Noon are equipped with "the switch" that father of Siri has
and they still can control it consciously.

In Blindsight Watts presented a device that is called "mentoscope" in Noon -
see Siri memories about his mother and father fight. In Echopraxia it is
revealed that these devices are used to bring whatever is pleasurable to
populace: "they know how to make dream come true" or something like that about
Echopraxia's pilot's marriage. This is about the same level of usage as in
Prisoners of Power when Maxim's memories was recorded in Saraksh.

In Noon's universe, however, the mentoscope is used to speed up learning and
to bring the skills that are hard to obtain otherwise (hand combat system
"субакс"/"subax" \- why punch others to face when you can record what to do?).
It is also used to suppress traumatic memories, bringing society member to his
full potential again.

In Noon, everyone lives the fullest possible life, even people that are
clearly brought to life by possibly hostile supercivilization. They help each
other even when they do not agree. In Firefall, the chasm is so big I can't
even feel a thing about anyone there (I still think about them, though). Why
in hell people still use terror tactics in end of 21st century (Siri is the
victim, Echopraxia's pilot's wife is the victim) instead of helping hand
tactics?

~~~
tsukikage
The noon universe is a thoroughly depressing set of books.

Most of the plot invariably occurs not in the ideal Noon society, but in one
or another form of recent/current dystopia: the totalitarian state of
Inhabited Island's Saraksh, the feudalist gulag of EN-7031 in Escape Attempt,
Arkanar's descent into a fascist police state in Hard to be God...

Over and over, the ideal humans from future-earth hold up a twisted mirror to
our own life as they try to engage and help but discover there are no good
answers - at best, they don't make things any worse; but often they fail in
even that much.

Monday begins on Saturday is a much more upbeat story that's actually about
people who are better than who we are right now, in an environment that lets
them thrive; and you do need both those components for a utopia - contrast
with A Thousand Years 'till the End of the World, which has people of similar
character (or better; they overcome challenges of a difficulty that Monday
begins on Saturday never presents its cast with in the first place) but in an
antagonistic environment, and is again super depressing.

While Watts expands horrors we are used to to new lengths, the Strugatsky
brothers are out to show that even ideally moral superhumans can't save us
from ourselves.

~~~
thesz
Exactly.

But Noon series also show what life of these demigods can be. You are at the
highest of your performance and climbing and you face problems that challenge
you to climb higher from unexpected sides.

------
codeulike
A great book, one of the best sci-fi books of the 21st century perhaps. And
its worth noting that its all online at that page because he released it as
Creative Commons - Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5

 _I 've set my latest novel free under the usual Creative Commons license ...

I do this only partly to add data to the ongoing get-rich-by-giving-your-
stuff-away experiment. The other reason is that a lot of people seem to be
having trouble actually finding the book in brick-and-mortar stores. All the
buzz in the world is worth jack-shit if the product isn't readily available.

So check it out and go wild. And when your eyes start to fall out from
phosphor burn, consider buying an old-fashioned paper version. There should be
enough to go around before long: I'm told Blindsight's going into second
printing._

[https://boingboing.net/2006/12/11/peter-watts-
blindsig.html](https://boingboing.net/2006/12/11/peter-watts-blindsig.html)

------
shoo
Watts' back catalogue:

[https://www.rifters.com/real/shorts.htm](https://www.rifters.com/real/shorts.htm)

I also enjoyed his earlier trilogy: starfish, maelstrom and behemoth

a lot of the short stories are also good.

a recurring theme in some of Watt's writing is damage control for failing or
broken civilisation -- for example there was an X prize competition last year
for short stories starting from the assumption that a plane flight magically
jumps 20 years into the future, Watts produced this:
[https://seat14c.com/future_ideas/37D](https://seat14c.com/future_ideas/37D)

------
andyjohnson0
An excellent book. Recommended if you like your science fiction hard and
bleak.

~~~
mrec
Parent is not kidding about the bleak. Peter Watts is very proud of getting
rejected by a Russian publisher for being "too dark".

It's a great read though; I can't think of many SF books that can hold a
candle to it for sheer density of novel ideas.

~~~
geoah
I would definitely suggest giving Gregg Egan a shot (start with diaspora
maybe?) and Hannu Rajaniemi’s Quantum Thief. Neither are dark but I loved the
ideas they mess around with. Same goes for Cicin’s third body problem for how
far he takes his ideas.

~~~
mrec
Egan IMHO works better in short stories than novels; he's at his best when
everything serves to illustrate a single idea. _Unstable Orbits in the Space
of Lies_ is still one of my all-time faves.

Haven't tried _3BP_. Haven't even heard of _Quantum Thief_ , but that sounds
fun; I might look it out.

One classic I keep meaning to reread is Olaf Stapledon's _Star Maker_. Never
surpassed in scope, and you've got to hand it to someone who predicted
teledildonics in 1937.

------
nabla9
Amazing 'teaser trailer' for Blindsight:
[https://rifters.com/real/progress.htm](https://rifters.com/real/progress.htm)

~~~
sxp
The PDF copy of the presentation is better:
[https://rifters.com/real/shorts/VampireDomestication.pdf](https://rifters.com/real/shorts/VampireDomestication.pdf)

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pmontra
One of the greatest sci fi books ever. I read it again on the long flights
back home from vacation this summer. It's been a few years since the last re-
read and I think I understood something new. I also suggest its almost sequel,
Echopraxia.

~~~
geoah
Hehe love the “almost sequence” part of your comment. I always call it a
sequel but your way is spot on. :))

------
qnsi
So, can someone recommend something similar to this?

Last time I read Three Body Problem but got dissapointed

