Firefall

Firefall #1-2

by Peter Watts

This is the Omnibus edition of Blindsight and Echopraxia .

February 13, 2082, First Contact.

Sixty-two thousand objects of unknown origin plunge into Earth's atmosphere—a perfect grid of falling stars screaming across the radio spectrum as they burn. Not even ashes reach the ground. Three hundred and sixty degrees of global surveillance: something just took a snapshot.

And then... nothing.

But from deep space, whispers. Something out there talks—but not to us. Two ships, Theseus and the Crown of Thorns, are launched to discover the origin of Earth's visitation, one bound for the outer dark of the Kuiper Belt, the other for the heart of the Solar System.

Their crews can barely be called human, what they will face certainly can't.

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction, Horror, Space Opera, Space, Hard Science Fiction, Literature

768 pages, Paperback

First published September 25, 2014

Reviews

[Claudia · Rating 5 out of 5]

LE 12.10.2020.

For fans of this series, fresh, just out of the oven:

https://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=9489

https://blindsight.space/

https://vimeo.com/467342474

❤️❤❤

-----

Note: links inserted in the review contain minor spoilers.

I’ve had my fair share of sci-fi works, with mind-blowing ideas and, at times, with worlds and concepts hard to imagine. But this duology was the most dense and tough I had read so far.

Blindsight

02/13/2082: Earth is surrounded by 65,000 alien objects, named Fireflies which after a little while, burned in atmosphere. Humanity is caught off guard and reactions are all over the spectrum. The quest in pursuing why/who/what sent them begins. Some probes are sent to investigate a signal apparently coming from Burns-Caulfield comet, located in the Kuiper Belt. Later on, as the third wave, Theseus , a ship captained by an AI and having a human (and not only) crew is sent to investigate further .

The crew is unlike any other you’ve ever met in a story, I guarantee you that; think of strange and multiply it tenfold.

“Who you do send to meet the alien when the alien doesn't want to meet?
You send a linguist with multiple personalities carved surgically into her brain. You send a biologist so radically interfaced with machinery that he sees x-rays and tastes ultra-sound, so compromised by grafts and splices he no longer feels his own flesh. You send a pacifist warrior whose career-defining moment was an act of treason. You send a monster to command them all, an extinct hominid predator once called vampire, recalled from the grave with the voodoo of recombinant genetics and the blood of sociopaths. And you send a synthesist — an informational topologist with half his mind gone — as an interface between here and there, a conduit through which the Dead Center might hope to understand the Bleeding Edge.
You send them all to the edge of interstellar space, praying you can trust such freaks and retrofits with the fate of a world.
You fear they may be more alien than the thing they've been sent to find.
But you'd give anything for that to be true, if you only knew what was waiting for them...” *

Siri, the ship’ synthesist, is the narrator. His PoV is objective up to a point. The focus is mostly on the characters, their interaction with each other and reactions in critical situations. There are a lot of dialogues between the characters but don’t think for a second that they are light or chatty; if you blink and miss a word, you’ll have to go back because every damn word has a meaning in this book. Happened a few times to me and I had to reread some paragraphs to discover what I missed in the first place.

But when Watts describe something, it's a bliss; pure poetry in its creepiness:

“You wake in an agony of resurrection, gasping after a record-shattering bout of sleep apnea spanning one hundred forty days. You can feel your blood, syrupy with dobutamine and leuenkephalin, forcing its way through arteries shriveled by months on standby. The body inflates in painful increments: blood vessels dilate; flesh peels apart from flesh; ribs crack in your ears with sudden unaccustomed flexion. Your joints have seized up through disuse. You're a stick-man, frozen in some perverse rigor vitae. You'd scream if you had the breath.”

“We crept through Rorschach's belly in fits and starts, focusing as best we could on the tasks at hand, trying to ignore the ghosts that tickled our midbrains. Sometimes the walls flexed subtly around us. Sometimes we only thought they did. Sometimes we took refuge in our diving bell while waves of charge and magnetism spiraled languidly past, like boluses of ectoplasm coursing down the intestine of some poltergeist god.”

It's (pure, utterly) hard sci-fi, filled with info from biology and lots of ethical & psychological issues rather than physics or technology. The universe is dreary but exciting at the same time; it made me think of Cixin’s ‘dark forest’ concept.
Can’t say more without spoilers so I’ll stop here and move on to the sequel.

* Source of quote (and other interesting facts related to Blindsight): http://www.rifters.com/blindsight/BS_....
And Rorschach slowly coming into view on the background - I watched it over and over again…

The novel is also available on the author site among many of his other works: http://www.rifters.com/real/shorts.htm


Echopraxia

Following Blindsight, we go on another journey, now in pursuit of Theseus. We have a new ship, Crown of Thorns and another unusual crew, but different in some aspects than the first.

Peter Watts writes hypnotic and I was mesmerized by his words, however, this one was much more difficult for me to comprehend. This is the kind of book which requires at least one more read to fully understand it, as far as I’m concerned; I missed a lot and I’m disappointed of myself for that. The key issues in focus are not hard to get but the myriad of nuances… my, this book is full of them. Not to mention the (again) myriad of questions left open.

Some readers complain that Al Reynolds usually leaves the ending somehow open and questions not answered; they should try this one. I spent more time rereading parts of it and ruminate upon them than the usual reading flow. And I still think about it. It’s the most thought-provoking sci-fi work I encountered in all my years of reading.

However, the author thought about us, laymen: at the end there are some extensive notes and references explaining a lot of things. They were a gem for me: it was like suddenly the light turned on. Beside clarifing stuff, you’ll be amazed to discover how many topics in the books are based on scientific facts. Stunning. Really stunning what Peter Watts managed to create. I will leave things to settle for a while and I will reread it. It has so much food for thought.

