Peter Watts

A follow-up to the Hugo Award-nominated Blindsight is set in a 22nd-century world transformed by scientific evangelicals, supernatural beings and ghosts, where defunct biologist Daniel Bruks becomes trapped on a spaceship destined to make an evolutionary-changing discovery.

Echopraxia

Avery

While it didn't quite hold up to the level of awe I felt for weeks after reading Blindsight, Echopraxia does have its share of cool ideas about the universe. I think it was worth the read, even though it also falls into the Wattsian pattern of having not much happen until a good 60-80% of the way through.

Tobias V. Langhoff

I’m not a morning person. When I wake up in the morning, I’m pretty much a zombie. I stumble around and can’t think straight. It doesn’t help that my daughter likes to wake up around 5 AM. At that hour, all my limited brain power is spent on making sure she doesn’t kill herself. I don’t feel like myself at that hour. Perhaps I’m not myself? Maybe my lizard brain is running the show, and my conscious Self is still asleep? If so, the little lizard is very cunning, because I’m often too tired to remember to make myself a cup of coffee. The lizard brain doesn’t want me to wake up and wrest control away from it.

This book is a kind of sequel/sidequel to Blindsight. Although Echopraxia doesn’t continue where Blindsight left off, I whole-heartedly recommend reading Blindsight first and then this one. Events in the first book are referred to here, and there are slight overlaps in timelines.

Blindsight was narrated in first person by Siri Keeton, after he returned as the sole survivor from the Theseus mission at the end of the story. (“And I only am escaped alone to tell thee” – Job epigraph in Moby-Dick; or, The Whale) Or was it? Several times during Blindsight, the story took turns that made me think back to past events to re-evaluate them in new light. This is also true in Echopraxia: It makes you think about the events of Blindsight again.

Where Blindsight focused on exploring the theme of consciousness and how it’s an evolutionary dead end, Echopraxia also contemplates this but takes its philosophy one step beyond. Instincts are better than the metabolistically expensive and mostly useless consciousness, but regular consciousness is still in many ways better than post-human hive minds (“We’re the ones still standing after the mammals build their nukes, we’re the ones with the stripped-down OS’s so damned simple they work under almost any circumstances. We’re the goddamned Kalashnikovs of thinking meat.”). And anyway: We’re conscious, but do we have free will? There’s also metaphysics: Is there a God after all, a concept of God that even scientists and agnostics can accept? Calling the laws of physics “God” is an old platitude, but might it have merit? If miracles break the laws of physics, are they “glitches” in the operating system of existence? And sure, “what is consciousness” and all, but what even is life? Is it a way for the universe to postpone total entropy as long as possible?

The last book introduced vampires as actual post-human creatures that are superior to humanity in all ways. It also featured a vampire character. However, we didn’t really get to experience the superiority of vampires. We were told they’re geniuses beyond anything humans can even fathom, but we weren’t really shown it. Tell, not show. In this book, I thought for a long time that the same would happen, when a new vampire was introduced as a puppeteer that laid plans within plans, without those plans being explained to us. Later in the book, though, it becomes clear that Watts actually has put a lot of thought into how vampires are better than humans. We get to see inside their heads properly at last.

Peter Watts is not great at writing dialogue. I didn’t much care for the style of dialogue in Blindsight, and I don’t much care for it now. There’s a character in this book with an even more oral way of speaking (no punctuation), which is more jarring than it is interesting. That little literary problem aside, Peter Watts is a genius and a masterful story crafter. OK, it’s still a bit hard to follow the actual flow of events sometimes, because it’s all very convoluted. Mostly, though, that’s deliberate: The plans within plans laid out by the story’s various post-human factions are meant to be beyond the puny understanding of us human readers, and there’s a lot of ambiguity as to what exactly happens, and why. I look forward to re-reading these two books some time.

If you’ve read the book, you undoubtedly have some questions; check out Peter Watts’s (spoiler-laden) Q&A about Echopraxia’s plot.

Like my first time reading Gibson, Watts gave me that feeling of being thrown in the deep end. It’s a little tiring, and the very different vernaculars he gives his characters are hard to follow at times. Still, a modern classic.

Echopraxia

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