false 48484 8 Two months since the stars fell....Two months since sixty-five thousand alien objects clenched around the Earth like a luminous fist, screaming to the heavens as the atmosphere burned them to ash. Two months since that moment of brief, bright surveillance by agents unknown. Two months of silence, while a world holds its breath Now some half-derelict space probe, sparking fitfully past Neptune's orbit, hears a whisper from the edge of the solar system: a faint signal sweeping the cosmos like a lighthouse beam. Whatever's out there isn't talking to us. It's talking to some distant star, perhaps. Or perhaps to something closer, something en route. So who do you send to force introductions on an intelligence with motives unknown, maybe unknowable? Who do you send to meet the alien when the alien doesn't want to meet You send a linguist with multiple personalities, her brain surgically partitioned into separate, sentient processing cores. You send a biologist so radically interfaced with machinery that he sees x-rays and tastes ultrasound, so compromised by grafts and splices he no longer feels his own flesh. You send a pacifist warrior in the faint hope she won't be needed, and the fainter one she'll do any good if she is. 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 synthesistan 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.... 47428 book 2006 Blindsight total:386|5:116|4:152|3:79|2:27|1:12| 386 1491 647 102 5 5 false false Fri Aug 22 00:00:00 -0700 2008 Thu Aug 14 17:31:38 -0700 2008 Sat Aug 23 15:48:43 -0700 2008 Rendezvous with Rama, The Mote in God's Eye, and Gateway. Watts is incredible and is on his way to being one of the new great science fiction auth...more...]]> 5 4 false false Thu Jul 17 00:00:00 -0700 2008 Wed Jul 09 08:47:45 -0700 2008 Fri Jul 18 06:45:52 -0700 2008 more...]]> 5 2 false false Sun Apr 19 00:00:00 -0700 2009 Wed Apr 01 21:54:33 -0700 2009 Sun Jun 28 20:18:41 -0700 2009 here (complete spoiler, though).

Blindsight is an excellent sci-fi novel on several fronts. We've got a meaty and complex apocalyptic aliens-arrive story; Watts somehow manages to make us care about his highly dysfunctional cast of post-human misfits, and then he com...more...]]> 4 2 false false Sun Apr 01 00:00:00 -0700 2007 Wed Jun 27 08:03:43 -0700 2007 Mon Aug 20 18:27:55 -0700 2007 more...]]> 4 2 false false Tue May 01 00:00:00 -0700 2007 Thu Aug 23 17:54:24 -0700 2007 Thu Aug 23 18:14:12 -0700 2007
But a blast. Works as...more...]]> 2 3 false false Mon Jun 09 14:13:18 -0700 2008 Mon Jun 09 14:16:16 -0700 2008 more...]]> 4 2 false false Sun Jul 01 00:00:00 -0700 2007 Mon Jun 18 19:22:44 -0700 2007 Wed Jul 18 10:21:12 -0700 2007 more...]]> 4 1 false false Sun Feb 15 00:00:00 -0800 2009 Mon Feb 16 09:55:44 -0800 2009 Mon Feb 16 10:09:53 -0800 2009 more...]]> 4 1 false false Sun Dec 14 00:00:00 -0800 2008 Wed Dec 17 20:53:56 -0800 2008 Wed Dec 17 21:06:24 -0800 2008 more...]]> 3 1 false false Wed Jul 09 00:00:00 -0700 2008 Thu Jul 10 11:07:22 -0700 2008 Thu Jul 10 11:09:38 -0700 2008 more...]]> 4 1 false false Tue Apr 29 00:00:00 -0700 2008 Fri Apr 18 06:45:37 -0700 2008 Tue Apr 29 11:04:26 -0700 2008 http://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.h... ) during down time at work (don't tell my boss).

Wow. This was definitely a wow book. I loved the characters. Every single one of them was incredibly interesting. In the not-so-distant future, a small group ...more...]]> 4 1 false false Wed Mar 26 00:00:00 -0700 2008 Tue Apr 15 04:10:51 -0700 2008 Tue Apr 15 04:32:30 -0700 2008 more...]]> 4 1 false false Fri Jun 01 00:00:00 -0700 2007 Tue Oct 23 17:07:51 -0700 2007 Tue Oct 23 17:09:48 -0700 2007
This book, lik...more...]]> 4 1 false false Mon Jan 01 00:00:00 -0800 2007 Mon Jul 30 10:22:10 -0700 2007 Mon Jul 30 10:22:16 -0700 2007 more...]]> 3 2 false false Sun Jul 01 00:00:00 -0700 2007 Tue Jun 05 11:38:31 -0700 2007 Tue Jul 31 15:40:32 -0700 2007 more...]]> 2 2 false false Fri Jun 01 00:00:00 -0700 2007 Wed May 30 18:36:10 -0700 2007 Mon Jun 04 14:18:35 -0700 2007
It's certainly a gutsy choice to have a person with no empathy as your main character, but it's pretty hard to get readers to care about someone who has only a vaguely intellectu...more...]]> 5 1 false false Thu Feb 01 00:00:00 -0800 2007 Fri Aug 22 20:23:13 -0700 2008 Fri Aug 22 20:23:13 -0700 2008 more...]]> 4 1 false false Sun Apr 01 00:00:00 -0700 2007 Sun Dec 28 10:58:29 -0800 2008 Sun Dec 28 10:59:31 -0800 2008 more...]]> 3 1 false false Mon Sep 14 00:00:00 -0700 2009 Thu Sep 10 14:26:22 -0700 2009 Tue Sep 15 11:23:46 -0700 2009 Destination:Void, with a dash of Lifeforce and Heart of the Comet thrown in for color. So yeah, it certainly had its share of interesting ideas, and yes it was a unique take on vampires-in-space (loved the 400-IQ bi...more...]]> 5 2 false false Thu Jan 31 00:00:00 -0800 2008 Mon Jan 28 11:58:07 -0800 2008 Fri Feb 01 05:32:22 -0800 2008
featuring:

* intelligence and sentience -- frenemys?
* paleo-vampires
* organo-plasticized super-conducting nona-armed aliens
...more...]]> http://www.goodreads.com/book_link/follow/8?book_id=48484