Moreover, on his site there you'll find other info related to both books (and not only). Check it out but be warned there are some spoilers: http://www.rifters.com/index.htm

There is also a thread on Reddit with Q & A, in which the author explains many things. This one, however, contains major spoilers and I quote PW:

“This post, and all its fraying threads, contain extensive spoilers for the novel Echopraxia. You Have Been Warned.
This was never supposed to be one of those books you were forced to pick apart in Mr. McLaughlin's Grade-12 English class. I mean sure, there are symbols and metaphors and all that stuff, but there's also story. There are characters. Echopraxia was meant to me thought-provoking— most of my stuff tries to be thought-provoking, at least— but it was never supposed to be confusing.
Live and learn.”

https://www.reddit.com/r/SF_Book_Club...

There are a lot of other things I wanted to include here, but this post is already oversized, so I’ll leave you to discover and break this diamond yourself.

Just a small advice: do not start this one unless: 1) you’re a fan of (really, really) hard sci-fi, 2) love psychology, puzzles and ideas more than action and 3) don’t mind being left with questions and lots of things to think about afterwards. It’s not at all a simple reading but a more than welcome challenge.

And if you’re curious about the author himself, here's a mini biography: http://www.rifters.com/real/author.htm

[Nick Imrie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I put this book down, went into the kitchen where my boyfriend was making tea, threw my arms around him and buried my face in his neck. “We're animals!” I told him.

He looked at me suspiciously. “Are you saying I smell?”

Of course not, but how to explain to him that I just spent hours in the world of Firefall: an intensely cerebral place where everybody is fixed on the zero-sum struggle for survival plotted through game theory and the ruthless manipulation of minds, brains, genes, and bodies by beings who have augmented, tweaked, upgraded, and uploaded themselves to such exalted states of intelligence that us mere baseline meat-sacks cannot possibly hope to understand them. A place where consciousness itself might be nothing more than an evolutionary dead-end, doomed to be superseded by those who have not wasted precious mental processing power on ephemera like love or music. They only have rational kin-selection and pattern recognition.

How pleasant to come back to the body and be intensely grateful for the capacity for pleasure and the appreciation of beauty.

I first read Blindsight (part 1 of this duology) when I was a teenager, and it totally blew my mind. At that point I hadn't even heard of Oliver Sacks, and I was fascinated and horrified by the litany of brain malfunctions that could so easily destroy what we think of as ourselves. I was perturbed by the idea that free will is an illusion, and we're all, as Siri Keeton puts it, a homunculus behind our own eyeballs. I've got to admit that I'm a lot more relaxed about it now. He says homunculus; I prefer the term aristocrat. While the plebs of my sub-conscious busy themselves with tedious functions like digestion, locomotion, and daily routine, here sit I, the brahmin of my self, weaving it all together into a tidy narrative and occasionally directing some executive function.

Over a decade later, Blindsight is still an excellent book. I know less now than I did then, and I'm still frantically googling to keep up with the text, which bombards you with technical terms, some real, some plausible-sounding Wattsian inventions. The characters are still opaque to me, and they only really come in two types: the hardbitten, foul-mouthed realists and the foolish, naïve optimists. This can be tiresome, especially in Echopraxia (part 2) where the main character is inexplicably ungrateful for having his life saved and spends most of the book in a sulk that the super-intelligent mind-hive isn't paying him more attention.

The sameness of the characters suggests that Peter Watts can't really imagine what it's like to be another human being. Nowhere is this more evident that in Echopraxia where he gallantly attempts to write a character who believes in God, and doesn't even come close to making them seem plausible. In the afterword he cheerily acknowledges this. His extremely interesting list of references includes plenty of papers on why belief in God is nothing more than a neurological glitch, but no theology. The strange thing is, that despite being unable to write people, he writes some of the best aliens I've ever encountered. Nobody else even comes close to showing how inhumanly different another intelligence could be.

Because of the utter foreignness of the aliens, both these books have a very satisfying twist. You won't understand why anything is happening until the end when you'll be like, “Wait? What? That's their motivation?” Unfortunately, it means that for most of the middle of the book nobody's actions will make any sense. But it's well-worth keeping faith and persevering for some of the best explorations in fiction of consciousness and free will.

[Gavin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Firefall is an omnibus edition of Blindsight and Echopraxia. While my review of Blindsight is and ever shall remain "The most mind-numbingly horrifying thing I've ever read.", Firefall was something quite different.

Before I even start reviewing Firefall I want to say that nobody alive works as hard as Watts: http://www.rifters.com/ and that it's completely worth tracking down the two prequels to this piece, The Colonel and Orientation Day

Set parallel to the Theseus mission out to Big Ben, Firefall follows the misadventures of baseline biologist Dan Bruks falling in with Bicamerals, militarized zombies and a Vampire on a tour out to space to see if anything else came back with the transmissions from humanity's attempt at first contact.

As with Blindsight I don't really want to discuss anything specific as the plot and the themes are all huge spoilers but I will say that it's a superb book written by someone who does not want you to entirely understand it.

[Charles · Rating 4 out of 5]

I just started reading this today. Its an 750-page combined version of Watt's "Blindsight" and "Echopraxia". I had mine shipped-over from the UK more than a year ago, but its now available in the States.

I first thought, I was just going to read the second part, "Echopraxia". After reading the Forward, I decided to start at the beginning, because it was a long time ago that I'd read "Blindsight", and I only vaguely remember it. I remember some tropes like vampires, AI, and 'real' Newtonian spaceflight.

I had forgotten how 'hard' a science fiction writer Peter Watts is. His writing is more sophisticated and detailed than I remember it. I also realize that he was actually ahead of the curve when he wrote about paleogenetic re-engineering and the generation of power from tornadoes.

Anyone reading this book should spend some time in the 'Notes and References' section at the back. Its a good guide for Futurist wanabees.

