Blindsight

One of the toughest reads I did in along time. It is well researched and if you have the motivation to look up only half of the technical terms used in the book, it will bring to great little niches of science to delve into. While this actually didn't deter me, I did feel that the detailed descriptions of the surroundings actually were more confusing than helpful of painting a picture. It's great to read once of how big in kilometers the orbit is, but I dare anybody after reading this book to actually explain to me of how the ship interior looks like and how the endeavours to the alien ship worked out. With all that text, I was still lost.

I actually do think it was a brave choice by the author make the narrator incapable of empathy, and therefore very hard to sympathise for. He also removed almost any real interaction between the characters. Except for small exchanges between the protagonist and his girlfriend, there is no real communication between them. Mostly they are just stating scientific facts and offer expositional narrative. That may have been one of the core ideas behind the book, but for me it was tough to have no characters to latch onto. It made it a very draining book just because of the emotional emptiness.

I really did like the far reaching thinking of how much humanity can stretch itself with the help of technology and far it can bring us and remove us from ourselves. But unfortunately this is mostly embodied by technological or genetics gimmicks in of the characters, which are super interesting by itself, but also make the characters feel like archetypes as they offer little beyond their post-human technology, as they are lacking in emotional impact.

Especially the leader of the crew was one of the weaker points for me of the book, which brings me to the somewhat spoilery part of the review. The leader of the crew is a vampire. The year is 2082 and humanity found out through genetic engineering that actually, vampires did exist! They are far more superior in intellect than every other human being and of course they brought them back to live. Jurassic “Ann Rice” Park. Why does it have to be vampires? Not just genetically engineered beings? Nope, vampires. They did exist, and yes, they can't look at crosses, because their superior brain and superior pattern matching powers can't deal with right angles. They were wiped out when people build houses, so literally because of rectangles. So in 2082 they are swallowing “antiEuclidean” pills to make them feel round and whole. Every time that character appears, it is hammered into the readers mind, that he is superior, that he is a hunter and that the other puny humans of the crew are just his prey. I do understand that he is on the edge of what the aliens do represent (I don't want to spoil here) and I actually also think that he was actually the only character that was developed (if only in the last third of the book) but that whole vampire thing and the repetitiveness of the hunter-prey relationship really dragged the book down for me. In combination with the hard to follow descriptions made it out to just three stars despite its stellar ideas.