Book Review: Blindsight

It's been two months since a myriad of alien objects clenched about the Earth, screaming as they burned. The heavens have been silent since - until a derelict space probe hears whispers from a distant comet. Something talks out there: but not to us. Who to send to meet the alien, when the alien doesn't want to meet? Send a linguist with multiple-personality disorder, and a biologist so spliced to machinery he can't feel his own flesh. Send a pacifist warrior, and a vampire recalled from the grave by the voodoo of paleogenetics. Send a man with half his mind gone since childhood. Send them to the edge of the solar system, praying you can trust such freaks and monsters with the fate of a world. You fear they may be more alien than the thing they've been sent to find - but you'd give anything for that to be true, if you knew what was waiting for them.

The story is told from the viewpoint of Siri Keeton, who went through a hemispherectomy as a child to correct his epileptic seizures. While successful, it also rendered him emotionally detached, perfect for a job as a synthesist, a type of observer whose job it is to "integrate traits, attitudes, and impulses to create a total personality." His job here is to observe the crew, a bunch of transhumanist misfits, as they try to figure out the aliens and then translate their findings into something comprehensible for mere mortals back home.

But Siri isn't really a reliable narrator. I wasn't convinced he knew what he was doing or what was going on. The crew didn't trust him, thinking of him as a spy for mission control, despite the fact that the ship was literally over a half a light year from home. We get flashbacks to Siri's time before the mission, showing his emotionally reprehensible behavior towards his ex-girlfriend which only underlines his incompetence towards relating to people. He blames the surgery for his shortcomings, but as it his job to read people, he fails to understand himself and what it means to be human.

The third most egregious offense is the addition of the vampire character. In this series, vampires co-existed with humans in paleolithic times but went extinct. Someone thought it would be a good idea to dig through our junk DNA to genetically engineer them back to life, complete with superhuman capabilities. I can't confirm it, but it seems that Watts—who earned a Ph.D from the University of British Columbia's Department of Zoology and Resource Ecology—got the idea from human bones that showed evidence of cannibalism. To me, that's too much of a stretch.

The second most egregious offense pertains to the aliens themselves. They have a certain ability that literally had me say "bullshit" out loud. It shattered my suspension of disbelief. After burying me in mounds of psychology, physics, and neuroscience, he finally went too far. To delve further into this would be to invoke spoilers, so I'm going to leave it at that. Since I lack the education to debate him on this matter or the existence of paleolithic vampires, I can't possibly win the argument.

This is probably the oddest first contact story that I've ever read. But it really isn't about first contact; it's a debate over intelligence vs. sentience. The characters argued over what the latest discovery about the aliens meant in this debate. Honestly, considering their behavior and the stakes involved, I felt it was a moot point. I didn't particularly care for how the crew interacted with one another, how contact with the aliens was handled, or the way the investigation was conducted. The methodologies the crew employed when studying the aliens went to such extremes that I felt like they were digging their own grave.

Complaints aside, this isn't a bad novel. It won prestigious awards. And Watts bleak worldview on humanity isn't lost on me. I certainly wouldn't argue with him on that. There is so much going on in here (the science, the debates, the unique aliens in an otherwise well trod storyline), and the fact that I've had such a visceral reaction to it demonstrates that I was engaged in the story. But Watts' most egregious offense, and the one that I will not yield on, is that he didn't give us a protagonist worth rooting for. By the time the Siri confesses his sins and the epilogue fades, I can't help but feel that the price for the reader to get there was too high.

3 stars

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DED