Echopraxia

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"A Tom Doherty Associates book."

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Challenging to a fault submitted by eknapp on August 24, 2020, 3:29pm A late 22nd century field biologist finds himself fleeing a desert attack by unknown parties and winds up a fugitive on a sun-bound spaceship. He’s accompanied by a Watts-standard assortment of human subspecies: a hive-minded collection of science monks; a Pleistocene-era vampire; her retinue of “zombie” attendants (living humans who’ve had their consciousness surgically switched off to boost physical performance); a neurotic brain-enhanced pilot; and an augmented supersoldier. The mission: investigate an alien transmission emanating from an energy-collection satellite orbiting the sun.

Nobody makes my brain spin more than Peter Watts. He revisits his Blindsight theme of consciousness as a maladaptive aberration, and embarks on a crusade against the existence of free will. The protagonist uncovers deeper and deeper manipulations: the monks orchestrated his rescue in the desert, or the vampire did…The anti-government super-pilot was manipulated into taking this dangerous job by fiendish government operators, or possibly an emergent artificial consciousness on the internet...Everyone’s presence was choreographed by the creators of the alien signal…the layers keep piling up.

Watts places immense faith in the reader’s ability to follow his complex, science-dense philosophical machinations. Sometimes this left me delighted at the minimalist, elegant manner in which plot transfers from writer to reader…and other times forced me to mad-scramble back through the pages, hunting for the key sentence fragment that would render the following pages comprehensible. It’s a lot of work and the good feels couldn’t overcome the bad.

I get the sense that a 170 IQ might render Echopraxia exhilarating, an all time fave. But for me it’s a mixed bag.