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Blindsight
Blindsight
Who do you send to meet the alien when the alien doesn't want to meet?
Book Excerpt
ecrets.
After all, Theseus damn well was.
*
She'd taken us a good fifteen AUs towards our destination before something scared her off course. Then she'd skidded north like a startled cat and started climbing: a wild high three-gee burn off the ecliptic, thirteen hundred tonnes of momentum bucking against Newton's First. She'd emptied her Penn tanks, bled dry her substrate mass, squandered a hundred forty days' of fuel in hours. Then a long cold coast through the abyss, years of stingy accounting, the thrust of every antiproton weighed against the drag of sieving it from the void. Teleportation isn't magic: the Icarus stream couldn't send us the actual antimatter it made, only the quantum specs. Theseus had to filterfeed the raw material from space, one ion at a time. For long dark years she'd made do on pure inertia, hording every swallowed atom. Then a flip; ionizing lasers strafing the space ahead; a ramscoop thrown wide in a hard brake. The weight of a trillion trilli
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4.1
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Silence is gold, on first contact.
An 'observe'ing read.
An 'observe'ing read.
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I had a hard time with this book at first, because the protagonist was such an insensitive jerk (to women), but then I realized that was sort of the point and he grew on me. This book is chock filled with gems. I think one of my favorites is the approach to the gnarly alien space station. I'd recommend buying the book for that scene alone. It's rare imagination.
11/17/2014
So much foul language I couldn't get past the first page.
02/07/2014
Great read!! Lots of "new slang", but all covered in context; For instance Noosphere is simply the news, as we already refer to the blogosphere (what people blog about).. Someone complained that Games Theory was introduced to clutter the story, not so! it was named as the reason behind a discussion of why a decision was made. If you like the hard-science stories, grab a copy of Blindsight.
07/23/2012
One of the best books i've read for ages. I particularly liked the way the characters were revealed. An avid read form start to finish. Thank you Mr Watts, I look forwards to further discoveries!
Btw,, No problems with the writing style, nor vocabulary, nor technical terms, even with English as a second language...
Btw,, No problems with the writing style, nor vocabulary, nor technical terms, even with English as a second language...
02/18/2012
One of the best hard SF books of the last decade and most original first-contact stories you're likely to encounter. It can be a bit of a hard read, but it's more than worth it. I've read it twice now and it was even better the second time.
02/09/2012
I have to agree with the reviewer normb on several points, this book had concepts that I found interesting but for me there was too much back and forth of the plot line, which at times made it a little hard to follow. I think hardcore sci-fi fans might enjoy this book, but be prepared for a somewhat difficult read.
10/23/2011
Hard science ficiton that is well worth the read... but if you are not a fan of this particular genre it may be too much like hard work.
09/19/2011
A really well written hard-SF book, exploring the concept of conciousness. Manages to be thought provoking while still keeping up the suspense.
07/06/2011
This is a great hard sci-fi, with some really original concepts that I haven't seen with the other authors I usually stick to in this genre.
Some of the story is quite challenging, especially in the beginning where many of the quirks of the characters or language use is not explained, but it's well worth the effort to stick with it.
This is one of the reasons I enjoy sci-fi so much, as it has the ability to introduce new concepts to us and challenge our brain cells while at the same time making us turn each page eager to continue the story and find out what happens next.
Some of the story is quite challenging, especially in the beginning where many of the quirks of the characters or language use is not explained, but it's well worth the effort to stick with it.
This is one of the reasons I enjoy sci-fi so much, as it has the ability to introduce new concepts to us and challenge our brain cells while at the same time making us turn each page eager to continue the story and find out what happens next.
04/06/2011