If you have any further interest in the author, like Cory Doctorow (who helped edit the two novels in this book), the author has placed his 'off list' stories 'out there' under Creative Commons license. (Google for it)

[Alexander · Rating 5 out of 5]

Utterly astonishing. This book has dared tread to places I’ve never even considered existed and managed it all with nail-biting tension. Watts explains concepts that are by their very nature post-human, post-homunculus, but does so in ways which are engaging and understandable for us basic humans. Where he got his ideas, I will never understand, regardless that he spells them out in detail in the post-script! Completely unique and masterful in scope and design.

[Dorian · Rating 2 out of 5]

If you like books with never-ending dialogue and under-explained technical detail, then this is the one for you.

[Gerhard · Rating 4 out of 5]

The poem Brüks discovers in the desert as his mind is coming apart is not, contrary to what you might think, a hallucination. It is real. It is the warped brainchild of Canadian poet Christian Bök,124 who has spent the past decade figuring out how to build a gene that not only spells a poem, but that functionally codes for a fluorescing protein whose amino acid sequence decodes into a response to that poem.125 The last time we hung out he’d managed to insert it into E. coli, but his ultimate goal is to stick it into Deinococcus radiodurans, aka “Conan the Bacterium,”126 aka the toughest microbial motherfucker that ever laughed at the inside of a nuclear reactor. If Christian’s project comes through, his words could be iterating across the face of this planet right up until the day the sun blows up. Who knew poetry could ever get that kind of a print run?

RTF.

[Między sklejonymi kartkami · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Ślepowidzenie" - 4,5/5
"Echopraksja" - 3/5

[Jules · Rating 5 out of 5]

“I am naked as I type this. I was naked writing the whole damn book”. I have to comply with the protocol when writing the review too.
- “Living fourteen thousand years didn’t make me a genius, I just had time.
- Time... You can’t see it, you can’t hear it, you can’t weight it, you can’t... measure it in a laboratory. It’s a subjective sense of... becoming what we are instead of what we were a nanosecond ago, becoming what we will be in another nanosecond. The whole piece of time is a landscape existing, we form behind us and we move, we move through it, slice by slice.
- Clocks measure time.
- No, they measure themselves; the objective referee of a clock is another clock.
- All very interesting, but what has it go to do with...”
- This book? “Fifty thousand years ago there were these three guys spread out across the plain, and they each heard something rustling in the grass. The first one thought it was a tiger and he ran like hell, and it was a tiger but he got away. The second one thought the rustling was a tiger and he ran like hell, but it was only the wind, and his friends all laughed at him for being such a chickenshit. But the third guy, He thought it was only the wind, so he shrugged it off, and a tiger had him for dinner. And the same thing happened a million times across the thousands of generations. And after a while everyone was seeing tiger in the grass even if there weren’t any tigers because even chickenshits have more kids than corpses do. And from those humble beginnings we learned to see faces in the clouds and portents in the stars, to see agency in randomness, because neutral selection favors the paranoid. Even here in the twenty first century you can make people more honest just by scribbling a pair of eyes on the wall with a Sharpie. Even now. We are wired to believe that unseen things are watching us.
And it came to pass that certain people figured out how to use that. They painted their faces or they wore funny hats, they shook their rattles and waved their crosses and they said: << Yes, there are tigers in the grass, there are faces in the sky, and they will be very angry if you do not obey their commandments. You must make offerings to appease them, you must bring gold and grain and altar boys for our delectation or they will strike you down and send you to the Awful place.>>
And people believed them by the billions, because after all, they could see the invisible tigers.”
- I can see what you mean; every slice of our history is marked by chickenshits and tigers.
- “At some point in our evolution we started to make decisions consciously, and we’re not very good at it.
- Identity changes by the second; you turn into someone else every time a new thought rewires your brain. You’re a different person than you were ten minutes ago.”
- That was my line, Steve, I am the smart guy and you play the apprentice.
- I wrote those lines. You are just standing there naked taking credit for them. “You’re a stick-man, frozen in some perverse rigor vitae. I stand between the Wizzard of Oz and the man behind the curtain. I am the curtain. All kinds of animals come here, occasional demons too.” You are the demon that steals my ideas to post them sometimes on Goodreads.
- What do you want me to tell them, about sci-fi stuff, rewiring the brain in every way you can’t imagine? It’s not just the mundane sensory stuff; it’s not just feeling colors and tasting sounds. They can literally see time. Sci-fi is overrated, proving you can’t think outside the box is trending now; every time someone says “think outside the box” what he really means is “think bigger boxes”. Empty space scares us, dark always put fear into man, we build boxes and call them homes, and we invent names like stratosphere and call it Earth. We put mirrors inside our boxes and we look at ourselves, how we work, what consciousness is. We cannot imagine what is outside our tridimensional box. But you could get an idea by reading this book.

[Jackson · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is hard science-fiction at it's absolute finest. If you are in the market for a challenging, sophisticated and terrifying first-contact sci-fi, full of absolutely genius ideas - this will without a doubt tick all of your boxes.

The Firefall duology is comprised of both Blindsight and Echopraxia. They are very different stories from each other, and while I certainly prefer the first, the second was both unique and interesting enough to elevate the whole.

“How do you say 'We come in peace' when the very words are an act of war?”

This duology is "hard" both in it's technology and in its subject matter. Watts is evidently extremely intelligent and does copious amounts of research for these books, as evidenced by the multiple "Notes" segments at the back of the collection.
There is physics, psychology, sociology, philosophy and biology aplenty. It is full to bursting with interesting ideas, looked at and explored in unique ways.
There is superb world-building and fantastic character design and really creative plotting. Together it all blends into a relatively slow-paced but unquestionably compelling series of absolutely off-the-wall happenings that had me by the throat the whole time.

“The most altruistic and sustainable philosophies fail before the brute brain stem imperative of self-interest.”

