"Blindsight" & "Echopraxia" by Peter Watts - a qualified positive review, discussion and questions

 ► Review (light contextual & thematic spoilers):

"Firefall" omnibus edition of both novels

These two hard sci-fi novels are ostensibly space operas, set near the end of this century. They depart from a world where base humanity is struggling for relevance, half choosing to live in virtual reality heaven. While technology has resurrected once extinct vampires.

But the author also uses the context and diverse assortment of transhuman characters, in each book respectively, to explore themes of, first: neuroscience, abnormal psychology and consciousness. Then: genetic engineering, augmented intelligence, belief, identity, culpability and free will (or lack of).

Both books have an explicit discussion of concepts at the end, with over 100 references to science papers and other books, in each. This comprises a full 10% of Echopraxia's total length! In case readers had any doubts about just how thoroughly researched and insightful these works are.

There are certainly spaceships, action and a novel first contact situation. But the plot arks were somewhat arduous through long mid-sections, with lots of dialogue that dragged a little. Brooding suspense and flashbacks, in one. Voyage with sometimes grating protagonist interactions, in two.

Echopraxia doesn't really continue on from Blindsight directly. For me, it had somewhat of a feel like, for example, Prometheus (2012) continuing the Alien (1979) franchise. Although there is technically one recurring character. Book two reframes the first a little and is mostly a chance to explore additional futurism and dig more into his conception of a hyper-intelligent vampire.

Despite a promising first book opening, that name checked the (technological) singularity and Ray Kurzweil explicit, I never quite meshed with the feel of Peter Watts' philosophising. Throughout either book. I think, in part, he deliberately writes to make things uncomfortable. There's certainly no heart warming romance or nice happy endings.

But, more fundamentally, in the afterword of Echopraxia, he explicitly states that he doesn't support/believe in the concept of digital physics. I.e. the leitmotif of most of Greg Egan's works, and (implicitly) many works by other authors, which have sat more squarely with my own core beliefs and understanding of the universe.

The character arcs conclude properly, in my opinion. Although there seems to be deliberate ambiguity left for interpretation as to exactly what and why various things happened, big and small.

► Blindsight discussion and questions (big spoilers!):

Watts has a really good go at world building a dramatised future reality that's largely plausible in its consistency to what we know and expect from science and technology. With great attention to details of human neuro-cognition.

Except that he somewhat sidesteps the impossibility of predicting much about machine intelligence. With a hat tip to it, and the (technological) singularity, as he sets up the start of Blindsight. Something all good future fiction needs to deal with, in my view.

In echopraxia, there's overtures of intelligent (AI) networks, in the background, on Earth. Incidentally, they are supposedly non-conscious, because the scale of their information system is too large for timely connectivity.

[1] Are they potentially pulling all the strings, discreetly?

Like, it turns out that Sarasti (the Vampire commander of the mission) is acting more as a glove puppet for the ship's AI.

[2] But didn't they (supposedly) turn off the (AI) “Captain” for a time, along with their (human) implants, when they had the captive scramblers aboard?

I felt like vampires, in both books, may have been a stand-in for super-human AI (more typically in machine form). I went along with their existence, as a fun axiom, but don’t really see a way for their brains to be so much more capable than any human wiring (including with artificial augments, etc). There’s physical limits and energy expenses. Vampire’s biological super-strength, similarly, seems non-physical.

Their crucifix glitch actually does work for me somewhat, upon reflection. It’s not mentioned, but static visual patterns can, in real life, trigger photo-sensitive epileptic seizures. Specifically high contrast, repeated vertical lines. Like some radiators, even. I discovered this fact after I started getting migraines (with an ‘aura’ of spreading semi-blindness), after playing Production Line for a couple of hours. Which has a ubiquitous strong grid pattern ground texture.

I appreciated the radical notion that (in this future) romantic partner compatibility could be engineered by simply tweaking the other's predilections with some light brain rewiring. Like a more economic counterpoint inversion of Ian M Bank's Culture, where people can (slowly) morph their physical appearance at will. This alternative has a mediocre dystopian flavour that rings more true to the nature of real life technological developments.

