Blindsight, by Peter Watts
Jul. 4th, 2007 11:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cyphomandraI liked this book and it also annoyed me, although if I’m prepared to write this much about it it must have done so in a useful fashion. Firstly, the good things about it – it’s well-written, it has fascinating (and footnoted, in the appendix) science, and it has a lot of very nifty stuff with genuine emotion (much of it the reader’s) going on in only 362 pages (I am also currently part way through Scott Westerfield’s The Risen Empire – over 600 pages – and finding it rather slow going). It follows a group of extremely abnormal humans (and one vampire) out into space, to the edge of the solar system, to investigate a mysterious signal – and, years away from contact with or a return to Earth, decide what to do when they do find something, and it’s alien. It’s about consciousness, humanity and other trade-offs, and it’s narrated in first person by Siri Keeton, who had a hemispherectomy as a child for intractable epilepsy, and as a result has, possibly, no real grasp of human emotion or empathy but – because of this – an amazing, near-telepathic ability to synthesise data, from personal interactions to alien existence, without – necessarily – understanding.
It’s a very well-constructed book – it would, for example, be really easy to dislike all the characters. Having a first-person narrator helps, but picking one who doesn’t really understand the human bit of humanity (or claims not to) works against that – or would, if Watts didn’t carefully start off with a childhood flashback scene, where Siri (postsurgery) saves his presurgical best friend from being beaten up. Not because he cares for him; because, as much as anything, that’s because what someone in a story would do.
Siri is a fascinating character, as much for what he doesn’t understand as for what he does. However, throughout the novel there’s also the story of his past relationship with Chelsea, a neuroaestheticist. Chelsea is bubbly and focussed on human interactions (has sex in person and so forth) and, as part of her job, wants to smooth out Siri’s brain to make him happier (she’s described “revel[ing] in her own inconsistency”). They re-enact a fifties idea of a relationship where the woman wants to change the man and the man wants regular sex and grunting, and Siri, thinking that their problems are due to Chelsea’s misunderstanding of how sexual relationships work, tells her a deeply aggravating parable about oogenesis that is right out of all that cod evolutionary biology about how Man, the mighty hunter, must be free to sow his seed in whatever moist passive uterus He can find. Much to his surprise, Chelsea leaves him (which is the only moment when I like her) and apart from a bit where he is unable to deal with her dying, that’s pretty much it for this storyline. Yes, it shows how Siri fails to be human (for a particular value of humanity), and it’s about conscious and subconscious interactions with others, and about how communication really isn’t all that great, but despite all that thematic resonance it just doesn’t work for me, largely because it is so clichéd. In addition, for a novel so well researched the parable contains so much misreading of biology and ignorance of actual sexual strategies (even if you narrow it down to mammals – it is particularly annoying if, say, you’re thinking about fish while he’s telling you that eggs are precious and rare and must be cradled lovingly) that either I lose all faith in Siri (which I don’t think I’m supposed to at that particular stage of the novel) or I get irked at the author.
The other main source of irritation is more subtle, and maybe it’s just the book catching me on a sharp edge. Well-researched as it is, there is a kind of joy in uncovering and using biological weirdnesses that, at times, bleeds through into the text as “hey, look at the freakshow!”. Take, for example, the following:
“A memory rose into my mind and stuck there: a man in motion, head bent, mouth twisted into an unrelenting grimace. His eyes focused on one foot, then the other. His legs moved stiffly, carefully. His arms moved not at all. He lurched like a zombie in thrall to rigor mortis.
I knew what it was. Proprioreceptive polyneuropathy…”
Loss of proprioception (proprioreception may be a US variant) means loss of position sense; no longer knowing where your limbs are. It’s inconvenient, but it’s not uncommon (people with diabetes often get this, usually in their legs) and it does not usually result in clinics full of lurching zombies, grimacing. Likewise, Siri himself is apparently the way he is because of his hemispherectomy, which is not impossible, but he somehow manages to avoid the supposedly universal side effect of the operation, which is partial paralysis (I have just finished reading a fascinating New Yorker article on hemispherectomy here while fact-checking this), which is much less cool and inconvenient for space travel. Likewise the ossification virus that kills Chelsea – the description is horror, not human, and although I think that’s part of Siri’s worldview it comes through in the appendix as well, where Watts is enthusing about hacking the brain and so on. I do think the stuff he’s talking about is fascinating, but one of my problems with hard sf is the way it tends to leap around waving its cool bits everywhere, and in this case it tends to forget that the cool bits might actually be people, who may have just gotten over their own freakiness already.
