Blindsight by Peter Watts (thoughts and impressions)

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 Blindsight is the pragmatic poetry of the unsentimental mind. Much like the vampires in the book it is an amoral efficient and a cannibal. Taking what it will from the hard sci-fi and horror and compiling them into shuffling cards of plot twist and strangely human nightmare fuel. 


Nihilistic and tragic in the death throes of its own conclusions. That are at once distant and obvious. In that liminal space between the stars.


Wonderfully well written on a practical level. On a sentence by sentence level. I think that my only complaint is I wish the characters had a little more human variation in their cadence speech patterns as written. They are all wonderfully developed and technically post human (or on the cusp of it).


The books captures everything I love about WarHammer 40k without any of the faults of the fiction put out by the black library (written like bad comic book power fantasy set in a richly developed universe).


I think it is one of my favorite books and likely will be for a long time. 


I went in blind except some hard recommendations from some book tubers I used to watch. There is a plot but it is a shuffling plot of twists and psyche-outs that is one part prose poem and one part philosophical thesis. 


And the plot twists work because the assumptions are so out of the intellectual ball park of most of its readers that you have a kind of faith in each argument before the rug is pulled out from under you. 


After you spinning in zero gravity after the rug is pulled yet again from beneath you. And launching you towards the future you learn to enjoy the ride and brace for impact.


For the first few of the reviews I will remind the reader my scores are only in comparison to my expectations not delusion of objectivity final score: A+


The bottoms line: this books will do to your brain what the monolith did to our ancestors in the Stanley Kubrick classic 2001.

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