Despite the possibilities of this tech, in-person relationships have become rare, and physical coupling a niche kink. So our protagonist is not unusual, at all, to be technically a virgin, late into adulthood. Kind of extrapolating on existing demographic trends in this direction. But Watts spares us the sordid details of how a virtual sexual interaction might depart from our contemporary physical kind. I guess VR fantasy-sex might have spoiled the gloomy mood.

Having to send the human crew into Rorschach, due to the intense radiation and magnetic fields within killing their robotic probes too fast, felt contrived and counterfactual to my intuition. Especially seeing as they always bring robot bodyguards along with them anyway. And they never break down.

I guess it's necessary for the plot. But I'd have preferred Watts to have said that the bots were breaking down when they should have been fine, implying something spooky, like Rorschach deliberately baiting the human crew in.

[3] Was The Gang of Four deliberately mind-hacked by Rorschach? Through their initial dialogue, then direct manipulations and psychology of events within the vessel?

[4] Did The Gang really single-handedly sucker Sasti/Theseus (and Bates and bots) with a switch of anti-Euclidian drug, improbably well placed crucifix, and a hack from the bridge..? Seems a bit much. Although the confusion of that action sequence is quite evocatively well written.

I should mention how the title concept of blind sight gets flopped out, a third of the way through: yup, there it is! Lol. The rare neuro/psychological phenomena of being able responding to visual phenomena without any conscious perception of them. As exhibited by Szpindel on an away mission.

Also as a metaphor for the book's big conception of (trans)human intelligent action and coordination, without consciousness. As maybe a dominant form of intelligence, in this fictional universe. That our philosophical focus on consciousness may be misplaced.

It's a fun thought experiment, and for sure a lot of cognition occurs below the level of conscious awareness. But I don't think this book succeed in making a strong case for this as truly possible. I wasn't sold on how the scramblers were able to act with such theory of mind, etc. And the Rorschach vessel was all movie set style and with no internal mechanism in evidence.

► Echopraxia - discussion and more questions (huge spoilers!):

This novel also whipped out direct reference to its title. But only at the end, feeling like more of an aside, to me. The neurotropic brain virus turning people on Earth into mindless imitators.

If that was a reference to, or sneer at, the field of memetics, I don't know. Watt's seemed to leave alone explicit discussion of Dawkins'/Blackmore's model of this primary driver of human thought and action. Except, maybe, as an abstruse mechanistic speculation behind the Rorschach aliens hostility to humanity: broadcasting their mind viruses, I think.

This book considered a couple kinds of technologically zombified humans. Again, intelligent action without consciousness . That the military kind would be able to take decisive, complex actions and hold coherent verbal interactions, even, is just a supposition. I don't know if that's a real world realistic possibility. Again, a philosophical "what if?". Anyway...

Compared to Theseus, with its telemater feed and auto-fabrication facility, The Crown of Thorns, in the second novel, felt more like a gimmicky 70s sci-fi model. Spinning arms, Zipping about the place with conveyor lines, etc. Despite being set a decade and a half later. Although, I guess it was just a civilian freighter, by comparison to the best the world could muster, previously.

From the illustration of the ship, at the start of the book, it at least makes sense from a conventional spaceflight perspective: spindly little stalk for cargo and human habitation, dangling off a huge engine block.

But the telling of the separation of the engine section, to fool their pursuers, confused me. They all climbed back aboard their mini-bus sized zorb, so I expected they were ditching the whole ship. To float free, in suspended animation, again, until some mystery rendezvous. But then Bruks was inexplicably back in the same ship-board hangouts.

[A] Were they just in there to protect from risk of radiation and/or hide their signs of life?

The Bicamerals then rebuilding, seemingly by hand, a reactor and propulsion system that could lift them out of low sun orbit then surely made a mockery of the ship's initial oversized engine design. What the ship then looked like was glossed over. I guess this is all besides the main points of the fiction But it seemed silly.

