Reading Recommendations

Books I’ve liked and why.

*Heads up, as an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. All links on this page are affiliates links. That said, I’ve personally read and believe in everything here. I’ve no intention of wasting your time with anything less than books I LOVE or which impressed the pants off me. 5 stars or bust!

Blindsight by Peter Watts

Blindsight was a third-eye opening kind of read. From page 1 you’re hit with futurism set to 1000 from people huffing fake marital bonding pheromones to the singularity to the occult-dna blending needed to put humans into serious space. I’ve never seen so many big sfi-ci ideas crammed into one space before. But, before I go on, here’s the blurb.

Hugo and Shirley Jackson award-winning Peter Watts stands on the cutting edge of hard SF with his acclaimed novel, Blindsight

Two months since the stars fell...

Two months of silence, while a world held its breath.

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.

So who do you send to force introductions with unknown and unknowable alien intellect that doesn't wish to be met?

You send a linguist with multiple personalities, her brain surgically partitioned into separate, sentient processing cores. You send a biologist so radically interfaced with machinery that he sees x-rays and tastes ultrasound. You send a pacifist warrior in the faint hope she won't be needed. You send a monster to command them all, an extinct hominid predator once called vampire, recalled from the grave with the voodoo of recombinant genetics and the blood of sociopaths. And you send a synthesist―an informational topologist with half his mind gone―as an interface between here and there.

Pray they can be trusted with the fate of a world. They may be more alien than the thing they've been sent to find.

And that’s just the blurb! Blindsight doesn’t let up there at all. It digs into serious sci-fi at all times even while dealing with an intense and evolving first-encounter situation. With concise prose that never breaks from its fast-paced brevity, the story moves along at a gallop. I wasn’t bored for even a moment.

Sadly, the most brilliant part of Blightsight must go into a blog post. As an editor and an author, I’m dying to tell you about its genius story structure and mirroring techniques BUT BUT BUT that’s 100% pure spoilers so I can’t do that here.

In the end I can only say this, if you want some fantastically experimental sci-fi packaged in a smashingly twisting plot - you’re gonna love Blindsight.