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Blindsight
Sep. 12th, 2019 08:01 pmI don't know how we acquired Blindsight by Peter Watts but Dave tried reading it a few months ago and didn't get very far. It sounded interesting to me so I decided to put it on my shelf and give it a go a some point.
I read it this week and really enjoyed it. Dave said it was the fact that the characters were unlikeable that put him off, but I thought they were all fascinating. I would have thought the style would be more off-putting for him, but I also thought that was really good.
The book tells the story of a group of specialists sent out into deep space to try and make first contact with aliens that had previously sent probes to investigate Earth. It's hard sci-fi in content but literary in style, which made for a challenging read and a story I only just managed to follow most of the way through. As a reader, the narrative dumped me straight in the middle of a complex and unfamiliar situation with no roadmap and only the barest of comprehensible details to go on. That's something I normally like, but this pushed it to such an extreme that it nearly lost me - but not quite. I hung on in there and found the book ultimately very rewarding of the effort I put into making sense of it.
The one aspect I never quite got the hang of was the vampires - I mean, what??? But I just went with it and it was okay.
I also took a very long time to figure out what the protagonist's job was (though it was spelled out about halfway through) - as Synthesist, he was supposed to observe the mission and report back to Earth on it. Which made him the *narrator* in a pleasingly meta way. He made for a quite fascinating point of view, since it was revealed right at the start that half of his brain had been removed when he was a child, to prevent his severe epilepsy. So, whilst he was trying to explain the actions of the other characters, he was also trying to understand them himself, as well as recounting episodes from his earlier life that gradually gave more insight into his own character.
The book was intermittently funny (these moments being spread out enough that they always took me by surprise) and intermittently quite horrific, with a ton of scientific stuff I didn't really follow, but enough exposition and plot for me to get the gist of what was going on.
So, a challenging read, but I quite like that every now and then!
I read it this week and really enjoyed it. Dave said it was the fact that the characters were unlikeable that put him off, but I thought they were all fascinating. I would have thought the style would be more off-putting for him, but I also thought that was really good.
The book tells the story of a group of specialists sent out into deep space to try and make first contact with aliens that had previously sent probes to investigate Earth. It's hard sci-fi in content but literary in style, which made for a challenging read and a story I only just managed to follow most of the way through. As a reader, the narrative dumped me straight in the middle of a complex and unfamiliar situation with no roadmap and only the barest of comprehensible details to go on. That's something I normally like, but this pushed it to such an extreme that it nearly lost me - but not quite. I hung on in there and found the book ultimately very rewarding of the effort I put into making sense of it.
The one aspect I never quite got the hang of was the vampires - I mean, what??? But I just went with it and it was okay.
I also took a very long time to figure out what the protagonist's job was (though it was spelled out about halfway through) - as Synthesist, he was supposed to observe the mission and report back to Earth on it. Which made him the *narrator* in a pleasingly meta way. He made for a quite fascinating point of view, since it was revealed right at the start that half of his brain had been removed when he was a child, to prevent his severe epilepsy. So, whilst he was trying to explain the actions of the other characters, he was also trying to understand them himself, as well as recounting episodes from his earlier life that gradually gave more insight into his own character.
The book was intermittently funny (these moments being spread out enough that they always took me by surprise) and intermittently quite horrific, with a ton of scientific stuff I didn't really follow, but enough exposition and plot for me to get the gist of what was going on.
So, a challenging read, but I quite like that every now and then!
