Blindsight
★★★★★
In an era where the quotidian human is made worthless by AI, only the divergent have value - those with with skills way beyond the standard deviation. Theseus’ crew is an elite band of the schizophrenic, vampiric, autistic, and augmented. I started doubtful that this setup was realistic, but by the end, I was convinced you couldn’t do it any other way! This is first contact as it really might be - no helpful clues, no friendly aliens, just a crew stumbling about pressing buttons, working out the box, and trying to find patterns in the noise.
Watts’ prose is delicious - “Every surface infested with topography”. He keeps this up throughout the whole book; everything feels alive and malicious - instantly one of my favourite writers.
About halfway through we shift gears. What started as a gripping story of first contact in space, tightens in on the crew that’s barely holding it together. Their psychological uniqueness mirrors their search for sentience among what seem to be just biological machines. Watts expertly takes us down the rabbit hole of consciousness and the mind as we peel back the layers of the crews psychology to ultimately understand the aliens and ourselves.