Often people when talking about Firefall will site the broad strokes and just say "vampires in space", and while that is certainly correct and it definitely sells some people on the series, I think on the surface it can sound kind of silly, and it is definitely reductive of it's core concepts.
Vampires are real, Watts makes them real. He does the science, and he gives them a place in our world and it's history. He portrays them realistically against the dark background of both earth and space, and it's awesome.

“It’s not in the nature of the lamb to mourn the lion.”

There is so much I could say about these books - I talked my partner's ear off about the story while I was going through it, just because I couldn't help but outwardly exclaim at just how well put together this story and it's ideas were. I absolutely loved it. I will be reading a lot more Peter Watts going forward.

5 stars, straight on the "favourites" shelf.

[Nathan Griffiths · Rating 1 out of 5]

So this was an omnibus of two books (Blindsight and Echopraxia) which tell seperate but related stories of first contact with aliens in a near-ish future. The first part of the omnibus (Blindsight) was as dense and sometimes impenetrable as other reviews had lead me to expect - however the overall story of the spaceship & crew encountering a genuinely disturbing and quite original alien entity did engage me and there were a few thrills and chills in there that kept me reading.

However. The second part of the this omnibus, initially set back on dystopian future-Earth, left me cold. The unexplained references and jargon mounted up until coming back to read it each time made me feel like some self-flaggelating monk and eventually I didn't feel like putting myself through it any more and for one of the few times in my life I did not actually finish the novel. It just wasn't worth the effort for me.

[Magdalena (Lolek The Pug) · Rating 5 out of 5]

„Ślepowidzenie” podobało mi się bardziej niż „Echopraksja”, dlatego „tylko” 4,5 ⭐️🙂

[Elentarri · Rating 4 out of 5]

Firefall is the omnibus edition of Blindsight and Echopraxia. Blindsight could function as a standalone, but I don't think anyone could get enough out of Echopraxia without having first read Blindsight. The novels overlap in their world-building and transformative event (i.e. the Firefall Event - presumed to be an alien survey). Blindsight deals with one response, Echopraxia deals with events happening on Earth and elsewhere concurrent with the events in Blindsight (a "sidequel" if you like). There are no overlapping characters.

In both novels, the author provides minimal exposition and no hand-holding (so you just have to go with the story and see where it takes you), but does include an extensive notes and references section, which is absolutely brilliant, and makes most scientific articles look like slap-dash affairs.

Blindsight is an alien first contact story involving a unique group of people, including a paleo-resurrected vampire, and a variety of augmented and neuro-divergent ship-mates. This novel explores themes of identity, the nature of consciousness, free will, artificial intelligence, neurology, and game theory as well as evolution and biology. The plot is fairly straightforward, but the examination of ideas is not. Serendipity at work - I've recently read a whole bunch of books, both fiction and non-fiction, on perception or umwelt, of other creatures and how they different from the human experience. This book fits in quite nicely.

Echopraxia - I'm not sure what this was. The story did, however, involve an escaped vampire (Valerie the Vampire), a bunch of zombies, a parasitologist accidentally along for the ride, transcendentalist-humans with a hive mind looking for God, and an interstellar slime mold (which the parasitologist names Portia). Echopraxia examines concepts such as the nature of consciousness, free-will, the use of religion to advance knowledge, the existence of God as a virus that modifies the laws of physics (this idea is new to me - if you are going to have a god, it might as well be a virus!), and the role of various types of humans in society (especially the "base-line", unmodified humans in a world full of augmented humans). The novel was fun, so long as you don't think to much. On the other hand, I think I missed some things and would need to re-read this book.

I enjoyed Blindsight more than Echopraxia. Blindsight has a simpler and more straightforward plot. Echopraxia started to fry my brain. But there were all sorts of juicy things to consider and that reference section is priceless!

NOTES:
Blindsight is the ability of people who are cortically blind to respond to visual stimuli that they do not consciously see due to lesions in the primary visual cortex.
Echopraxia is the involuntary repetition or imitation of another person's actions.

[Patrick Stuart · Rating 4 out of 5]

Enjoyed Blindsight, bombed through it,

Echopraxia was good, but more like a B novel

very very very depressed by whole thing

Peter Watts genuinely seems like an awful person

Fuck he's Rick Sanchez from Rick and Morty - finally I see it




DRAMATURGY

Blindsight good story - interesting to just look at the simple dramatics of it. Others have probably talked about the watts-hosepipe of science fiction hard-but-not-hard ideas and about the metal level stuff.

But in terms of sheer dramaturgy, Blindsight goes pretty hard. Strong mission-crew baseline. Add to that that everyone on the crew is some kind of autistic hyperbeing. Add to that the Vampire captain - are Vampires in Watts just literalisations of the humanity/A.I. terror nexus? Quite good ones if so.

On a mission for "home" but home clearly bollocked and getting worse so even if good guys "win" what happens when get back?

Good for story as everything unstable, no safety. Imagine venetian sailing ship travelling to mysterious island but Venice itself has Plague and deeply morality compromised, also Ships captain is a Vampire and you need him but need to be scared of him. Scared of unknown, scared of own leader, scared of whats happening at home, just generally pretty scary.

Everyone on ship brilliant but alienated from each other due to deep cognitive differences. Everyone simultaneously sympathetic and monstrous. Even vampire captain, simultaneous threat/saviour maybe the loneliest creature there, motives impossible to fully resolve.

Story also about loneliness and shame. Lacking data and deeply fearing potentials in unreadable aliens, humans resort to abduction and torture of alien goons in order to gain knowledge. ARE HUMANITY THE REAL MONSTERS???? Yes but in Watts-verse so is everyone else. Moral axis of this dramatic element utterly dissolved in wattsverse cynicism since there are no innocents and aliens had Nolan plan to be abducted and tortured. Vampire captain and alien hypermind both predicted this & are duelling each other Anime Hyperplan Sphere.

