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Blindsight by Peter Watts (2006) 381 p.

Back when I was slowly trying to read my way through all the Clarkesworld issues, one of the stand-out stories was Peter Watts’ “The Things,” a retelling of the John Carpenter classic The Thing from the point of view of the shapechanging alien which terrorises Kurt Russell and his companions in a remote Antarctic research base. Telling a well-known story from the point of view of the monster feels as eye-rollingly predictable as having characters turn out to be God or Hitler or Adam and Eve, but I was surprised by how well Watts handled the concept. Speaking as the Thing, he narrates from a mindset that is so different, so fundamentally alien, it doesn’t understand that it’s hurting its victims.

The same basic puzzle of perspective lies at the heart of Watts’ novel Blindsight, in which the human race is shocked in the late 21st century by the sudden arrival of thousands of alien probes, which capture and transmit an analysis of Earth and then burn up in the atmosphere. “Caught with our pants down,” as the protagonist Siri Keeton puts it, the human race scrambles to prepare for what they assume is incoming first contact. Blindsight follows a crew of five cutting-edge transhuman scientists as they emerge from hypersleep at the edge of the solar system, sent to investigate a mysterious signal coming from a previously undiscovered gas giant. Upon finding the gas giant being terraformed by a fleet of self-replicating drones, and a smaller alien object orbiting around it, the crew begin the frightening process of figuring out if the aliens are friend or foe.

Blindsight is very much hard science fiction. Not in the classic sense, which always makes me think of 1950s stuff about physics and chemistry and the speed of light, but in a more modern scientific sense: Watts is fascinated by questions of consciousness, artificial intelligence, psychology, evolution and xenobiology. How much you’ll get out of this book is dependent on how interested you are in those things yourself, and in particular, how much you can tolerate long passages of exposition about them. I found the opening half of Blindsight quite compelling in an Alastair Reynolds sort of way: alien mystery, creepy goings-on at the very edge of known space, a sense of horror and dread at the danger the universe might contain. This waned as the book went on, especially as Watts became more focused on the interactions and reactions of the crew. Character writing doesn’t have to be your strongest point in the science fiction game, but it does if you’re going to spend this much time around them, more so if you’re going to insert lengthy flashbacks to your main character’s failed romantic relationship. There are ultimately at least two plot twists in Blindsight, but I didn’t find them all that shocking, because by that point I’d sort of lost the thread of Watts’ hypotheses.

The other thing that bothered me was the vampires. In the world of Blindsight vampires are a long extinct apex predator which humanity has revived by gene splicing into functional sociopaths and high functioning autistics; walking computers, tightly-controlled monsters. There’s nothing supernatural about them, really, but it still felt uncomfortably pulpy every time the word came up in a story about spaceships and aliens; crossing the streams, so to speak. It felt even weirder given that they have nothing to do with the broader plot, although Watts did end up tying them in thematically at the end. Still, it didn’t sit right with me.

If none of that puts you off, check it out – Watts released it under Creative Commons license, so you can download it for free. He’s a talented writer in a poetic sense; it’s just a shame it tends to get drowned out under the weight of all this scientific theory. And certainly read “The Things,” which is up there with Jeff Vandermeer’s “The Third Bear” as one of the best short stories I’ve read in Clarkesworld.