sunyi15150238

I love speculative fiction, but I feel a lot of authors fall into this trap of making it needlessly vague and difficult to read as a way to make it 'intelligent' or 'edgy', and thus sacrifice it being... you know, interesting or entertaining. Not to say Blindsight isn't interesting, but it has some major pitfalls to it being a book I really enjoy. Here's the skinny: a massive meteorite event leads to the building of a ship and the selecting of a crew to be sent far out into space to investigate the origin of the event, which come to find out also has a signal component. The crew is unique - a biologist that can taste cells, a linguist with multiple personalities, an augmented warrior, a... Mentat, for lack of a better term, with no empathy at all, and a vampire resurrected from extinction in a manner that recalls Jurassic Park. Our narrator is the Mentat, Siri. The aliens they encounter out in the middle of nowhere in space are truly alien - nothing humanoid about them. Siri was the first problem I encountered in this book - I simply couldn't relate to him. Perhaps that was the point, but I found it made reading the book difficult, since much of the book was seen through his eyes. When the book started reaching its climax, the author chose to talk about the central conceit of the book (a conceit that makes use of the dozen or so times that the idea of the "Chinese Room" comes up in the book) in what felt more like an excuse for him to rant than any character or story development I should care about. I didn't find it all that great an idea myself, but your mileage may vary. I certainly don't like being made to feel like I'm not smart enough for any book. I loved the aliens too... but when I read the author's appendices and came across the section on the aliens, it led out with a bit about how he was "utterly weary of humanoid, big-forehead" aliens. Perhaps my irritation with the book, and the fact that I was stubborn enough to sit through and finish it (I bought the thing! I used my birthday gift cards on it! I was damn well going to finish it!) finally got to me, because I snorted and skimmed ahead. Nothing better than an author who actively alienates (haha) some of his readers with his lamenting of what is a large part of sci-fi. Does he revile Star Trek's rubber forehead aliens, too? How about the Goa'uld? I think a session with a System Lord and a hand device might change his mind. TL;DR version: Blindsight is a decent book that suffers from flaws in its delivery. It felt similar to Michael Crichton's Sphere at times, a book for which I have a massive nostalgia factor. I would read it, but not be upset if it gets on your nerves and you have to put it down. The first half is quite slow. And if reading on the Kindle, be aware you'll be clicking around to look up words a lot.

2023-07-07 23:09