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Blindsight by Peter Watts
01/11/2006 . Source: Geoff Willmetts 
pub: TOR/Forge. 384 page hardback. Price: $25.95 (US), $32.95 (CAN). ISBN: 0-765-31218-2. Buy Blindsight in the USA - or Buy Blindsight in the UK  check out website: www.tor.com and www.rifters.com and
'Blindsight' as a premise seems interesting in as far as it uses traditional SF fare. Out on the edge of the Solar System in the near future, a satellite detects the presence of an alien spaceship in the traditional big dumb large object sense just waiting there. To engage in first contact, the crew selected are based on some peculiar ability which unfortunately is combined with some sort of dysfunction and sent out in hibernation.
A multi-personality linguist. A biologist integrated more with circuitry and organics. A 'vampire' - not in the strict definition of the term but a predator of old genes. Chiefly, the story is seen through the eyes of Siri Keeton, a synthesis specialist who had half his brain stripped away so he wouldn't have fits. With this oddball selection, you'd have thought this would have been an unusual affair. It's unfortunate to report that once the story got on the way, they acted pretty much as any human even if it was difficult to distinguish which personality governed Susan James' body.
If anything, the lack of an everyman amongst the crew doesn't help matters because there is no sense of how far these people deviate from normal. Even so, this could have been overcome had author Peter Watts had worked a lot more on the characters themselves.
It's interesting that in the extensive acknowledgements at the end there is a wide selection of SF writers and specialists who are mostly concerned with the alien vessel, space and terrestrial technology to get out there but far too little where it is concerned with looking after the characters.
Granted the alien spaceship is an interesting entity with its own sort of maintenance creatures but so much gets lost in technobabble that an average reader is likely to get lost beyond understanding what a Chinese Box is. I came away from this story still wondering whether the mission was a success or the crew was running with their figurative tails behind their backs.
This doesn't mean this book isn't an interesting read but in some respects it tries too hard in some areas and left seriously wanting in others, mostly because the concern is with the spaceship and not really using the crew to their full advantage and demonstrating what makes them different to regular humans.
An interesting experiment. A shame that it couldn't have been so much more.
GF Willmetts
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