Nihilism of universe ultimately dissolves most of its perceived moral tensions, though this doesn't rally kick in hard until Echopraxia. Thing is, real nihilists can't tell horror stories since there is literally nothing to be scared of, so Watts is a fake of a pretty common sort;

- Consciousness is a virus
- God is a virus
- Erf doomed
- Vampires
- I am very smart
- oh did you realise free will is impossible probably not because you are a pod person also any determinism means absolute HARD determinism everything is FATED though I won't actually act like this is true and just vibe on the infinite but will instead remain vaguely angry at everything
- oh also simulation theory

You SCARED boy?

Well no because if all this is true and I *believe it* fear is as meaningless as everything else. But neither I nor Watts really fully believe it and that makes it scary. If he held his most powerful beliefs as true to his heart as he loudly declaims he would be the most zen fucker ever which clearly he is not.

Huge weight of consequences leads to terror of moral synthesis, of finding the best possible path even in dark circumstances, rejection of this weight leads to Wattsian hyper-cynicism we-are-all-doomed-but-I-the-doomsayer shit

true for Watts, true for characters

Feel like Stanislaw Lem did this with more emotional wisdom and clear beauty of conception but just way less STUFF - Watts is pure ameritrash with all kinds of extra junk and here is my google search and I am here for it. Solaris probably a better book but way less fun to read.




PETER WATTS BEING AN AUTISTIC FUCKBOY


- Dead Wife theme (why yes my wife/partner/mother ALSO entered a state of living death) Nolan wants his theme back


- wheels within wheels ah you only assumed that because of my SOOPA PLAN to manipulate you, no _actually_ YOU only _thought_ you had a soopa plan because of this still-greater MEGA PLAN and after a few of these you just stop giving a shit

this kind of works ok in Anime because the episodes are short and its generally campy enough to absorb the dissonance, and ok in bill and ted because its a short bit and a comedy - works ok in a shortish horror story too when the loss of meaning synthesises pretty well with the moral nihilism of the tale

in watts this effect meshes quite well with the despair and doubts over their own agency of the point of view "baseline" humans as they deal with gods and monsters

however also leads towards a "dying fall" effect where you just stop giving a shit about any part of the story because everything will be reversed or re-interpreted by some xanatos gambit bullshit


- watts a cat person = sociopath confirmed





ON THE OTHER HAND

Both books really horror movies about Humanity taking itself apart. Aliens really a side role. watts has good near-schitzoidal pattern recognition for systems-doom, collapse of humanity through awkward chaotic singularity

Watts book looking pretty much like a mid 21st Century news report.

FUCK YOU WATTS! HUMANITY INVICTUS! I will not die to monkeypox or be a drone! No!





HARD TO FILM

Blindsight would be a hard story to make a film of because a lot of the tension comes not from the events but from sliding and quite subtle interpretations of events. Saw a mock trailer for a Blindsight film, had the first-contact translation scene where the voice of the Alien ship transforms into slasher-movie threats, but in the book true horror of that scene comes before as the crew slowly work out their first contact with aliens is them essentially talking to a non-conscious chat bot, highly capable mirroring and analysis system that has _no fundamental awareness_ of what it is saying, or the meaning of what it is saying.

The collapse into horror-movie clichés after that is still scary, but is tinged and refracted with unease as the crew know this is a non-conscious system simply designed and instructed to make them stay away. Are the slasher threats just reflections of human conversation patterns absorbed by the system and now being thrown back as the system just switches from [deter contact Lvl1] to [deter contact Lvl5], or do they represent something more? Are the threats, even though they are spoken by a system with no awareness, suggestive of some deeper drive, interpreting a maker by its tools.

Hard to put that in a movie. In Blindsight things generally mean two or three things and the argument about the interpretations synthesises with the terror of the situation in a way hard to literalise in 2 hour film.

[Uvrón · Rating 3 out of 5]

The first book in this collection, Blindsight, is full of juicy bits of science philosophy, mostly related to consciousness and odd brain phenomena. These are obviously the result of genuine fascination by Watts, which is charming and means he goes way beyond recycling Zeitgeist topics. These are some great thought-sparkers, and the speculative science-inspired elements are also used to construct a decent thriller plot.

What hooked me most was how this related to the narrator and main character, Siri, whose unusual brain damage allows Watts to relate the character's introspection and self-identity into the book's theme. There are some parallels and hypotheses set up that could so easily lead tie a personal emotional payoff that also informs the larger philosophizing, but disappointingly Watts misses this opportunity. In particular, there is a lot of support for the idea that Siri is telling himself the wrong story, and that a reinterpretation could change his life. This would be such a wonderful parallel to help us reflect on the central sci-fi mystery that it shocked me when it didn't happen. By the end, Watts seems to care mostly about plot twists and action sequences. But those are fun to read, and I still enjoyed the experience quite a bit.

Don't read book 2, Echopraxia. Its philosophizing is far less coherent, it does even less main character development, and its plot is nothing but a series of violent encounters with myriad shitty people and baddies. Everyone exists on a simple ladder of biological or technological superiority; those on the higher rung will always seek to dominate or manipulate the inferior, and are capable of playing the most absurd 12D chess to outwit any plan. I don't agree with this philosophy (it already lead to some silly leaps of logic in book 1), but more importantly it makes for incredibly dull reading if you care about ordinary people, or if you like character conflicts without foregone conclusions.

Seriously, don't read Echopraxia—all that aside, it retcons a core element of Blindsight, just to add some ominous vibes to a subplot. That retroactively soured Blindsight for me. :(

[Mel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oh, where to start? Reading this double hard SF offering made me giddy with glee! If you don't have at least a passing interest in the sciences and emerging tech, you will probably hate this. If your eye was drawn to a mention of zombies and vampires, stop right there. There is absolutely nothing for Twilight and Walking Dead fans here. Move on.

