Watts's books are either admired or viciously rejected. No matter how many people I talked to, the reaction was exactly that. Even the reviews show it. The reviewer may be reticent, may give "average" grades, but the reviewer's opinion is either there or there. It's either love or hate.
My story with Watts began, I think, in a standard way. A friend was raving about a new word in science fiction, and I gave in and picked up False Blindness. It was a hard read. It's kind of science fiction, but in no way resembled the Strugatskys, Saimak or that Lukyanenko of his heyday. The book was quite, radically different - fast pace, revealing the characters through action, an incredible saturation of scientific facts (and not those in school textbooks, but those in specialized scientific articles) and with all that... vampires?!
Blindsight is a hard science fiction novel by Canadian writer Peter Watts, published by Tor Books in 2006. It won the Seiun Award for best translated novel, and was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novel, the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel, and the Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel. The novel explores questions of identity, consciousness, free will, artificial intelligence, neurology, game theory as well as evolution and biology.
Some time later, the same comrade asked about my impressions, and I honestly told him everything. He laughed, opened the novel a little beyond where I had left off, and showed me the description of the vampires. And it turned out they weren't vampires from dumb English-language books and movies, they were a construct strictly based on scientific facts. In Watts' description it was so realistic, so scientifically sound, so TRUE, that one had to wonder how evolution had not actually created such creatures.
I admired this construct so much that I grabbed False Blindness and started reading it from the beginning. There, at my friend's place.
And was blown away by the brilliance of this book. It was just fantastic! In every sense of the word!
I know the recipe for enjoying Watts' books. First, you have to read every word. This is not the kind of literature that you can read half-eyed, with the TV on, and even thinking about something of your own. The pace is so high, nothing is chewed up, and therefore even one missed word can ruin the understanding of what is happening completely. Second, you need preparation. Seriously. This literature is not for C's. Not even for otlichnikov - not for those otlichnikov that memorized, but did not understand the biology and chemistry and physics. It is for those who know about the transmission of impulses in bacterial mats. And not just know, but who is amazed by the transmission of impulses in bacterial mats and makes him run from corner to corner in exaltation.
But if these two things come together! If you really love the natural sciences and yet have the time to detach yourself from everything and concentrate on reading, Watts will be the best science fiction writer of our time for you. Verified by me. Guaranteed.
Now for the book itself. The not-too-distant future. It doesn't seem very likely, but Covid did a good job of showing just how fragile the current order of things is. And if you remember the quite official UN forecasts for the next thirty years (yes, the very same forecasts that no one reads until the world around them collapses), the future described by Watts no longer seems so unrealistic.
So, a strange, twisted not-so-distant future from our point of view. Something incomprehensible, flying into the solar system. A spaceship on its way to find out what's coming to us. The crew is as strange as the future itself.
One could, I suppose, dissect the plot and characters, but just Watts' is a completely pointless exercise. Until the reader understands, feels the world where everything happens, any talk of plot and characters is useless. "False Blindness" is precisely the kind of book that should be read, not dissected.
What is "false blindness" itself, which became the title of the book? It is the physiological inability of the eye to see something for a tiny fraction of a second. It is a very different phenomenon from that of the "invisible gorilla. False blindness in the novel is about the way the eye functions, whereas the "invisible gorilla" phenomenon is about the way the brain functions. And yet, in some ways they probably overlap.
If we formalize to the point of absurdity, we might say that this is a book about first contact. People encounter something completely alien, not because the author said it is alien, but it is alien in every action, in every manifestation. Watts' phenomenal ability to "create" something that has no counterpart on Earth, but which is perfectly realistic and scientifically valid. This something is so alien that there is no way of knowing if it is reasonable. This is the degree of foreignness where our concepts no longer work. Of course, Earth's reaction to such contact is predictable - we'll direct all our technology to figuring out what we're up against. And, of course, it ends up with nothing. Hence the popular definition of the novel "False Blindness" - "an obituary for human understanding." And indeed - it is a very definite requiem for the human-centered view of the world around us.
