johnlog/books

Watts: Blindsight

First book in a while that's not Asimov's, but still hard sci-fi. Blindsight is about an alien encounter and different forms of consciousness. It is more philosophical and made me think. I enjoyed it, but the word choice and sentence structure made it a demanding read.

SPOILERS After finishing the Foundation series, this was definitely a shift from Asimov. It wasn't easy to read, and several times I had the feeling I skipped a page and had to re-read to understand what exactly was going on. I really had to focus and pay attention. There are lots of made-up words and acronyms, and the ones that weren't made up were often technical. It has this style where it just throws you into the world without any explanations, and you have to figure things out as you go. It's fun in sci-fi, but it was a bit annoying when I couldn't follow the action a few times. The story takes place on Earth, several decades in the future. Societies are highly technologically advanced, with body enhancements, mind uploads, and even vampires being a thing now. It is a bit dystopian, especially in how people upgrade their bodies to gain extra abilities, but often at a significant cost in dexterity or even in losing themselves in the process. An event takes place where some alien technology "takes a picture" of Earth, or so it seems; they gather some information. The ruling officials then send probes into an object they found far in the solar system, followed by a spaceship with a crew who are the main characters of the story. Once they arrive at the artifact, they try to communicate and receive responses that seem intelligent, but not quite in a human way. They eventually capture some of the alien lifeforms and perform experiments (which are essentially torture) to see if they can reason themselves out of the pain being inflicted on them. It turns out they can perform complex tasks with incredible precision and speed. What is interesting is that they never developed a sense of 'ego', so it's almost like they are all unconscious, reflex-based brain processes. The coolest part of the book was the discussion about how the part of the human brain that makes us think we are a 'person' is, in fact, slowing us down, and that life could thrive without it. There were also other sci-fi concepts that touch on consciousness, such as mind uploads or multiple personalities living in one body or brain.