Blindsight

This is the hardest SF I've read in years. And I mean hard in the purest SF sense: it's filled with mind-boggling concepts deeply rooted in science, and it's got the jargon to match.

Blindsight tells the story of Siri, an observer on a space ship headed for what may or may not be a hostile alien life form. The crew itself verges so much on the posthuman that they are barely human themselves: they are the "cutting edge", as Siri puts it, Humanity's vanguard as it is faced with First Contact with a truly different form of intelligence. There's Siri himself, with only half a brain; the Gang of Four, composed of four different personality "cores" running on a single brain; and the commander of the expedition, a bona fide vampire.

Yep, you read this right: in the midst of a hard SF novel is a vampire, complete with fear of right angles. This felt like an odd choice at first, but damn if Mr. Watts didn't pull it off. His discussions on predator versus prey mental concepts were fascinating and fresh. Ditto the other characters, who genuinely stretch the limits of consciousness and identity.

And then there's the alien itself. I won't spoil any of it, because the pleasure of discovery is a big part of the novel. But suffice to say that this alien is the most dramatic departure from Humanity I've witnessed in SF in recent memory. They are so drastically different, as a matter of fact, that they raise questions about the role of consciousness in survival, and about the structure of the Self. There are moments involving the aliens that are genuinely, full-on creepy and thought-provoking.

For all its coolness, though, the book does drag in the middle. It's also a hard book to read, but I can't decide if that's a good thing or not. Certainly, the book doesn't hold your hand through its scientific concepts, and some of its dialogues are hard to figure out. I was not always able to follow the many revelations and discussions about the nature of consciousness, and some of the character drama was opaque to me. Still, equipped with an Internet connection, I learned a lot just by googling up words. For instance, have you ever heard about Sanduloviciu plasmas? It's a cool SF book that name-drops Sanduloviciu without explaining it.

A definite, enthusiastic recommendation for lovers of hard SF who don't mind exercising their brain and their scientific curiosity to make sense of a dense plot and complex, nuanced character interactions.