The pages of the novel are displays. And on them flicker scientific concepts, terms, phenomena. And there are people walking around, people who are strange from our point of view, who go about reinforcing themselves with incomprehensible ease with implants, genetic corrections, chemicals, breaking morals and ethics. They are not mean and they are not bad, they are already different in themselves. It is difficult for us to recognize them as human. But they are only the answer to the age-old joke - a millipede that starts thinking about how to move its legs will fall. To be aware of their actions, to think them through means for people of the not-too-distant future to fall behind, to be late, to fall out of the flow. Their way of living is to perfect reflexes, all reflexes-existing reflexes and new reflexes-that we cannot even think about. Consciousness is too much of a luxury now. It is a burden. Reflexes are the key to survival. And after a reflex has been triggered, we can reflex. If there is such an opportunity. And after all, these creatures (are they still human?) will have to face the very real alien something...
And this something is also perfection. But only in its evolution. It, without understanding a word, is able to answer something, creating the illusion of a conversation, but in fact only buying time. After all, there is more than just a "human" way to survive among the cosmic diversity. Instead of trying to understand everything you encounter in the galaxy, you can just do your thing, whatever that thing is (and what that thing, that alien thing, is, we'll never understand). Does it make sense for the victim to try to understand the predator? Would it increase the antelope's chances of survival when attacked by a lion? Does the human-type, "understanding" mind really have an advantage over other variants of mind? Man is the only bearer of intelligence on Earth; he knows no other intelligent beings, his mind lives in a hothouse where there is no competition. Hence our belief that an "understanding" mind is, if not the only possible, then certainly the best possible option. And so mankind takes a step forward, and it turns out that the "reflexive" mind is better. And then mankind encounters something alien, and it becomes unclear at all on what principles this alien mind functions. So unclear, in fact, that there is some doubt as to whether it is reasonable. At any rate, whether it is reasonable from our point of view.
But Watts' worlds are not limited to such variants of sanity. There are Pleistocene predators there who cannot get along peacefully with each other even within sight, and who look upon humans as walking blood vials. There are swarming minds of bipalans who can no longer communicate with humans. And the main character in the book? Siri Keaton? He represents another version of the mind, the "informational" mind. For him, love is a competition of the sexes, empathy is an evolutionary atavism, understanding other people is "white noise" at work.
The whole evolution of the living, and then of the sentient, eventually came down to where it began. Like the Precambrian oceans, it all came down to the bare fact of survival. Humanity as we understand it has disappeared. It has fragmented-no, not into subspecies, not even into groups, it has disintegrated into separate mind-bearers, each now a separate species, forced to coexist with billions of other sentient species around it. To live in such a world means one thing: one must give up "understanding," one must focus on "surviving.
Watts has created such an alien world, such a multi-layered alien world, that one cannot even approach his book with a "for Jane Eyre" mood. This is not the kind of novel where there is white and black, where there is an apartment and an office, where there is a spaceship and a Thunderbird.
Yes, we all know science fiction is dead. Most readers don't need the component of this genre's name that the word "science fiction" reflects. More than that, most readers find that component annoying. And without this component, the genre degenerates into a fairy tale in a modern setting, which, in fact, most readers are quite happy with. The last generation of science fiction authors have died out, and the new authors, themselves flesh from modern culture, following the majority of readers alien to science fiction.
There are many reasons for this. One of them - science has become very complicated. It is now very difficult for a non-specialist to understand. By simplifying the material to the point where it is understandable to most, science fiction and ceases to be scientific.
Watts took a different path. The path is ambiguous, and Watts is so far the only one to follow it. He simplifies science, but not to the mass version. He stops at the simplification one step before that version. You don't have to graduate from a university biology course to understand his books, but you do have to know the high school course and a few other things. Or at least you have a fair amount of scientific curiosity, so that you have the energy to figure it out.
All writers write trying to reach as many readers as possible. Watts deliberately limits his circle of readers, but for that circle his work is perfection. Watts' books in general, and False Blindness in particular, are one of the pinnacles of science fiction, but because of their breakthrough nature they are not for everyone.
This article was sponsored by Robert Murphy
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