In Blindsight, the first of two novels incorporated into Firefall, Watts draws on current and nascent: biology, neuroscience, propulsion, particle, materials sciences and astrophysics to create a 'first contact' marathon. It is packed with detailed ideas, conjecture and invention. The research is obvious and the scope is staggering.

How about the characters? Damaged, dangerous and as human as their neural modifications allow! None is really what they seem or even believe themselves to be. I'm not sure that any are truly likeable but they are intriguingly tragic, particularly Siri; and the complicated dynamics between the hapless crew chosen to voyage and intercept whatever intelligence has revealed itself to a startled earth, make for a fascinatingly tense narrative.

The authors says: "one of Blindsight's take home messages is that life is a matter of degree - the distinction between living and non-living systems has always been an iffy one".

The second novel, Echopraxia, deals with the same event set against a backdrop of conflict, pandemics, zombie outbreaks (it's OK....it's all seriously handled and involves both deliberate and viral zombification; these are not the slavering, lumbering, rotting variety!) and a civilisation on the verge of collapse; this time an apparently accidental or hurriedly premature expedition sets out to discover the fate of the first ship which has long been silent and presumed lost, fate unknown. Here, hive minds, the nature of God, sentience versus consciousness, free will and adaptation are the dominant themes.

This time the strange crew and wonderfully paced tension are provided by another heavily modified gang, save for the main protagonist, Brüks, the most identifiably human and unmodified character. A retired biologist with a guilty secret, apparently caught up in the adventure by virtue of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Did I mention Vampires in space? Yes? Good and again, don't worry; there isn't a bulb of garlic or a wooden stake in sight. These vamps are truly terrifying but there is nothing supernatural about them.
This time some of the crew do make it back to a dying world. But they have in no sense escaped the very alien threat they encountered beyond the Oort.
And in the end, what of man, his broken planet and his monsters? Last line to the author: "the game [evolution] is never over; there's no finish line this side of heat death".
Six stars! An outstanding read. Epic.

[Anna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Firefall consists of two novels, sci-fi Blindsight and Echopraxia. The latter is a sequel to the former, but I'm still not sure why they were published together in this deeply unwieldy 750 page hardback edition. If you're expecting Echopraxia to answer the questions raised in Blindsight, you will be disappointed. I definitely appreciated Blindsight more than Echopraxia, although both are original and interesting. First published in 2006 and 2014 respectively, they are set in the 2090s and centre upon first contact with aliens.

Blindsight is the stronger novel, in my view, and I really enjoyed it. The main strengths are a fascinatingly unreliable narrator, a genuinely creepy alien first contact scenario, and some brilliant world-building details. Of the latter, my favourite is the vampires. I absolutely love the concept that vampires went extinct when humanity started building structures with right angles. This extrapolation of vampires being unable to tolerate crosses is truly inspired. In the future depicted, humans have de-extincted vampires from DNA and created drugs that can suppress their deadly aversion to right angles. Whereupon vampires immediately began to take our jobs, as they're much more intelligent than humans (albeit only able to speak in the present tense). In Blindsight, the spaceship captain is a vampire. And yes, they still hunger for human blood. Watts includes annexes full of journal paper references at the end of both novels, demonstrating his interest in extrapolating from genuine scientific discoveries. This makes the presence of vampires all the funnier, but they have important thematic resonance. Implicit and explicit in the narrative are questions about what constitutes personhood, intelligence, and consciousness. The aliens are very alien, but so are modified humans and their blood-sucking coworkers.

One little moment that tickled me concerns Necker cubes. These offer the optical trick that either side of the cube can be the front depending upon where you focus. Apparently a sign of vampiric intelligence is that they can see both ways at once. I enjoy these cubes enough to have one tattooed on my arm and would like it to be known that there are two additional ways you can view them. As a hexagonal faceted jewel, with the overlap between the potential 'front' sides as the top, or sideways, with that overlap square and the adjoining triangles as a raised motif wrapped across a bisecting hexagon. It's calming mental exercise to stare at a cube and view it in four different ways, believe me.

Cubes aside, Siri the narrator of Blindsight is fascinating because he believes himself to be objective while saying and thinking the wildest things. For example, on the topic of his ex-girlfriend:

I had my own style, of course. I tried to be charming in my own peculiar way. Once, after too many fights about honesty and emotional manipulation, I'd started to think maybe a touch of whimsy might smooth things over. I had come to suspect that Chelsea just didn't understand sexual politics. Sure she'd edited brains for a living, but maybe she'd just memorised all that circuitry without giving any thought to how it had arisen in the first place, to the ultimate rules of natural selection that had shaped it. Maybe she honestly didn't know that we were evolutionary enemies, that all relationships were doomed to failure. If I could slip that insight into her head - if I could charm my way past her defenses - maybe we'd be able to hold things together.

As this girlfriend points out and Siri refuses to acknowledge, he had a really fucked up childhood. Could that perhaps have shaped his feelings about relationships and gender roles? Not according to the man himself! There's a hilarious contradiction between Siri's role as a neutral observer who makes judgements based on data and the fact that he can't actually explain these judgements with reference to specific data points. So his superpower is intuition! This guy would be really annoying if the narrative vindicated and supported all his views, but it doesn't. This is carefully done, as he is the reader's only perspective on what is going on. His partial and notably skewed viewpoint is both interesting in itself and when contrasted with other characters. It also feeds the theme of attempts to understand and communicate with aliens nicely.

After quite a brisk progression in the first two-thirds, the latter third of Blindsight seemed more dilatory. Echopraxia is somewhat oddly paced throughout and doesn't have the same momentum as Blindsight. The narrator isn't as compelling either. It engages with the same situation (uncanny alien first contact) in a similar context (space mission), without the same delicacy. There are many ponderous debates about the nature of consciousness, perception, intelligence, free will, and godhood. While thought-provoking, these take up quite a lot of space without necessarily going anywhere. Echopraxia all felt a bit circular, which makes a point in itself albeit not a very satisfying one. The narrative itself acknowledges this:

"Do you really think that's a likely scenario?"
"Scenario? I don't even know what the goddamned goal is! No matter who's pulling the strings, what have we accomplished other than nearly getting killed a hundred fifty million klicks from home?"
Moore shrugged. "God knows."
"Oh, very clever."

