Blindsight - May 2015

[Donna]

This book looks intriguing and it won several awards. I'm interested to read it but I've got a couple of others queued up at the moment.

Has anyone read it before or is planning on reading it?

[Michael]

I'm working my way through it at the moment. It's good - very much hard SF but the writing is brilliant.

[[deleted user]]

I read it in 2010. It was ok - but I couldn't buy into the vampires. I just say no to vampires in modern fiction.

The part I remember best was a conversation about first contact between humans and aliens and how difficult it could be to communicate. The example supposed aliens who talked through microwaves brain to brain, but any message of peace they sent would cook the human's brain.

I'm not going to reread.

[Derek]

I'm with Greg. I absolutely don't consider this "Hard SF", because it's got unscientific hand-waving, and vampires. My vampire phase ended decades ago. I'm struggling with this--it's trying to do too much at once. "Let's do an alien invasion story?" OK. "How about the machine singularity?" Oh, that would be nice. "Can we have vampires?" Why not! So, I'll keep at it because of the group read, but I'm making no promises to finish it.

[Derek]

So, I'm about half-way through, and since somebody needs to say something, I'm volunteered :-)

It's better than expected! I actually picked this up on somebody else's recommendation a couple of years ago, and I rather think I got the wrong Blindsight—there are quite a few with the same title. But the person was comparing it to Saramago's Blindness, and that's making no sense yet!

Still, once we got close to the alien object, and human & alien started trying to converse, things got pretty interesting. Semiotics and Chinese Rooms—fun stuff that reminds me of Embassytown