Tag: peter watts

Echopraxia (Firefall, #2) by Peter Watts

Echopraxia (Firefall, #2) by Peter Watts

Peter Watts returns readers to the dystopian world of Firefall with Echopraxia, the second novel in the series.

Meet Daniel Bruks, an outcast biologist with a secret. He’s struggling to continue with his scientific studies in a world that has ceased to make sense after the alien contact in Firefall.

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“The Theseus mission would be well past Pluto by now. If it had found anything, Bruks hadn’t heard about it. For his part, he was sick of waiting. He was sick of life on hold, waiting for monsters or saviors to make an appearance. … He wished the world would just hurry up and end.” pg 15

His life quickly changes when he finds himself herded into an esoteric and technologically advanced cult’s desert compound while they’re under attack from weaponized zombies. (It makes more sense when you read it, I promise.) What follows is an exploration into the realms of religion, technology and faith.

“One day you’re minding your own business on your camping trip…” “Field research.” “… the next you’re in the crossfire of a Tran war, the day after that you wake up on a spaceship with a bull’s-eye painted on its hull.” “I do wonder what I’m doing here. Every thirty seconds or so.” pg 81

The same microscopic lens Watts used to take apart consciousness in the last book, he applies to a totally different topic, religion, in this one and it doesn’t quite work.

He doesn’t take any time to introduce readers to some of the more far-out concepts from the last book. If I had dived into Echopraxia without reading Firefall, I would have been totally lost. And as it was, I certainly was confused by the end.

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Where the last book was a space and science adventure, this one is a journey, both metaphorical and physical. The threats along the way are somewhat as scary, but the characters aren’t as well-fleshed out.

Maybe I was spoiled in the last book because I really enjoyed Siri, the narrator’s, character. Daniel Bruks is more difficult to love.

But it’s not just the characters. The science of the last book was more connected to the story line. In this book, it almost felt like a tacked-on after thought.

And as hard as I tried to put the pieces together, the ending never quite made sense. I put some serious thought into it too. It’s one thing to leave an ending somewhat ambiguous so the readers can hash it out, it’s another to give almost no clues at all.

That’s not to say Watts isn’t brilliant, because he is. However, if you have the choice between reading Firefall or Echopraxia, I would suggest the former rather than the latter.

Blindsight (Firefall, #1) by Peter Watts

Blindsight (Firefall, #1) by Peter Watts

Blindsight is an incredibly imaginative science fiction novel that takes on the foibles of human consciousness and examines, in a serious way, what an alien-form of consciousness might look like.

Siri is a unique protagonist. Because of severe seizures when he was young, doctors performed dramatic brain surgery in order to save his life, essentially cutting his brain in half.

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“The brain’s a very flexible piece of meat; it took some doing, but it adapted. I adapted.” pg 9, ebook.

This early surgery changed the way Siri’s brain worked and how it processed reality, making him the perfect translator for other humans whose brains and bodies have been so changed that baseline humans can no longer communicate with them.

And Siri’s special talents are desperately needed after aliens unleash surveillance technology in the atmosphere. Humanity called the strange lights in the sky, “fireflies.”

“How else would you explain 65,536 probes evenly dispersed along a lat-long grid that barely left any square meter of planetary surface unexposed? Obviously the Flies had taken our picture.” pg 24, ebook.

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Siri becomes part of an elite mission sent by Earth to discover where the “fireflies” originated from and who or what created them.

Blindsight isn’t a simple read. It proposes complex ideas that demand some attention to unravel and it makes the reader consider how real is her own perception of this thing we call “reality.”

It asks how technology may change not only how humankind takes in information, but how that information is interpreted and how that would separate people from each other. The characters Peter Watts has created for the alien-seeking mission are some of the most unique I’ve read because he takes those ideas to extreme conclusions.

“When the fate of the world hangs in the balance, you want to keep an eye on anyone whose career-defining moment involves consorting with the enemy.” pg 135, ebook.

But it feels very real. That is Watts’ strength – making the fantastical seem perfectly logical like vampires, real vampires.

Highly recommended for readers who enjoy “hard” science fiction.