Thus I didn't find Echopraxia as involving as Blindsight, nor did it constitute a satisfactory sequel. Perhaps it's better considered as a companion novel? I appreciated the inclusion of Siri's father as a major character, providing the reader with some insight into why Siri ended up like that. The survival strategies of Valerie the vampire were also a highlight, but the alien action in Echopraxia wasn't up to the high standard set by Blindsight. Overall, Blindsight deserves 4 stars and Echopraxia 3, so the 3.5 mean rounds up to 4.

[Gavin Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

I reviewed both Blindsight and Echopraxia separately, as I wanted to rate the two slightly differently, but I actually read this Kindle edition of the Firefall omnibus, which combines the two. Just wanted to drop a quick note in to say that I picked this up very cheaply in a sale a while back and it really is a lot of bang for buck. Blindsight is one of my favourite books and Echopraxia is really great, too. This edition also features some notes and references provided by Peter Watts, which are very interesting and a worthwhile addition. Definitely a recommended purchase!

[Tomi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ensimmäinen puolikas, Blindsight, 5/5. Toinen puolikas, Echopraxia, ehkä 3/5. Ei jotenkin yllä ideoidensa ja draamallisen jännitteensä puolesta samalla tasolle. Vaikka huippukohtiakin toki on. Samanlaista whoa-efektiä ei kuitenkaan aiheuttanut.

[Melanie · Rating 2 out of 5]

Joy of joys! This book finishes at 88%, and the rest is acknowledgements and notes. Thank goodness, but this was a slog.

Or rather, Echopraxia - the second book in the duology - was a slog.

The compendium of Firefall is made up of Blindsight and Echopraxia. The two cover the fallout of first contact.

In Blindsight, we travel with the crew dispatched to investigate the source of the objects which alerted Earth to the undeniable fact of alien life. Siri Keeton is our narrator, and he's there strictly as an observer, he is to have no actual impact on the mission, simply to record the details and 'translate' events into something understandable to the masses upon their return. They are in the depths of space, encountering the unknown and doing what they can to build some kind of relationship with whatever it is they've found. But nothing is as it seems. And I mean nothing.

Now, I quite enjoyed this book once it got going. There were some really interesting parts, and some cool themes explored. Was it blow-my-mind amazing? No. But it was enjoyable, and upon reaching the end I was looking forward to the next dose, particularly because most people seemed to think that the second was better than the first.

In Echopraxia, it's 25 years later, back on Earth, and with a whole new set of characters. To be honest, I never really understood what the plot was. Stuff just seemed to...happen. I was pretty confused a lot of the time, and it got to the point that I was reading just to finish rather than out of any real desire.

The shift in everything was difficult, and while the first book had a clear story - real, proper first contact -, this one didn't. Now, maybe I missed some vital line of dialogue somewhere, but I don't think I did. I think the story was just a bit of a mess. And I use the word 'story' in the loosest sense of the word.

There were positives. Expansions on the world introduced in Blindsight and some other pretty cool stuff, but on the whole a disappointment and the reason this book's been dragged down in my rating.

Will I read anything else by Peter Watts? Maybe, but I think it would have to have some killer reviews to entice me.

[Pat · Rating 4 out of 5]

Firefall is a two-in-one edition containing Blindsight and its sequel Echopraxia.

In one sentence: Blindsight is very good and Echopraxia is very bad.

Blindsight

In the not-so-distant future a grid of lights appear across the sky. Is it a alien species spying on Earth? Humans send a ship to a distant brown dwarf to see if they can find who/what is responsible for the light show. They do find life, but it isn't anything like the little green men one would expect. The aliens are so utterly inhuman that they force the ship's crew to challenge their understanding of what it means to be an intelligent and a conscious being.

This is "hard" sci fi, so naturally the best aspect of this book is the exploration of scientific questions. However, I have come to associate hard sci fi with physics (basically, books about space ships traveling at near light speeds and space time folding in on itself). It was refreshing to read a hard sci fi book that instead engages with biology. Peter Watt's probing of consciousness reminded me A LOT of The Conspiracy Against the Human Race by Thomas Ligotti. Although, in this novel Watts frames consciousness more of a mistake/glitch whereas Ligotti frames it more as a burden/curse. Regardless, after reading this book I had to spend a lot of time alone sitting on a park bench staring off into space and thinking about life.

Echopraxia

This is the third sci fi series I have read where the author has an amazing first half but then ABSOLUTELY BOMBS the second half. (See The Hyperion Cantos and Ender's Game).

The beginning of this book is VERY confusing. But that's okay, because the main character is also confused! He is a biologist doing research out in the desert where he gets caught up in some kind of turf war. He then gets dragged into in a religious temple. Then hauled off into space? Oh I guess it's not just the beginning that is confusing, it's like that the whole way through! And, wait . . . how does this relate to Blindsight? Your guess is as good as mine.

Don't read this book.

[Paddy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’m marking this as “Finished” as this edition contains two books: “Blindsight” and “Echopraxia”. I completed “Blindsight” sometime in November but thought I had updated this. Obviously not!

BOOK ONE - “ECHOPRAXIA”:
I found it enjoyable and well paced, but in its early stages it did frustrate as it can be a little hard-going due to its Hard Sci-Fi setting - although it should be said that it never felt like a long, slow slog. Just as things feel like they’re starting to overwhelm, it changes gear again and rewards you for sticking around. I think that this is due to the obvious fact that if there is one thing that Peter Watt’s is an expert at, it’s in knowing how to expertly handle pacing.

