Learning curves don’t mean much to you because you already know everything, which means the curve of anything you write is very likely to have an infinite gradient. But you figure it’s not going to take the readers of Blindsight too long to get their sea legs (which, as a former marine biologist, you know all about); an initial 50-page slightly-less-scientific-than-the-rest-of-the-book crash course should provide plenty of time for the plebs to dredge up their long-forgotten high school physics vocab.
And they’re going to need it, because you’re about to go very much “hard” science fiction on their asses. So hard, in fact, that you're not going to have time to do much more than drip-feed the following backstory to them:
In a world where human technology has outstripped human capacity to understand said technology, superior-minded homo sapiens vampiris has been brought back from the Pleistocene to help out – albeit with some cybernetic nip and tuck to keep the right angle-induced seizures that led to their extinction at bay. With IQs at least 100 points above “baseline” humans and naturally predatory, vampiris is kept on a tight leash. Meanwhile, baseline humans have three basic options: undergo some kind of surgical augmentation to remain technologically relevant, shuffle off this mortal coil a tad early and enter a virtual crypt world called Heaven, or join the Realist terrorists fighting against widespread government-sanctioned defeatism in the face of inevitable biological obsolescence.
Got that? Good. Because that's just the background. It’s not even on the stage for most of the story. Your premise is this:
After a structured network of thousands of meteorite-like objects suddenly burns up in Earth’s atmosphere, the world wants to know why; first contact wasn’t supposed to be like this. So they toss some ships out into the void to sniff after a mysterious comet on the edge of the solar system. It’s not until the third wave of explorers is sent that Rorschach is discovered – a hundred square kilometres of tangled black thorns orbiting a dark superjovian in the middle of nowhere. Earth has sent just 5 people to the meet and greet: a synthesist with only half a brain tasked with explaining otherwise unintelligible mission events to the folks back home, a cybernetically enhanced biologist whose senses have been plugged directly into his knowledge centres, a linguist with medically induced multiple personality disorder to turn her brain into a quad-core language computer, a warrior pacifist whose empathy-based tactics make her one of the most dangerous military strategists alive, and a grudgingly unleashed vampire commander with filed-down teeth … but the decidedly pointed genetic predisposition to view his crew as food.
Oh, but you won’t be spending much time developing your characters either. They’re just vehicles for the mad science flying all around your mind in some occult hybridization of linguistics, mental illness, philosophy of mind, evolution, criminology, military tactics, game theory, communication, mythology, geometry, biology, cosmology, cryogenics and a hundred other things. And damned if you’re not going to put a scientific crossbreed on every second page! Damned if you’re not going to try to apply every half-plausible theory to the mundane or taken-for-granted things in the world and see what happens.
As well as carefully examining the theoretical science of how they all came to be, you’re going to make your characters discuss or stumble through literally dozens of your scientific musings, including what game theory might have to say about telling others when your birthday is, what happens when you splice the ideas of undeath and cryosleep together with genetic modification, and whether mental illness confers an evolutionary advantage. And then you’re going to toss it all in a conceptual blender for a denouement that asserts one of the most awesome – and terrifying – theories on the nature of intelligence that science fiction has ever seen.
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I want to be clear about how phenomenal this book is. I've never actually gaped at words in a novel before, and I did it at least three times whilst reading Blindsight. It is absolutely one of the finest pieces of hard science fiction I have ever read. Reading it makes your mind jump through so many hoops of different shapes and sizes that you actually come out of it feeling more intellectually limber, and that's nothing to scoff at from a 350-page book.
One reviewer on Amazon complained that the book "feeds the head but not the heart". I can see what he's getting at; Watts writes characters without a mind for whether the reader cares about them or not. But you know, as someone who gets tingles down his spine reading New Scientist, I can say with reasonable certainty that meaningful literary character development holds a monopoly on "feeding" the heart only because it's such an easy way to do so. Our natural human solipsism holds us enthralled to empathy.
If science is one of your passions, and you want something original and challenging, I promise this book will not disappoint you. As for me, I'm off to read the rest of Peter Watts' books.
PS: The author has very kindly made Blindsight available here for free.
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