Blindsight (2006) by Peter Watts takes everything you’ve read about First Contact and crushes it under its boot heel. Watts makes the process of First Contact mysterious and awe inspiring, but frightening and painful also. He has written a novel so outside what people had come to expect they still have difficulty coping with it. Blindsight is exactly the kind of subversive story SF needs more of.
Firefall. That’s what they called it afterwards. The day thousands Fireflies surrounded the Earth and scanned it. Now humanity knew for a fact that they weren’t alone. And when a rogue comet enters the solar system broadcasting a mysterious message there is only one possible course of action.
Siri Keeton is special. But then so is every other crew member aboard the Theseus. From the AI Captain to the Vampire mission commander, each being is unique in their abilities. Waking from years in sleep the Siri Keeton and the crew of the Theseus are ready to discover what the comet has to offer. But there’s a problem. The comet isn’t there, or rather, the Theseus isn’t where the comet was expected.
Instead, Theseus has travelled years longer and thousands of kilometres further than expected into Trans-Neptunian space. What the Theseus and its crew find is beyond their wildest imaginings. Now they must cope with not one mystery but many. With no way to contact Earth and no possible help Theseus‘ mission just went from difficult to nearly impossible.
When you think of First Contact stories most SF fans will immediately bring up Rendezvous With Rama (1973) by Arthur C. Clarke or Contact (1985) by Carl Sagan. These are both fine stories but both are gentle and comforting in their own ways. At the other end of the spectrum are the invasion stories like The War of the Worlds (1898) by H. G. Wells or Footfall (1985) by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. However, those aren’t really about First Contact. Blindsight, though, is an animal of a completely different stripe.
Right from the outset Blindsight exposes our ignorance of how impossible it will be to understand ideas and motivations that are not our own. What ever reasons we ascribe to any actions that are not our own are not only false but dangerously so. Knowing our own minds is a nearly impossible task let alone knowing another’s. And then there are the aliens.
In Watts’ first novel, Starfish (1999), his characters were at the extreme fringes of the human norm. With Blindsight Watts doubles down and creates a trans-humanist society that encompasses behavioural aspects that would set your average right-wing fanboy into frothing convulsions. So when the human characters are difficult to sympathise with you know Watts’ aliens are going to go even further.
The alien species of Blindsight, the Scramblers, actions and motivations are not merely strange, they’re unfathomable. Yet the unknowableness of the aliens serves as a platform to expose the strangeness of humans. Each newly discovered facet of the Scramblers reveals something about humans. Everything from our evolution to our intelligence is fair game. Watts makes much about the self-awareness of humans and what it really means for intelligence. And whether it’s needed at all.
Given that Watts was a professional marine biologist, his use of science and scientific jargon enhances the verisimilitude of the story. Yet despite all the technical points raised in the story Blindsight is deeply philosophical. Watts continually questions the drives and motivations of human existence. And he wears his heart on his sleeve as he does this, refusing sidestep the negative aspects of what humanity is doing or where it’s going. He confronts it face on, using it as a mirror to reflect ourselves. Forcing us to reflect on our own actions and motivations.
Robert Silverberg’s influence on Watts’ writing comes through in this book. Silverberg is highly imaginative and sharp but his work is also roundly dark. Watts takes Silverberg’s sharpness and darkness and magnifies it by at least two orders of magnitude. This sort of writing won’t win Watts many awards but it’s honest.
This is part of what makes Watts’ writing so difficult at times. He’s completely uninhibited by what anyone thinks about his work. He writes because he wants to and the fact that we read it is just good fortune. While Watts doesn’t actually despise his readers he doesn’t care if they ‘get him’. I think we need more SF writers of this sort.
I would recommend Blindsight to fans of hard SF, people who enjoy highly intelligent SF, and to readers who like their fiction dark as espresso coffee. Blindsight is not for the uninitiated nor is it for the feint of heart. It’s high concept SF that refuses to play dumb. Moreover it refuses to conform to any standard idea of what SF is or should be. Watts has made a career forging his own path. It’s a path I will continue to follow.