Finally, I have to give kudos to Watts for being brave enough to never coddle the reader. He doesn’t just play with big ideas - he plays with huge ideas, and challenges the reader to come along for the ride. If you do so, the reward of placing your trust in him is worthy of your time.

In a genre with so many authors, so many stories, so many over-used tropes and somehow still bursting with new ideas and worlds to explore, it’s not often you walk away from a book feeling “pleasantly” surprised by the unexpected tale you found within.

“Blindsight” is a novel that is asks some big questions, doesn’t spoon-feed you the answers and as hokey as its synopsis may seem, it somehow feels possible. If that doesn’t speak to Watt’s talent as an Author, I don’t know what does.

Not for everyone, but one of those rare books that you can’t finish without it having left some kind of lasting impression on you at its end. To me, that can only ever be a good thing.

Peter Watts is this generation’s Arthur C. Clarke.

***

I’ll update this review at a later date when I decide to revisit Watt’s work and read “Echopraxia”.

[imyril is not really here any more · Rating 3 out of 5]

Blindsight is rather hard science fiction (for a first contact novel featuring vampires in space, um) that - as good scifi should - asks difficult questions, in this case about humanity, consciousness and emotion. I found it interesting and thought-provoking rather than enjoyable - good brain food, but don't expect a light at the end of the tunnel or much else in the way of sustenance for the heart.

More thoughts on Blindsight.

Like Blindsight, Echopraxia may be one of those books that will sit better with me if I give it another whirl in a couple of year's time. I'll have to get back to you if I revisit it. As things stand, I am still trying to grapple with the point. I don't feel like I got closure or satisfaction from it; more an extended exercise in frustration at trying to figure out what the hell Watts was trying to achieve. If Blindsight had me arguing with the page, Echopraxia left me walking away with a 'whatevs'.

More thoughts on Echopraxia.

[Stephen · Rating 1 out of 5]

The good

There are some really interesting concepts in the world Peter has built. I wont give them away but they definitely kept me reading long past the point where the plot and characters had completely lost any hook.
The main character had a really cool condition and seeing how he managed it was fascinating. Unfortunately the best interaction he had involved some conflict quite early and it was mostly downhill from there. His relationship gave good insight into him but when he fails to really do anything I started to lose my interest in gaining said insight.

The bad

There is no character dev at all. None of the characters besides the narrator are even mildly memorable.
The plot is glacial.
There is little to no action in the first 2/3rds of the book (after which i couldn't bring myself to continue).

Appeals to
People who liked Hyperion but felt it was too action packed?

[Lou · Rating 4 out of 5]

Blindsight
5 ⭐️
I had to read this twice. The first time I couldn’t stop thinking about it, and I just had to read it again. I think this will be a forever re read, because there are still so many things I need to think about.


Echopraxia
3 ⭐️
Although I enjoyed the conversation around religion and consciousness, the story was quite floppy and hard to follow. I loved how it was linked to the previous book, but it wasn’t as brilliant compared to Blindsight.

[Ash · Rating 2 out of 5]

Dnf. Only managed to get through the first book.
Started out interesting and new but faded into a drama more than an alien exploration. Rape and victim blaming trigger warning and possible stockholme syndrome where the victim tries to save his rapist which is even worse because in this society people don't have sex physically, they have sex virtually so. Yeah. Didn't want to drag myself through the second half.

[Dave White]

Full of great ideas, but would it kill to make it a bit more approachable? People on the internets are prising it for it's inovative ideas, but also mention how it took them 3 reads to appreciate it. Aint nobody have time for that.

I'm torn tho, reading about the book seems like such an interesting experience and yet when I open the actual book my mind just automatically starts skipping paragraphs.

[TonyR · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not worth persevering to the end - a novel cannot be sustained by interesting ideas alone. The second star was for the interesting ideas.

The dialogue was too fragmented (even taking into account not knowing how people will speak 60 years hence). The characterisations too shallow. There are just too many other better or more valuable books.

[Neil · Rating 4 out of 5]

Firefall contains two books: Blindsight (which i'd rate 5/5) and Echopraxia (which i'd rate 3.5/5)

Blindsight is a terrific read, blending sci-fi and horror together deftly, with a tight, well paced narrative and believable characters (well, the humans at least). I'd love to re-read it sometime in the future, also it'd probably make for a great screen adaptation (fingers crossed!).

Echopraxia, on the other hand, is a heady, unwieldy beast by comparison. The plot feels a bit meandering, the pacing isn't as tight as the previous installment. This one often got so cerebral and obtuse in its high-concept philosophising about the nature of consciousness etc. that it at times became difficult to read. It lacks the same nervous tension that made Blindsight such a page-turner, and contains more navel gazing than I'd like in a horror novel.
Not a bad book, but one that occasionally requires a bit too much effort for the casual reader to digest without getting a headache.

[Kahn · Rating 3 out of 5]

When I asked in passing in a Sci-Fi lovers group what people thought of Firefall, "hard Sci-Fi" was the phrase that came back repeatedly.
It wasn't a phrase I'd heard before, or could claim to understand.
I do now.
Set in 2085, which isn't as far into the future as you might think, Earth gets visited by aliens and decides to visit back.
With a raft of disparate characters, and a vampire for luck, Watts weaves backstories and modern science with ease creating a world we at once know and don't know.
Somehow he also manages to great the exact feel of 70s sci-fi classics such as Silent Runnings and Alien - that cold, still atmosphere, that steady pace.
You can almost feel the space ship around you.
But the "hard" bit is hard, if you're not a science guy. Like me.
Watts clearly knows his stuff. And you need to know his stuff too, because it's dense and plentiful. There are things going on in here way above my pay grade and it's not often you find yourself itching for a reference book to try and understand what it is you've just read.
I wouldn't describe this as an easy read, but the effort you put in will bring its rewards.
Plus he quotes Suzanne Vega and Jethro Tull. Which is cool.