[B] Did I misunderstand some aspect of their spaceflight?

[C] Does Echopraxia make it canon that the (whole) story of Blind Sight is a lie told by the Roarshack aliens, to remotely hack Siri's father's brain? Or maybe just part of the story, past a certain transition point?

[D] Does the back-hacking of the telematter stream, to assemble Portia in Icarus, imply that Rorschach wasn't destroyed by Theseus exploding? Maybe the explosion never even happened? Or did the telematter hack occur (offscreen) during the events portrayed in Blind Sight?

[E] When and how did Portia get into Bruks?

[F] What did Valerie actually do when seemingly biosampling Bruks?

[G] Valerie surely allowed herself to be killed by Bruks? Did she know what was going on inside him, and want to 'upload' herself as a personality he internalised?

[H] Did the Bicamerals, or that vague force of intelligence in the background, pick Bruks specifically, to manipulate him into going to Icarus as a lab rat host for Portia?

If so, why him and not any old idiot? What does Bruks bring, other than our narrative perspective to cover the topics the author wants to explore? And a foil for the author, as a former marine biologist himself.

[I] Did anyone else think that "backdoor Bruks" thing was too much of a stretch. That events would plausibly proceed like that, or that he'd feel and be perceived as culpable? I couldn't even remember the details of what he'd supposedly done, there?

He accidentally enabled an info-sec breach that allowed some terrorist organisation to maliciously re-code the simulated transmission of disease within virtual reality (game) worlds. Such that their results, in turn, misinformed real world public policy measures on controlling viral spread..?

Seems like a long chain of events. And implausible those kinds of digital human behaviour insights, alone, would be such a pivotal part of policies. So fine tuned to make such a difference. Especially after seeing the sheer scale of ongoing clusterfuckery and misinformation around our current pandemic.

[J] Big speculation - what do we think happens to the world, humanity and this fictional universe, after the end of the book?

Does unconscious alien intelligence, from Rorschach, wipe out humanity? Or home-bread intelligences. (Or just uncontrolled disasters.) Are they all part of the same thing, effectively? And is it bad, like an homogenising swarm, or merely opaque to us base level humans?

[K] Was the account of the escape of Valerie the Vampire (an uncharacteristically whimsical alliteration) from the institute, where she was initially held, a metaphor for how (hyper)intelligent life throughout the universe might contrive to manipulate its eventual collapse in the unlikely way necessary for an Omega Point Singularity?

Ok, so that's probably a big leap. But a premise of Frank J Tippler's "The Physics of Immortality", is that the universe ultimately falls back in on itself. And that this collapse is manipulated from within to fall extremely unevenly, to provide unlimited energy from the gravitation shear (or whatever it is exactly). A problem being that physics speed of light, etc) precludes the possibility of communication between even the most powerful spacefaring civilisations, to explicitly coordinate what needs to be done. So all parts of the universe would need to silently converge on complementary actions, to succeed.

The captive vampires (of whom we only ever meet one) apparently perform a similar type of coordination feat. They simply infer each other's existence and locations, then each resolve, in isolation, to act optimally. Assuming that each of the others will do so too. Despite the fact they'd likely have to kill each other if they were to ever meet.

Somewhat like the conundrum of first contact posed in book 1, where: "Intelligence implies belligerence."

► Concluding note - for this Reddit post to printSF:

I read these books due to the hype for Blindsight on this sub. The overall flow of the plots, pacing and story arcs were not easy going or fun. But I wasn’t at all disappointed, thanks to all the high density of concepts to muse on.

It's a very impressive work of speculative fiction. Even if I take many of the e.g. big philosophical ideas like The Chinese Room for granted, already. If it seems like I've skipped over some major themes in these discussions, that may be why.

I’d be happy to hear anyone's thoughts on any of my (numbered/lettered) questions. Or perspectives on discussion I've put forward. I’ve not gone to much length to try to research answers, beyond reading the books. This is mostly off the top of my head, a week or so after finishing the second book, read consecutively.