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BLINDSIGHT

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Blindsight is fearless: a magnificent, darkly gleaming jewel of a book that hurdles the contradictions inherent in biochemistry, consciousness, and human hearts without breaking stride. Imagine you are Siri Keeton. Imagine you are nothing at all. You don't have to; Peter Watts has done it for you.” —Elizabeth Bear, author of Hammered When I heard “Audible hopes you enjoyed this program” I was left with that desirable, but all too rare, sensation that even though I just had a very enjoyable experience, there was so much more to discover. This book will require a repeat listen. It left me with the same feeling as some of the novels of Gene Wolfe—the book ends but, since there is no real closure, the story lives on in your head like a rogue subroutine awaiting a necessary command. Blindsight was recommended by Richard K. Morgan (author of Altered Carbon) as his, “If you only read one book this year,” endorsement. I can now understand. This will get my recommendation as well, even though I do not pretend to have more than a rudimentary understanding of it. So you've established a facility to harness geothermal power at the bottom of the ocean, in an incredibly scary, claustrophobic, dangerous environment, and you man it with the Right Stuff, yes? Like astronauts. You send down a group of smart, fit, psychologically stable people equipped to deal with the stress. Take a dozen children, any children. Beat and mix thoroughly until some lumps remain. Simmer for two to three decades; bring to a slow, rolling boil. Skim off the full-blown psychotics, the schizoaffectives, the multiple personalities, and discard. […] Which is to say, self-awareness, the I, the ability to observe and question our own actions—or at least to convince ourselves we are doing so.

priča se da korporacije već godinama kod prijava za posao traže da se ispuni i psihološki test da bi se otkrilo potencijalne psihopate, ne da ih eliminiraju nego da iz zaposle. Te glasine podupire jedno nedavno provedeno istraživanje:Isaac Szpindel is the ship's primary biologist and physician. He is in love with Michelle, one of the Gang's personalities. I’m actually rather happy, though, that I didn’t read the blurb. Because this book holds quite a few surprises, especially towards the end, when it all becomes rather big and scary and, yes, about survival. And the blurb here on Goodreads does give a few things away, that I’m glad I didn’t know. For the first half of the book, Starfish was shaping up to be one of my best sci-fi reads since Leviathan Wakes. Combining remote, hazardous deep sea environment with a larger mystery and character study was riveting, and if that at all sounds appealing, I suggest you try it. In the second half, Watts loses a bit of focus as he brings in larger issues of both physical change and a dystopian mystery. The vampire component is sort of beside the point - it's just one more alien (meaning foreign to human) in a book that is exploring the nature of being alien. (Even those characters that are human are explored for their "alien" characteristics). The concepts are DEEP. Are we really human if we're hitched to computers. Can our brains hold more than one functional personality? Are there aliens so smart and fast that to them we'd look like imbeciles? If there are aliens, what are the chances that we'd ever find them, ever understand them, ever "know" them?

Are they monsters? Are the aliens monsters? Or are they—and we—all just machines, and moral judgments utterly meaningless? As Siri himself wonders at a crucial part in the narrative—“Did he ever speak for himself? Did he ever decide anything on his own?” It is incredible how many things ended up in this .... short, man, shortiest of the short stories I ever read. Elizabeth Bear is the two-time Hugo-winning author of Grail, The Sea thy Mistress, and a bunch of other things. I thought so," he says, as though she has. "It's really kind of...well, beautiful, in a way. Even the monsters, once you get to know 'em. We're all beautiful."

