Updated 2 years ago
Hopefully, this novel will eventually be filmed. Blindsight by Peter Watts is a fresh take on a first contact story, with interesting world-building. It is a cross between Alien and Lovecraft. It is available for free online.
Blindsight book review
“….before the reader gets to contemplate the weirdness of the aliens encountered in Blindsight, they are first presented with perhaps even weirder humans. The year is 2082 and vampires walk the Earth, resurrected from the prehistoric DNA of homo sapiens vampiris, having genetic aversion to Euclidian shapes (crosses for example), and can computationally run circles around baseline humans. Human minds can share and occupy one body. Physicians can take a blood sample, consume it, and tell you what’s wrong with you. Baseline humans can leave behind the mundane and upload themselves into Heaven, never having to interact with the physical world again. Synthesists can tell you who you are and what you’re thinking just by reading outward physical topologies.It’s a truly unique and bizarre world that Watts has created, but it’s also dark, cold and remorseless world in which you, as an individual, are either modified in one way or another or are left behind as a mundane baseline.
…Blindsight is one of the most challenging sci-fi books I’ve ever read … in a good way. It challenges the reader’s entire experience, piling on scientific and philosophical concepts so deep that you begin to wonder if you’re soon going to drown in them, or if Watts will ever resolve them. So no, it is not an easy and casual read, even for fans of the genre. Blindsight is an unforgiving hard scifi fan’s wet dream. The Notes and References section literally contains 133 references to back up the concepts in the book. A stat that will surely scare away many readers, much to their loss.”
Blindsight: a strange neurological condition that could help explain consciousness
Here is some background lore multimedia on its resurrection of vampires, which are presented as Pleistocene genetic mutation:
Some Quotes
“We all come into the story halfway through, we all catch up as best we can, and we’re all gonna die before it ends.”
The Book of Oogenesis
“In the beginning were the gametes. And though there was sex, lo, there was no gender, and life was in balance.
And God said, “Let there be Sperm”: and some seeds did shrivel in size and grow cheap to make, and they did flood the market.
And God said, “Let there be Eggs”: and other seeds were afflicted by a plague of Sperm. And yea, few of them bore fruit, for Sperm brought no food for the zygote, and only the largest Eggs could make up the shortfall. And these grew yet larger in the fullness of time. And God put the Eggs into a womb, and said, “Wait here: for thy bulk has made thee unwieldy, and Sperm must seek thee out in thy chambers. Henceforth shalt thou be fertilized internally.”
And it was so.
And God said to the gametes, “The fruit of thy fusion may abide in any place and take any shape. It may breathe air or water or the sulphurous muck of hydrothermal vents. But do not forget my one commandment unto you, which has not changed from the beginning of time: spread thy genes.”
And thus did Sperm and Egg go into the world. And Sperm said, “I am cheap and plentiful, and if sowed abundantly I will surely fulfill God’s plan. I shall forever seek out new mates and then abandon them when they are with child, for there are many wombs and little time.” But Egg said, “Lo, the burden of procreation weighs heavily upon me. I must carry flesh that is but half mine, gestate and feed it even when it leaves my chamber,” for by now many of Egg’s bodies were warm of blood, and furry besides. “I can have but few children, and must devote myself to those, and protect them at every turn.
And I will make Sperm help me, for he got me into this.
And though he doth struggle at my side, I shall not let him stray, nor lie with my competitors.”
And Sperm liked this not. And God smiled, for Its commandment had put Sperm and Egg at war with each other, even unto the day they made themselves obsolete.”
Why Telling People your Birthday is a Bad Idea
“I swear, if the aliens end up eating the lot of us, we’ll have the Church of Game Theory to thank for it,” Sascha said.
She was grabbing a brick of couscous from the galley. I was there for the caffeine. We were more or less alone; the rest of the crew was strewn from dome to Fab.
“Linguists don’t use it?” I knew some that did.
“We don’t.” And the others are hacks. “Thing about game theory is, it assumes rational self-interest among the players. And people just aren’t rational.“
“It used to assume that,” I allowed. “These days they factor in the social neurology.”
“Human social neurology.” She bit a corner off her brick, spoke around a mouthful of semolina. “That’s what game theory’s good for. Rational players, or human ones. And let me take a wild stab here and wonder if either of those is gonna apply to that.” She waved her hand at some archetypal alien lurking past the bulkhead.
“It’s got its limitations,” I admitted. “I guess you use the tools you can lay your hands on.”
Sascha snorted. “So if you couldn’t get your hands on a proper set of blueprints, you’d base your dream home on a book of dirty limericks.”
“Maybe not.” And then, a bit defensive in spite of myself, I added, “I’ve found it useful, though. In areas you might not expect it to be.”
“Yeah? Name one.”
“Birthdays,” I said, and immediately wished I hadn’t.
Sascha stopped chewing. Something behind her eyes flickered, almost strobed, as if her other selves were pricking up their ears.
“Go on,” she said, and I could feel the whole Gang listening in.
“It’s nothing, really. Just an example.”
“So. Tell us.” Sascha cocked James’ head at me.
I shrugged. No point making a big thing out of it. “Well, according to game theory, you should never tell anyone when your birthday is.”
“I don’t follow.”
“It’s a lose-lose proposition. There’s no winning strategy.”
“What do you mean, strategy? It’s a birthday.”
Chelsea had said exactly the same thing when I’d tried to explain it to her. Look, I’d said, say you tell everyone when it is and nothing happens. It’s kind of a slap in the face.
Or suppose they throw you a party, Chelsea had replied.
Then you don’t know whether they’re doing it sincerely, or if your earlier interaction just guilted them into observing an occasion they’d rather have ignored. But if you don’t tell anyone, and nobody commemorates the event, there’s no reason to feel badly because after all, nobody knew. And if someone does buy you a drink then you know it’s sincere because nobody would go to all the trouble of finding out when your birthday is— and then celebrating it—if they didn’t honestly like you.
Of course, the Gang was more up to speed on such things. I didn’t have to explain it verbally: I could just grab a piece of ConSensus and plot out the payoff matrix, Tell/Don’t Tell along the columns, Celebrated/Not Celebrated along the rows, the unassailable black-and-white logic of cost and benefit in the squares themselves. The math was irrefutable: the one winning strategy was concealment. Only fools revealed their birthdays.
Sascha looked at me. “You ever show this to anyone else?”
“Sure. My girlfriend.”
Her eyebrows lifted. “You had a girlfriend? A real one?”
I nodded. “Once.”
“I mean after you showed this to her.”
“Well, yes.”
“Uh huh.” Her eyes wandered back to the payoff matrix. “Just curious, Siri. How did she react?”
“She didn’t, really. Not at first. Then—well, she laughed.”
“Better woman than me.” Sascha shook her head. “I’d have dumped you on the spot.”
