Why Blindsight isn't all that great a story

Peter Watt's grimdark nihilism mixes the best of SF speculation with unlikeable people and a depressing message

You wake up one day to discover that your family lives in a computer and a race of hyper-intelligent vampires hunts the survivors

I'm talking about Peter Watts' much-remarked book Blindsight.

There's a lot for the sci-fi geek to like here.

Mind uploads into a shared VR reality which is more fun than living out in the real world.

Biologically realistic vampires revived from extinction by genetic cloning tech.

The selling point of the story is the wildest aliens like you'll never see on Star Trek. They don't even have mushy foreheads.

Even the human crew of the starship Theseus (a prophetic name if there ever was one) isn't quite normal.

Not surprising. The central conceit of Watts' existential SF horror story is that normal ain't what it used to be.

The headline of this post might give the impression that I don't like the book.

Not true.

There are things I like about it. There's things I don't like about it.

The discussions of consciousness and evolution are some of the most interesting parts of the book.

What I don't like is how one-sided it all is. The deep thinking is put out there in the service of an agenda.

And that agenda? Nihilistic grimdark fatalism.

Nothing matters woe-is-me I forgot my Zanax today.

C'mon.

If nothing matters then why'd you wake up and create this beautiful piece of art for the readers to enjoy?

Existential nihilism is so boring because it's so clearly the author's own psychological hang-ups intruding into the writing.

If the author coughed up a wad of black phlegm all over the page it would be less of a heavy-handed intrusion into the story.

The philosophical story about consciousness as an evolutionary dead-end sounds plausible enough. As a story premise, it's fantastic. What we have here is a tantalizing tale that wraps up reflections about mind, life in a purposeless world, Fermi's paradox, the hard problems of space travel, and more themes I'm certainly forgetting.

I don't agree with any of Watts's conclusions, by the by, but my philosophical disagreement is less important than the broaching of the subject, or its use as a dramatic core.

In story terms, what the crew of doomed Theseus discovers at that rogue planet beyond the edge of the solar system explains a whole lot about the haunting silence of the stars.

The difficulties of space travel for warm, wet Earth-adapted beings like ourselves hit home hard.

That stuff is the best part of the book. The problem's different.

The story itself is ultimately unsatisfying, like all nihilistic stories. Who cares what happens to any of these people if nothing, nothing done by any human ever, matters?

Horrific dread and terror have a place in all kinds of fantastic fiction. The depressive nihilism of the story runs well past that. We cross the line beyond unsettling to the point where you have to wnder what's the point of reading stories.

We get it, the world sucks and everything sucks and nothing matters and I forgot to take my SSRIs today.

Here's a dirty secret about philosophy. Very few abstract ideas are motivated by rigorous argument and supporting reasons alone. Many of the deepest problems about knowledge, ethics, and What Exists could be better explained as psychological scruples.

Worried about free will? Think ethics are just somebody's opinions? Believe that nobody can know anything?

It won't surprise you to learn that the people who believe these things almost always fall into a certain psychological profile.

You'll know it when you meet them because they are by temperament jaded, cynical, pessimistic people.

Around here at RP we love to dabble in the bleak side of things. The empty black void of space. The inevitable impact of technology on the human condition. Synthesizer music. Cultural wastelands. Existential terror. All that and more.

But Your Host also recognizes the other side. Bleak for bleak's sake isn't satisfying.

If you want to look at the ugly, you have to contrast it with beauty.

Ditto for the contrast of good and evil.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aA9GhsYt2O0

It's the contrast that makes the meaning. Get rid of that and all you've got is a boring wasteland of grey-scale junk.

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Space is terrifying

Lots of people could be watching you right now (and they aren't in Silicon Valley for once)

The eggheads have made a shocking discovery:

The researchers identified 1,715 stars that could have spotted Earth transits since about 5,000 years ago, which is about when civilizations began to bloom on Earth.

Whew.

It gets better (worse):

... the researchers estimated that 29 of these 75 stars may possess rocky worlds in their habitable zones.

Seven of the 2,034 stars are known hosts of exoplanets that have had or will have the chance to detect Earth just as Earth's scientists have detected them. Three of these seven exoplanetary systems — K2-65, K2-155 and K2-240 — can currently see Earth.

A key tenet of ours around this slice of the cyberspace:

You DON'T want to discover the aliens.

If they're out there, let 'em be.

Why's that? Aren't they going to be fuzzy forehead people with warp drives, just like mass pop culture drilled into your brain for the last 70 odd years?

Far be it from me to challenge what's programming your brain-waves on the TV.

But the puzzle known to normies as "Fermi's Paradox" implies strange and frankly worrying consequences.

Why's it so quiet out there?

All those nearby stars... lots of them with rocky planets in the star's habitable zone... and not a peep.

No signals. No signs of high-energy propulsion. No antimatter farms. No visits from self-replicating probes (maybe).

Earth's about four and a half billion years old.

Best guess is that the median age of planets is close to six and a half billion years with the oldest being around 9 billion.

That's a huge gap.

If Earth is a typical, unexceptional, not-special occupant of the universe, then we should expect the average age of civilizations to be much older than ours.

All modern science does assume this. It's called the Copernican principle. We are not special.

With all the stars out there...

Some of them very old...

And the likelihood that a few of these very old stars ought to have civilizations older than Earth's continents...

Where is everybody?

Maybe they're all dead. Maybe civilizations don't last that long. Maybe they're at a sleepover with Chtulhu.  

You can cook up any number of explanations.

But you mean to say that not one of them sent out self-replicating devices? Not one of them sent out a signal that we’d detect? Not one of them made a neat-o decoration out of stars?

That defies belief.

That should terrify you down to your frozen bones.

It means either that our scientific studies of the stars have gone badly wrong somewhere, somehow...

Or else we are badly mistaken about some of our key assumptions – about how common life should be, about what minds are like, about how species evolve, about intelligence and its motivations... and so on.

Maybe Earth isn't as typical as the scientists and natural philosophers assume.

Maybe there's another reason it's so quiet out there.

Maybe everybody else knows to keep their fool mouths shut.

And if somebody did turn up out there? It might be better to skip the "hello".

Instead of E.T. you might find The Thing knocking at your door.

It might not be as bad as all that. Instead of carnivorous shapeshifters in flying saucers, it might just be that everybody dies out in the cold night.

Though I'd rather have the crazy aliens I think.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=739jf9DuKEM

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