alt Hacker Newsits a way overhyped book. It is not hard sci-fi at all. (Leader of the crew?!). And its imposes some questionable ideas about consciousness. Its edgy and its prose is not good. The characters are bland. I bought it, as it comes up quite often on reddit and HN. But for me it was totally not worth it. Just my 2cents.
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I agree that Blindsight is highly overrated. Peter Watts devotes much of the book to ridiculous dialogue about the Chinese Room Experiment (astronauts in space apparently have nothing better to do than poorly discuss undergrad philosophy apparently).
The treatment of the Chinese Room Experiment is shallow and Watts clearly does not possess a more than rudimentary grasp of the philosophy, nor of computer science apparently.
It also felt shoehorned in. As was the vampire subplot, as other commentators have already discussed.
Felt like Watts just wanted to add in the Chinese Room Argument to make the novel seem "deep", when in fact it accomplished the exact opposite. No computer scientist that I know of takes the Chinese Room argument seriously, Scott Aaronson had a Quora answer where he mentioned how when he presented it to his undergrad class none of the students found it convincing, even after he tried to present arguments for it.
I don't like most of John Searle's work in general, but his Chinese Room Argument is obviously one of the worst pieces of philosophy of the 20th century, on par with the worst of the works ridiculed by Sokal et al.
Who reads hard-scifi for the characters? I have seen so many mangled and mongrel -revamps of concept books after the nebula hit- and they all suffer for it. SciFi characters are "probes" slammed and slicde into an idea- they are not there to be interesting and entertain, they are one-dimensional scalpels to vivisect a effect and then be disposed. I thoroughly hate this notion that every "great book" has to be life up to the ulysses or similar great interior models of character. Stop damaging the field with your nonsense demands!
Yeah, I found the writing really hard to follow. And it was really difficult to visualise any scene due to how complicated it all was.
I was surprised it's recommended so much.
Agreed. Does anyone have suggestions for non-grimdark modern sci-fi? Something hopeful that imagines what a good AI future could look like? Do optimistic people not write novels anymore?
I felt like it was a collection of interesting ideas (not necessarily good but at least fairly unique) placed on a straight line. For me it was a worthy read because I don't necessarily need stories to be twisted in a pretzel. I also firmly believe that any feeling of getting any wiser through literature is illusory because narratives always lie. What I expect from literature is just a bunch of things I haven't yet seen, because the older I am, the more repetitive everything I see becomes. And for that Blindsight delivered.
I tend to agree, it's not for me. Objective 'goodness' I will not assess. But it's barely sci-fi. More of a Eldridge horror book awkwardly set in space, with... vampires? Scientifically defensible vampires