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In fact, some of the Human—or near-Human—people turn out to be, to coin a phrase, the real monsters here. Another huge plus point in the book’s favour is he doesn’t waste any time, at all. After a brief, riveting prologue we are thrust aboard the Theseus as its crew come out of deep sleep, approaching their destination. He emphasises this relentless narrative focus by eschewing conventional chapters, splitting the novel into parts with names like ‘Rorschach’ and ‘Charybdis’ which, in turn, only serve to make it more intense. They are off to see some truly alien aliens whose actions are less scary than their implications. The book is a study of consciousness, sentience, and the Chinese Room concept. This is definitely hard SF with lots of scientific concepts and terminology, but most of the time you can grasp the science from context when it is not explained outright. That was not a big deterrent for me and I actually learned a great deal. Research conducted by forensic psychologist Nathan Brooks from Bond University found 21 per cent of 261 corporated professionals had clinically significant psychopathic traits." The exploration of consciousness is the central thematic element of Blindsight. [6] [7] [8] The title of the novel refers to the condition blindsight, in which vision is non-functional in the conscious brain but remains useful to non-conscious action. [9] Other conditions, such as Cotard delusion and Anton–Babinski syndrome, are used to illustrate differences from the usual assumptions about conscious experience. [9] The novel raises questions about the essential character of consciousness. Is the interior experience of consciousness necessary, or is externally observed behavior the sole determining characteristic of conscious experience? [6] [7] [9] Is an interior emotional experience necessary for empathy, or is empathic behavior sufficient to possess empathy? [9] [10] Relevant to these questions is a plot element near the climax of the story, in which the vampire captain is revealed to have been controlled by the ship's artificial intelligence for the entirety of the novel. [9] [11]

I had a really formative experience with the [Peter Watts] short story “The Things.” The Thing is one of my favorite movies, and besides the fact that “The Things” is a brilliant story, it’s such a badass move to just be like, “I’m going to totally write fanfic about this IP, and I’m going to publish it, and it’s going to be amazing.” That was a big inspiration for me, because I also have a lot of strong feelings about The Thing, and I wrote a story called “Things with Beards,” which was also published in Clarkesworld, where “The Things” was published. It got a Nebula nomination, and it’s one of the things that I’m more proud of of mine. So yeah, Peter Watts gave me permission to write The Thing fanfic. Starfish begins with some of the best stuff of science fiction, pushing the boundaries of what we know about our environment; humanity living on the edge. Deep in the abyss of the sea, on the Juan de Fuca Rift where two tetonic plates come together, the GA corporation has built Beebe, an outpost for farming geothermals. Only their scientists have found that it takes an unusual sort of person to tolerate living at the bottom of the ocean. Oh, there's the physical modifications, of course--removing the left lung to make room for adaptive equipment, a little gene-splicing to help human enzymes adapt--but more important are the psychological traits that allow some people to cope. Imagine you’re a scrambler. Imagine you have intellect but no insight, agendas but no awareness. Your circuitry hums with strategies for survival and persistence; flexible, intelligent, even technological — but no other circuitry monitors it. You can think of anything, yet are conscious of nothing. —Blindsight Peter can write a paragraph about a spaceship course-correcting on a high-g burn that would make Herman Melville wring his hands in envy. He can also vividly ground the reader in the viscerality of a character’s experience, the physical sensations and emotions, and make even vastly unlikable people sympathetic and compelling. That being said, it's a nice little short. I think I would have liked it more if I'd read it before I finished the series, because there is some intense (eloquent) characterization and the post/transhuman future he details is deeply thought provoking. But I already knew the characters and had gotten my thoughts provoked by Firefall, so all this did was fill in some details about a time and place that hadn't had much attention in Firefall.

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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. The writing is particularly bad as well. Every thought that every character has is written out, something that particularly annoys me. SHOW me what they're thinking, don't tell me exactly what they're thinking. It's incredibly lazy. More significantly for me was how the dual overarching issues were integrated in the second half of the book; plot-wise, they could have benefited from more transition and detail. Instead, we have choppy new viewpoints introduced from one of the very early and peripherally involved scientists and from a chopper flier. I understand what Watts was trying to do, so it is successful enough in that sense, but as a reader, I think it could have been more powerful with more detail. I don't know if I dare say it, but it almost made me wish Neal Stephenson was co-writing. I'll add further thoughts under spoilers. Ovo je Wattsov prvi roman i odlično se snašao, na ovih 350-tak stranica pisao je o mnogim temama, a sve ih je uspio povezati u smislenu i zanimljivu priču. Our main character, Lenie, is as odd as expected. Not quite sure how things work with other people. Afraid to go outside at first. But by chapter 2 already more comfortable out there in the dark than inside the station, with another person.

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