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sabotabbyI really wish I could give it a proper review, but I'm too busy shuddering. I was, I must admit, duly warned ("You'll like it. It's dark."). It hits one of my major fiction kinks: protagonists that are only protagonists by virtue of being slightly less awful than the antagonists. Or, as Watts describes in the acknowledgments, "a cast of characters who were less cuddlesome than usual."
The premise gets vampire novel all over your hard SF, in a most cheeky and awesome sort of way, the vampires being a long-extinct human subspecies that goes into seizures when confronted with Euclidian geometry. And they are genuinely creepy and don't sparkle; natural predators that are evolutionarily disinclined to feel anything resembling empathy or connection with their prey. The rest of the cast is a fraction less chilling: human enough that you sympathize with them, horrific enough that you feel a bit disturbed at belonging to the same species as them. The narrator has had half of his brain removed because of childhood epilepsy, leaving him highly intelligent but, like the vampires, unable to feel empathy. He and a handful of others—a linguist who has partitioned her brain into four distinct personalities, a pacifist soldier, and a biologist with augmented senses who can no longer feel anything with his own body—are sent, along with a vampire captain, to make first contact with an alien ship.
What follows is a slow-paced, tense dance between two (or possibly more) species that are so different that, even with the best of intentions, understanding is impossible. Because the hard SF is largely window-dressing: the real ideas in the book have to do with language and consciousness. Watt's thesis is that consciousness and intelligence are unrelated, the conclusion is that the default state of evolution may be some sort of sociopathy, and the result is that I think I will have nightmares from this.
So, of course, highly recommended. But I think I need to read some fluff now.
The premise gets vampire novel all over your hard SF, in a most cheeky and awesome sort of way, the vampires being a long-extinct human subspecies that goes into seizures when confronted with Euclidian geometry. And they are genuinely creepy and don't sparkle; natural predators that are evolutionarily disinclined to feel anything resembling empathy or connection with their prey. The rest of the cast is a fraction less chilling: human enough that you sympathize with them, horrific enough that you feel a bit disturbed at belonging to the same species as them. The narrator has had half of his brain removed because of childhood epilepsy, leaving him highly intelligent but, like the vampires, unable to feel empathy. He and a handful of others—a linguist who has partitioned her brain into four distinct personalities, a pacifist soldier, and a biologist with augmented senses who can no longer feel anything with his own body—are sent, along with a vampire captain, to make first contact with an alien ship.
What follows is a slow-paced, tense dance between two (or possibly more) species that are so different that, even with the best of intentions, understanding is impossible. Because the hard SF is largely window-dressing: the real ideas in the book have to do with language and consciousness. Watt's thesis is that consciousness and intelligence are unrelated, the conclusion is that the default state of evolution may be some sort of sociopathy, and the result is that I think I will have nightmares from this.
So, of course, highly recommended. But I think I need to read some fluff now.
