If you only read one science fiction novel this year…

…make it this one!

Looks cool, don’t it.  And I happen to know for a fact that it is cool, because I was lucky enough to snag a super-early advance reading copy at the back end of last year.  Peter Watts is one of a very small list of writers, and an even smaller list of writers within the SF genre, who make me genuinely jealous when I read their stuff (full disclosure, he’s also an occasional work colleague, and a friend).  Blindsight blew me away with how head and shoulders above the general standard it was – there was a poetry to the prose, an intensity to the characterisation and action, a bare-knuckle no-holds-barred emotional honesty to the storytelling that rarely surfaces in genre fiction of any stripe, and barely exists at all in the rarified cerebral vivarium of so-called Hard SF.  Blindsight left me painfully aware of how lacking those qualities tend to be in genre fiction, and it left me desperate for more.

Now there is more.  Echopraxia picks up a bit less than a decade after the finale of Blindsight, and like its predecessor, it puts the whole of the rest of the genre in the shade.  It deserves to walk away with the Clarke, the Hugo, the Nebula, the BSFA, and pretty much any other genre award for which it’s eligible.  It’s off the scale.

What’s it about?  Well, here’s my attempt at a blurb, some of which you may or may not see adorning the jacket of the book when it hits the shelves next month:

Ever wondered what X-Men or Avengers Assemble might have looked like if it were written for adults and based on actual bleeding edge science – now you don’t have to; Peter Watts is back after cometary absence and burning bright as ever across the genre skies.  Zombies, vampires, post-human prophets and invasion from outer space – Echopraxia reads like some dark, twisted superhero ensemble piece, but with all the prose gravitas of a novel by Cormac McCarthy or Philip Roth.  Its late twenty first century future feels at one and the same time dizzyingly outlandish and all too grimly real, exploding with high-end concepts, laced through with harsh human truths.  If science fiction can really be claimed as a literature of ideas, then Watts is without doubt its premier practitioner – Echopraxia is a depleted uranium shot across the bows of complacent, by-the-numbers SF, and a bright rallying cry for the soul of the genre.  Fucking awesome!

And here is my rough-cut, less-than-honed initial impression, once I’d put the finished book down and got my breath back:

Makes Blood Meridian look like Bonanza

I suppose that last comment is a warning of sorts, because if you thought Blindsight was kind of bleak, well, prepare to revise your parameters – Echopraxia takes bleak to a whole new level.

But it’s a beautiful kind of bleak, and as with any kind of beauty, you’re going to find it very hard to look away.