Echopraxia
★★★★★
Echopraxia is a direct sequel to the excellent Blindsight. Just as the latter explored big ideas on the nature of consciousness through alien first contact, so Echopraxia explores free will and the nature of reality as humanity slides towards the posthuman singularity.
In a mirror to Blindsight, the book centres again on a ship’s journey to alien contact with a cast who are all, to some extent, not in control of their destiny. Whereas Blindsight gets to contact and awe quite briskly, Echopraxia dawdles far too long on the journey, stretching the middle of the book with lots of psychological sparring between the crew and compressing the final contact into a confusing jumble of scenes.
By the end, Watts has succeeded in creating a sense that the posthuman world was beyond groking and agency was out the window, but the book failed to capitalise on this backdrop by building a strong plot around it. Instead, the lack of agency and nihilism was the story, and ultimately unsatisfying.
Watt’s didn’t shy away from packing the book with more big ideas. As a fan of the computational universe, ever since reading Egan’s Permutation City, I was particularly intrigued by the idea of god as a virus in the system. However, ideas like this often weren’t deeply explored; instead, they were dropped on the reader in philosophical sidebars or exposition dumps and were frankly surplus to the plot, what little there was…
“… What have we accomplished other than nearly getting killed a hundred fifty million clicks from home?”
I certainly agreed with the protagonist as I slogged through the 3/4 mark. Echopraxia didn’t live up to the massively high bar set by Blindsight. It had potential, packed with more deep philosophical ideas that dovetailed well with its predecessor, but the plot was weak and as confusing for the reader as it was for the protagonist. A worthwhile ideas read, but unfortunately unable to meet expectations set by Blindsight.
