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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.
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no subject
Date: 2010-01-26 01:29 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-26 02:26 am (UTC)Basically a whole bunch of my friends mentioned it within the space of about a week, and shortly thereafter Peter Watts got beat up crossing the border, and I decided I had to read it.
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Date: 2010-01-26 03:14 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-26 04:06 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-26 02:13 am (UTC)Recommended grammar: misplaced modifiers.
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Date: 2010-01-26 02:27 am (UTC)OH, IT'S MY LOVE
Date: 2010-01-26 08:43 am (UTC)of course many other females wanted to date him and he decided we should be friends. and now he dead from moustache.
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Date: 2010-01-26 08:46 am (UTC)(More misplaced modifiers, or do I really own Scriabin? You decide.)
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Date: 2010-01-26 12:06 pm (UTC)(I was going to put "now he dead from moustache" on the icon, but it didn't quite work.)
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Date: 2010-01-26 04:23 pm (UTC)Also, strangely, I don't think I have the picture of him that you used. Where you get it?
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Date: 2010-01-26 08:07 pm (UTC)Just for you.
I googled Scriabin. Presumably it's the same guy because it looks like the same guy.
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Date: 2010-01-27 02:17 am (UTC)BUT DAMMIT NOW I NEED TO GET RID OF AN ICON
which one is unworthy
I haven't used the Rorschach sucks icon in ages, but I just can't let go of it.
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Date: 2010-01-26 02:24 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-26 02:28 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-26 03:15 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-26 03:31 am (UTC)Blade Runner was on today, incidentally.
Watts is a right bastard when it comes to following through on the brutal logic of plot, he is
Date: 2010-01-26 07:14 am (UTC)He also made me reconsider my praise for last summr's geek epic, Children of Earth (spoiler ahead!): he suggested that the only believable ending would have been for the aliens to win — and for the people of earth to just deal with the tithing of their children.
(Of course, it's hard to do that to a commercial children's franchise, in'it?)
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Date: 2010-01-26 04:34 pm (UTC)Honestly, that book had me feeling like the author was slipping inside my head and driving me directly crazy.