Peter Watts, Blindsight [Library of Babel]

This is the final Best Novel Hugo nominee of this year's field, and given James Nicoll's immortal description of Watts's writing ("When I feel my will to live getting too strong, I pick up a Peter Watts book" or words to that effect), I wasn't terribly enthusiastic about picking up Blindsight. I was on something of a roll, though, and took it along to read on the plane to our Internet-less vacation weekend in Michigan. In the end, I think my reaction to the book was colored by James's comment, but it wasn't as bad as it might've appeared.

Blindsight is narrated by Siri Keeton, who had a radical hemispherectomy (half his brain was cut off) as a child to stop life-threatening seizures, and as a result, is sort of unemotional and distant. He has excellent models of human behavior, and can simulate it very well (in fact, that's his job), but in the end doesn't really understand it. One of the earliest scenes is a childhood memory in which he recalls seeing some bullies picking on his one real friend, and nearly kills them in response.

So, you know, you can tell right away that this is a cheery book.

The main action of the book concerns a mission sent out after aliens announce their presence to humanity in a rather dramatic fashion: Thousands of small objects simulatneously enter Earth's atmosphere, and transmit detailed images off to some unknown location, allowing the aliens to make a map of the Earth with about one-meter resolution. A first contact team is hastily assembled, consisting of a number of highly modified humans (a linguist with deliberately induced multiple personalities, a biologist who's sacrificed large chunks of his brain for greatly expanded senses, a military officer with major augmentation), Keeton to sort of translate the behavior of the others for people back on Earth, and a vampire to command the whole thing.

Yes, a vampire. For whatever reason, there are vampires in this world, a distinct branch of humanity that starved into extinction some time ago, but were brought back via genetic engineering. They're ultra-smart ruthless predators, and generally superior to normal humanity.

Anyway, they're originally launched toward a small icy object in the outer Solar System that had been detected broadcasting signals, but are diverted en route to a previously unnoticed brown dwarf, where they find an alien ship engaged in some sort of extremely complicated operation that they can't figure out. They make contact with the aliens, and very quickly discover that they're completely out of their depth.

This is where I think that my reaction to the book has been significantly altered by James's comment. This is a very grim book, and not in a fun Steven Erikson sort of way--it's all "Woe, woe, humanity is totally outclassed..." I think this is intended to be thought-provoking and depressing, but about two-thirds of the way through the book, it started to become almost comical to me. I think it's the vampire thing that put it over the top.

Anyway, the problem is that everything about the book, from the depressing core message to the lengthy technical appendices at the back (with footnotes!) positively screams "I R SERIOUS RITER, THIS AM SERIOUS BOOK," and it gets a little ridiculous. The predicament that Keeton and his colleagues find themselves in seems less like a natural result of core truths about the universe, and more a matter of the author trying to find new and innovative ways to heap woe on the characters. That sense of piling on misery kept throwing me out of the book, and dramatically reduced its impact.

That said, it's a very well done book, if you're not bothered by the accumulation of woe. The plot moves along very nicely, the aliens are about as alien as you'll ever find, and there are Big Ideas and Cool Objects galore in the story. I'm pretty dubious about one of the physics conceits, but the main focus is on biology and cognitive science issues, and he's extensively documented the plausibility of what he's talking about. At least, he provides footnotes to references that I assume establish the plausibility of what he's talking about-- I didn't go read them.

This goes in the category of "Impressive book, but not one I enjoyed." It's worth reading if you like hard SF, especially since it's available for free online, and it deserves its Hugo nomination, but it's not getting my vote for first place.