Watts, Peter: Blindsight

I expected to dislike Peter Watts’ Hugo-nominated novel Blindsight (also available online) for its tone. I mean, not only have I seen James Nicoll’s comment “Whenever I find my will to live becoming too strong, I read Peter Watts,” [*] there’s the dedication to this very book:

For Lisa
If we’re not in pain, we’re not alive.

Which makes my hands twitch as though I’m going to throw the book across the room every time I lay eyes on it (see also Chad’s review). However, I ended up disliking it for a different reason: I don’t know what it’s saying. Which turns out to be a prerequisite to having an emotional reaction to it, whether finding it suicidally depressing or an almost comical piling-on of WOE.

[*] Which Watts basically flaunts on the front page of his website, to give him that much credit.

Here’s the setup: in 2082, thousands of probes—evenly spaced around the Earth—fall from the sky, and as they burn up, they send a message—somewhere. By chance, a research instrument catches the edge of the signal, and a potential first contact team is sent out. It consists of an AI ship and five beings. The website blurb (slightly modified from the jacket copy) is pretty cool, so I’ll excerpt it as a pre-made summary:

Who you do send to meet the alien when the alien doesn’t want to meet?

You send a linguist with multiple personalities carved surgically into her brain. You send a biologist so radically interfaced with machinery that he sees x-rays and tastes ultra-sound, so compromised by grafts and splices he no longer feels his own flesh. You send a pacifist warrior whose career-defining moment was an act of treason. You send a monster to command them all, an extinct hominid predator once called vampire, recalled from the grave with the voodoo of recombinant genetics and the blood of sociopaths. And you send a synthesist — an informational topologist with half his mind gone — as an interface between here and there, a conduit through which the Dead Center might hope to understand the Bleeding Edge.

The book is retroactively narrated by the synthesist, Siri Keeton, whose half-brain resulted from surgery to treat severe epilepsy. Since then, Siri views all human behavior as the result of observable and reproducible algorithms. Since he’s tapped for the mission because he’s the best synthesist out there, his lack of empathy apparently doesn’t impede the process of transforming advanced knowledge into something non-experts can understand—without understanding it himself. I’m having a suspension of disbelief problem right there, but it’s questioned once by Siri himself and isn’t central to the book, so I’ll let it pass.

(Whether Siri is actually good at synthesis is something that the book’s readers are, by definition, unable to tell, since all we’ve got is his version. But it’s clear that Siri is not as good as he tells himself when it comes to reading people’s emotions. This leads to painful scenes like him telling his girlfriend, right before sex, a little fable about how men and women are “evolutionary enemies,” complete with metonymic Sperm and Egg. (I wish I were making this up.) In fact, that entire relationship is painful. At their first meeting, the woman decides to rename him and offers to tweak his brain so he’ll grow out of being “dark” (personality manipulation is her former profession, now mostly automated). She keeps trying to change him, she cries all the time because he won’t be honest and emotionally open with her, she ends up leaving because she’s used up all her emotional effort and he doesn’t care . . . And then she dies horribly so he can be Haunted By Guilt. (Not a spoiler.) It’s all dreadfully stereotypical and the net effect is fingernails on the blackboard of my mind.)

The book is deliberately designed around questions of consciousness, intelligence, humanity, and evolution, from the composition of the crew down to the prose, which is saturated with theoretical exposition. [**] And here’s my fundamental problem. This all leads to a very definite—emphatic, even—answer to the questions. About which I’m indifferent, but never mind that for the moment. There’s an answer.

Except there’s this prior series of events, which looks inconsistent with that answer. To the extent that I understand them, which I think I do, enough for these purposes—what baffles me is the motivations for the events, not the results. So, either the book is inconsistent; the book is consistent but isn’t clear about reconciling the apparent inconsistency; or the book is clear but I’m too stupid to understand it. Being confident in my intellectual abilities, I’m naturally leaning towards the first two, neither of which are good.

(Yes, I know what response I’m inviting. Go ahead, prove it. The events in question are, briefly, (ROT13 spoilers) fnenfgv orngvat gur fuvg bhg bs fvev fb ur pna or na rzcnguvp uhzna naq haqrefgnaq gur nyvraf, juvpu npghnyyl jbexf.)

[**] If that’s your thing, there are appendices with over a hundred references.

Even if I understood this book, I suspect it wouldn’t work for me, because as I said, I’m not really interested in the question it’s asking. As a result of that detachment, I can see all the ways the book has been deliberately constructed to get to its answer, or to be uncharitable, all the ways it’s stacked the deck. In short, I neither liked it nor was impressed by it, again finding myself in the apparent minority (and regretting this whole Worldcon-homework thing).