Holy. Shit.

I'd heard Blindsight was good for ages, and never got around to reading it despite it being released as CC. Well, that gap has finally been rectified.

Siri Keeton is a synthesist, a specialist in translating the research of cutting edge post-human scientists into terms mere humans can comprehend. He's part of a small crew sent to make contact with an alien artifact, along with a linguist who's cut her consciousness into multiple personalities, a soldier commanding a squad of combat drones, a biologist who has traded motor function for extra senses, all commanded by a vampire. (Yes, vampires are real, and scientific).

They are the best humanity can produce. They are utterly inadequate. The alien artifact, an immense wreath of spikes orbiting a dark gas giant in the Oort cloud, calls itself Rorschach and warns the explorers to stay away. It torments them with magnetically induced hallucinations, and it is inhabited by perfect predators.

Blindsight is grim, atmospheric, and ultimately an extended argument on the philosophy of mind. Watts is down on consciousness as slow, metabolically inefficient, and just plain suboptimal in an evolutionary sense. Rather, the universe belongs to pattern recognizers without the illusion of "I", intelligences unburdened by the problems of the self.

Dark, brilliant, and grim, a technofetistic masterpiece, Blindsight is every bit as good as I told it was.