I have an excerpt of the book explaining this here: https://jodavaho.io/posts/books-blindsight.html
The discussion about non-conscious intelligence was less so (I see ants every day!). But this is a new idea dense book to say the least - if you love worldbuilding, please pick it up.
Learning how modern AI's respond immediately made me think about how Rorschach was communicating with the crew and how current LLM AI's might be considered intelligent while not conscious.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight_(Watts_novel)#Consc...
While people might remember it for other more striking ideas, I was impressed with how it expounds the theory behind the claims that "intelligence implies violence". That entire narrative was quite chilling.
That, and the way the author explains how to establish a means of communication using just... pain.
It's a brilliant book.
If you want a really shoehorned scifi vampire, there's a David Weber book in which it comes out of fucking nowhere towards the end.
This helped explained their downfall with man creating euclidean geometry everywhere and was taken advantage of when they where brought back as they where very good at certain tasks while also requiring anti seizure drugs which kept them in control.
IIRC, it was more "intelligence may be a maladaptive dead-end".
> might have some lingering trauma
Why does every character have to have some trauma? Just because the Oscar committee says so?
All of the characters are weird, super humans with their own problems. At one point, the vampire freaks out and attacks the protagonist. Which leads to some plot ramifications. If you are to maintain that structure, you require a teammate to lose their cool at a pivotal moment when it has been established that the team leader was better and more logical than everyone else.
The in-universe vampire explanation gives a rationale for the scenario. This does not hold if you trivially swap out for a different character, so some kind of hard-wired trigger is required.
Edit: another thing I didn't like was how the author just dumped pages and pages of his character-notes as background information for that character. At least that's how it felt on the multi-page flashback digressions. I skipped pages and pages of the book because it was irrelevant to the story.
Also a big shout out to his less well-known novel, The Freeze Frame Revolution. It's about the crew of a "stargate"-seeding spaceship trying to stop the ship's AI, but being hampered by the fact that the AI is both near-omniscient and that they only work in short shifts before being put back in hibernation. He also wrote a handful of short stories set before and after the novel.
There's something very refreshingly direct, unvarnished, no-nonsense, and clear-eyed (some would say cynical) about Watts' style of writing. His prose tends to be tough (quite like early Gibson's noir style, with the punk attitude intact), but also beautifully cinematic. The only other write that I think comes close, aside from Gibson, is Dan Simmons with his Hyperion Cantos, but he's not nearly as darkly cynical.
Anyone who gets that far into the book doesn't need to have their hand held that much. I get that it's the entire point of the book, but everything until this point has been a challenging read.
Personally, I think it might have been interesting to rewrite the whole thing such that conclusion is ambiguous.
Consequently, I'm not really sure who the book is for. I don't know any Christians who like atheistic hard scifi (although, I exist so there must be others). And I don't know many people into hard scifi who really care for the religious imagery.
Personally, I find the experience to be unique, so I think it's worth it if you can get into it.
Besides that (and to spoil the point of the book) the biggest flaw is that the author doesnt seem to trust the reader to get the point, which is that consciousness is an unnecessary (and detrimental) evolutionary dead end. Real intelligence is totally orthogonal.
As a software engineer who has seen very intelligent systems with no more consciousness than a paperclip for decades, I got on board with the premise as soon as it showed up. But then I kind of had to wade through case study after case study highlighting the idea.
[1] - this isnt atheism that's aggressive, but rather a universe where there's no doubt that there is no god with all of the consequences thereof.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperion_(Simmons_novel) is a massive classic and is full of that stuff. The Matrix has The One die and be resurrected as a godlike glowing being.
Most atheists/Christians aren't as rigid as you imagine.
> a universe where there's no doubt that there is no god
The vast majority of scifi (and other genres) doesn't care or take a position either way. Nothing in Blindsight says "there can't be a God"; it has nothing to do with that.
Religion aside, the imagery is undeniably cool. It goes hard.
No other reason is required.
Some ideas are nice and new, especially knowing the author's particular science background. But the purple prose was exhausting.
Quoting from:
https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2enwks/iama_science_f...
So I saw two options. 1: Book tanks, nobody can read it; or 2) book tanks, anyone can read it. I saw no option where Blindsight would ever make money. So what the hell, thought I-- I may die poor, but maybe I won't die completely obscure. Told my editor I was going to set everything free under a Creative Commons license-- it would have broken the contract, but Cory Doctorow had been getting away with it for years and besides, I figured my writing career was pretty much kaput anyway. Editor asked me to wait a month, to see if things turned around. I waited. They didn't. Finis.
The week after I started giving Blindsight away, sales tripled. The rest is history.
Are you also opposed to open source software?
http://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm
My capsule summary:
In the 2070s, on the cusp of the singularity, a swarm of alien drones takes a snapshot of the Earth before burning up in the atmosphere. A small crew of bleeding-edge posthumans, all with different physical or mental augmentations, is sent to the outer Solar System to investigate the source. The narrator, Siri Keeton, is an emotionally lobotomized "synthesist" tasked with monitoring the mission and interpreting it for the leadership back home.
I don't want to spoil its frightening twists, but suffice to say that it shapes up to be a cosmic horror novel where the horror is rooted in abstract ideas like human cognition and the nature of consciousness. The book is peppered with philosophical concepts like the Chinese Room and (real-life) neurological quirks like blindsight, all bent towards smart, existential horror. Like Lovecraft mixed with Oliver Sacks.
And while the ideas are solid -- the author is a marine biologist who fills the appendix with citations of evolutionary and cognitive research -- what I really love is the prose. Watts is a fantastic hard SF writer, filling every page with authentic, charismatic narration, cinematic imagery, and a way of talking about abstruse scientific concepts in a way that punches you in the gut and chills you to the bone. His style is like a horror version of Douglas Adams, mind-bending ideas and memorable characters with a compulsively readable flow to it.
Its biggest weakness is that one of the most compelling aspects sounds like a pulpy joke at first glance -- the ship is led by a "vampire." I can't imagine how many people read this on the jacket and took a hard pass on Dracula in Space. But it's not some fantasy gimmick -- it's the in-universe nickname for an ancient, predatory, sociopathically brilliant subspecies of humanity that's been resurrected, Jurassic Park-style, to help manage high-stakes ventures like the first-contact mission. The captain starts off intriguing, quickly grows frightening, and eventually advances one of the book's most disturbing and unforgettable arguments.
Overall, it's not just my favorite SF novel, but one of my favorite novels, period. The only book I've ever bought a dead-tree copy to be signed by the author. Highly, highly recommended.
Despite that, still one of my all time favorite sci fi books. A fantastic exploration of intelligence, conscioussness and first contact.
Probably a bit too heavy on ideas for most and those who are only used to lighter cost might find it boring. But for me one my all time favorite sci-fi books.