Two months since sixty-five thousand alien objects clenched around the Earth like a luminous fist, screaming to the heavens as the atmosphere burned them to ash. Two months since that moment of brief, bright surveillance by agents unknown.
Two months of silence, while a world holds its breath.
Now some half-derelict space probe, sparking fitfully p...
(more)
Two months since sixty-five thousand alien objects clenched around the Earth like a luminous fist, screaming to the heavens as the atmosphere burned them to ash. Two months since that moment of brief, bright surveillance by agents unknown.
Two months of silence, while a world holds its breath.
Now some half-derelict space probe, sparking fitfully past Neptune's orbit, hears a whisper from the edge of the solar system: a faint signal sweeping the cosmos like a lighthouse beam. Whatever's out there isn't talking to us. It's talking to some distant star, perhaps. Or perhaps to something closer, something en route.
So who do you send to force introductions on an intelligence with motives unknown, maybe unknowable? Who do you send to meet the alien when the alien doesn't want to meet?
You send a linguist with multiple personalities, her brain surgically partitioned into separate, sentient processing cores. You send a biologist so radically interfaced with machinery that he sees x-rays and tastes ultrasound, so compromised by grafts and splices he no longer feels his own flesh. You send a pacifist warrior in the faint hope she won't be needed, and the fainter one she'll do any good if she is. You send a monster to command them all, an extinct hominid predator once called vampire, recalled from the grave with the voodoo of recombinant genetics and the blood of sociopaths. And you send a synthesist—an informational topologist with half his mind gone—as an interface between here and there, a conduit through which the Dead Center might hope to understand the Bleeding Edge.
You send them all to the edge of interstellar space, praying you can trust such freaks and retrofits with the fate of a world. You fear they may be more alien than the thing they've been sent to find.
But you'd give anything for that to be true, if you only knew what was waiting for them...
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on Oct 03, 2009 at 00:50
Thank god for Peter Watts. This book scared the shit outta me as did all of his other ones. His writing was beautiful, and scary because I felt a true connection to real life. He made a bunch of charictors that you could hate but he forces you to fall in love with them, then he rips them apart. Read his other books too. They are just as good if not better and I hope he keeps writing like crazy. I wish and pray that someone makes at least one movie from one of his books. Just to see what it would look like on the big screen.
on Sep 13, 2009 at 00:49
Watts has created one of the most fascinating alien species.
This is a heartbreaking book that forces the reader to reconsider the nature and importance of his own consciousness.
I found myself wondering what was it exactly I was reading. A sci-fi first contact story? A sci-fi horror story? A sci-fi existential story? Finally, I realized it was all those and then some more.