Anyway. It’s a book you have to keep up with (I’m not sure I did, all the way through – I don’t think I fully understand Sarasti’s actions and motivations, for example), and it deals with big ideas in fascinating ways. It’ll be interesting to see what he does next.
It’s a very well-constructed book – it would, for example, be really easy to dislike all the characters. Having a first-person narrator helps, but picking one who doesn’t really understand the human bit of humanity (or claims not to) works against that – or would, if Watts didn’t carefully start off with a childhood flashback scene, where Siri (postsurgery) saves his presurgical best friend from being beaten up. Not because he cares for him; because, as much as anything, that’s because what someone in a story would do.
Siri is a fascinating character, as much for what he doesn’t understand as for what he does. However, throughout the novel there’s also the story of his past relationship with Chelsea, a neuroaestheticist. Chelsea is bubbly and focussed on human interactions (has sex in person and so forth) and, as part of her job, wants to smooth out Siri’s brain to make him happier (she’s described “revel[ing] in her own inconsistency”). They re-enact a fifties idea of a relationship where the woman wants to change the man and the man wants regular sex and grunting, and Siri, thinking that their problems are due to Chelsea’s misunderstanding of how sexual relationships work, tells her a deeply aggravating parable about oogenesis that is right out of all that cod evolutionary biology about how Man, the mighty hunter, must be free to sow his seed in whatever moist passive uterus He can find. Much to his surprise, Chelsea leaves him (which is the only moment when I like her) and apart from a bit where he is unable to deal with her dying, that’s pretty much it for this storyline. Yes, it shows how Siri fails to be human (for a particular value of humanity), and it’s about conscious and subconscious interactions with others, and about how communication really isn’t all that great, but despite all that thematic resonance it just doesn’t work for me, largely because it is so clichéd. In addition, for a novel so well researched the parable contains so much misreading of biology and ignorance of actual sexual strategies (even if you narrow it down to mammals – it is particularly annoying if, say, you’re thinking about fish while he’s telling you that eggs are precious and rare and must be cradled lovingly) that either I lose all faith in Siri (which I don’t think I’m supposed to at that particular stage of the novel) or I get irked at the author.
The other main source of irritation is more subtle, and maybe it’s just the book catching me on a sharp edge. Well-researched as it is, there is a kind of joy in uncovering and using biological weirdnesses that, at times, bleeds through into the text as “hey, look at the freakshow!”. Take, for example, the following:
“A memory rose into my mind and stuck there: a man in motion, head bent, mouth twisted into an unrelenting grimace. His eyes focused on one foot, then the other. His legs moved stiffly, carefully. His arms moved not at all. He lurched like a zombie in thrall to rigor mortis.
I knew what it was. Proprioreceptive polyneuropathy…”
Loss of proprioception (proprioreception may be a US variant) means loss of position sense; no longer knowing where your limbs are. It’s inconvenient, but it’s not uncommon (people with diabetes often get this, usually in their legs) and it does not usually result in clinics full of lurching zombies, grimacing. Likewise, Siri himself is apparently the way he is because of his hemispherectomy, which is not impossible, but he somehow manages to avoid the supposedly universal side effect of the operation, which is partial paralysis (I have just finished reading a fascinating New Yorker article on hemispherectomy here while fact-checking this), which is much less cool and inconvenient for space travel. Likewise the ossification virus that kills Chelsea – the description is horror, not human, and although I think that’s part of Siri’s worldview it comes through in the appendix as well, where Watts is enthusing about hacking the brain and so on. I do think the stuff he’s talking about is fascinating, but one of my problems with hard sf is the way it tends to leap around waving its cool bits everywhere, and in this case it tends to forget that the cool bits might actually be people, who may have just gotten over their own freakiness already.
Anyway. It’s a book you have to keep up with (I’m not sure I did, all the way through – I don’t think I fully understand Sarasti’s actions and motivations, for example), and it deals with big ideas in fascinating ways. It’ll be interesting to see what he does next.
