Recently I’ve been trying to read more SFFnal classics among my normal selection. I can’t remember why I added Blindsight by Peter Watts (published in 2006) onto my library holds list. When it finally became available and I started to read, I discovered that one of the characters is called Jukka Sarasti (which is a Finnish name), so perhaps that was it.

Content note: spoiler alert!

The novel’s events start in the year 2082. A first contact situation arises after thousands of unknown devices burn up in Earth’s atmosphere in a coordinated manner and radio signals are detected near a Kuiper belt object.

Earth sends a ship captained by an AI (called the Captain) to investigate. Theseus is crewed by five augmented humans or transhumans, including their leader, a genetically reincarnated vampire (Sarasti). When the crew wakes from hibernation they discover that Theseus was rerouted mid-flight to a new destination in the Oort cloud. Orbiting a previously undetected rogue gas giant is an enormous, constantly growing object, presumably a vessel, which the crew dub Rorschach.

The Theseus crew begin studying Rorschach with telemetry and excursions despite some very hostile environmental conditions. Additional challenges are posed by psychological effects (hallucinations) and extremely fast, multi-limbed organisms on Rorschach, and on Theseus the crew’s aggravation with the narrator, synthesist Siri Keeton. Eventually relations between Theseus and Rorschach culminate in physical attacks, and only one crew member, Keeton, is sent back to Earth in an escape pod with copies of the information collected before Theseus detonates its payload to destroy Rorschach.

What was especially delightful is that—setting aside Sarasti, who as mission commander and a predator is kind of outside the crew anyway—Theseus’s crew consists of two men and two women, and everyone is described the same way regardless of the configuration of their bodies. Skills and personalities are what matter most. (This is especially enjoyable after reading certain other classic SF novels, which I will leave unnamed to languish in their stifling obsolescence.)

Another interesting detail is that Susan James, the linguist in the crew, actually carries three other personalities or cores in her head, all working and socializing in harmony, and collectively referred to as the Gang by the rest of the crew.

Blindsight turned out to have one suprisingly topical detail. The Gang figure out that despite conversing with the Theseus crew seemingly normally, Rorschach doesn’t really understand the communication. This sounds very much like the recent discussion of Chat-GPT and other AI engines, doesn’t it?

One of the strengths of Blindsight is that it fuses elements from both the so-called hard sciences and the social sciences. Surely SFF (and all storytelling, for that matter) is at its strongest when it’s questioning our perceived realities or possible realities, starting from what makes humans tick. I’m quite tired of SFF that takes bland “and then they went to x and did y” travel narratives and merely cloaks them in fancy wrappings.

Alas, Blindsight has quite a few horror elements and closes with a rather despondent situation. Despite being skillfully written and constructed, it’s therefore not for me.

Blindsight was followed (in 2014) by the novel Echopraxia to make up the Firefall duology.

ICBIHRTB—pronounced ICK-bert-bee—is short for ‘I Can’t Believe I Haven’t Read This Before’. It features book classics that have for some reason escaped our notice thus far.