This is another book Christian recommended on his blog, Fractale Framboise. Blindsight (buy it from Amazon.ca, or download it for free on the author’s web site) is a hard SF novel telling the story of Siri Keeton, a futuristic kind of translator who has been sent to the farthest corner of the solar system with a few other humans (and a modern vampire) to deal with an unknown quasi-invisible extraterrestrial ship which appeared past Pluto’s orbit. This is a high-concept book, focussing on topics such as consciousness, senses, intelligence, illusions, languages, etc.

Siri is part of a crew of 9 on a ship sent to meet an extraterristrial artifact discovered in the Oort cloud, past Pluto’s orbit. The scientifics of the vessel (each of which with his/her own speciality) help discover what seems like an alien organic ship generating an obscenely lethal energy field around it. The crew gets to study the ship and try to communicate with what seems like representants of an alien species from a distant planetary system. That’s when the crew starts to wonder about the consciousness of the extraterrestrial beings and their ability to communicate. Can an entity talk and, at the same time, not be self-aware. The book studies the consciousness from a non-human point of view, with a few flash-back scenes exploring aspects of the human experience, always related to the main ideas of the book.

The story itself evolves around the ship’s crew, their interractions and the limited contact they have with the alien spaceship. I was a bit disoriented with the many characters (especially since one of them has multiple and distinct personalities.) Although they all have their background and personality, they all seemed to blend together in my head. Maybe it was because I read the book over a long period of time, but none really stood out, other than the narrator and the vampire. I would not have been able to give the name and titles of each of the other characters is you were to ask me.

The story itself is one of discoveries. The crew of the ship has a lot of time to talk, think and extrapolate. Each discovery is supposed to bring the story forward, but I was not really moved. You can’t really know where the story is heading and it’s something I prefer in stories. Not that I don’t like surprises, don’t get me wrong, but during most of the book, I would simply not be able to guess at what the next few chapters would be about. Some discoveries happened out of the blue, just because it was the time to move the story forward.

The crew sends drones and robots to explore the alien artefact, and eventually visit the tunnels themselves because of the limited effectiveness of the robots. What they find in the alien artefact is scary, but still not enough to fully grab me. It seemed to me like having an antagonist that is not necessarly intelligent (and/or conscious and/or self-aware) dampens the effectiveness of the said antagonist.

The idea of bringing vampires back in a science-fiction story is interesting and the science behind it is a good read. There is a whole appendix on the topic, which is an optional but facinating read.

So, should you pick this book? It depends what you are looking for in a story. If you want to read about concepts such as consciousness, language, etc. this might be good book for you. Myself, I was a bit turned off by those discussions. I like stories with a good adventure in the first place, then with reflection and 2nd level stuff. Blindsight focusses on such reflections and I can’t say I like it that much.

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Lectures by Alexandre Lemieux