Author: Peter Watts
ISBN: 0765319640
Date read: 2023/4/23
How strongly I recommend it: 10/10

This book dives into a first-contact mission set in the late 21st century, where a group of highly enhanced humans heads to the Oort Cloud to investigate an alien signal. The crew is wild: a linguist with multiple consciousnesses sharing her brain, a biologist who sees in X-ray, a military general who hates violence, a synthesist—the main character, tasked with reporting back to Earth—and a vampire brought back through genetic engineering. Yeah, a vampire. It’s weird, but it works.

The story kicks off with a bang on February 13, 2082, when the “Fireflies” event shakes humanity awake. Over sixty thousand objects burn up in Earth’s atmosphere, forming a precise grid. They scream across every wavelength as they go—no invasion, no follow-up, just silence. People lose it, throwing out every theory from divine wrath to alien pranks. Finally, a signal from the Kuiper Belt gives humanity something to chase.

The response is a three-wave mission. First, an uncrewed lightspeed probe zips by the object for a quick look. Second, a slower probe orbits it, mapping and running experiments. Third comes the Theseus, a multinational ship carrying this bizarre crew. They’re humanity’s best shot at answers, but their enhancements make you wonder if they’re still human—or if that even matters when facing the unknown.

It’s a hard science fiction book. You can read this online by the way, just google it. This book also has a pretty huge following that someone made a really good trailer that I think does the book justice and can serve as a trailer:

Blindsight gets better every time I read it. It’s packed with so many ideas it could’ve been split into multiple books. The technical terms—some real, some invented—were tough to wade through at first, but they paint a vivid, immersive world.

The main theme is the nature of consciousness. Peter Watts, the author and a biologist, has this wild idea (backed by some compelling theories) that self-awareness isn’t tied to intelligence. You can be brilliant but not recognize yourself in a mirror. He weaves this into the story in ways that stick with you.

The narrator, Siri Keeton, is a synthesist—someone who can practically read minds by picking up on tiny details like behavior, tone, and facial expressions. He’s this way because half his brain was removed as a kid. It’s a haunting detail that sets up his perspective perfectly.

What’s fascinating is how all the characters are so enhanced by technology they barely seem human. The book keeps asking, “What even makes us human?” The ship’s name, Theseus, nods to the Greek myth where a ship’s parts are replaced one by one—when everything’s new, is it still the same ship? If your body and mind are rebuilt with tech, are you still you?

Take Susan James, the linguist. She’s got multiple consciousnesses in her brain, letting her think way faster than a “baseline” human. Isaac Szpindel and Robert Cunningham, the biologists, are so augmented they can taste chemicals in the air and see in X-ray or infrared. Amanda Bates, the military officer sent as backup, is so linked to her drones—called “grunts” in the book—that they’re like an extra limb.

Then there’s Jukka Sarasti, the crew’s leader and a vampire. Yes, a vampire, resurrected through genetic engineering. The book dives into how vampires were once humanity’s predators, part of the Homo family tree. They’ve got minds running a dozen parallel consciousnesses, making them leagues smarter than us. But they went extinct because right angles—like in buildings—mess with their brains, triggering fatal seizures. I’m not great at explaining it, but the way Watts lays it out is gripping. You just have to read it.

I won’t spoil the plot—check Wikipedia if you want a summary. There are YouTube videos that break it down better than I can. If you love hard sci-fi, Blindsight is a must-read. It’s awesome.