Blindsight (Firefall, #1)

by Peter Watts

But Sarasti battered my tools and left them barely functional. I’m as blind now as any baseline.

How? Why? question

I think he’s warning me to stay away.

Which is what ROrschach did too. Question

So much power my father must have had, to be able to authorize such a broadcast and yet waste so much of it on feelings.

They never told us, of course. We were happier that way. We disliked orders from machines.

If the scramblers follow the rules that a few generations of game theorists have laid out for them, they won’t be back.

by then, there won’t be any basis for conflict.

we never completely stopped sowing EM throughout the heavens.

The O’Neils and the asteroids never stopped singing.

some sort of pursuit in progress, a ship making the plunge into deep space, other ships in dispassionate pursuit.

Question

Jukka Sarasti.

In some sick surrealistic way I had more in common with Sarasti than I did with any Human.

Though he died for our sins,

Lamb of God and Lion of Judah. Very weird

I can empathize with him, though.

That’s evolution for you; one stupid linked mutation and the whole natural order falls apart,

Thanks to a vampire and a boatload of freaks and an invading alien horde, I’m Human again.

By the time I get home, I could be the only sentient being in the universe.

You’ll just have to imagine you’re Siri Keeton.

sentience versus intelligence.

Parts of Blindsight can be thought of as a rejoinder to arguments presented in Karl’s novel Permanence;

Copyright © 2006 by Peter Watts

Introduction copyright © 2016 by Sarah Wishnevsky Lynch