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  • its a way overhyped book. It is not hard sci-fi at all. (Leader of the crew?!). And its imposes some questionable ideas about consciousness. Its edgy and its prose is not good. The characters are bland. I bought it, as it comes up quite often on reddit and HN. But for me it was totally not worth it. Just my 2cents.
    by redbear2026
  • I did not enjoy this book. It felt too try-hard edgy. If they dropped the vampire it would have been better.

    Edit: another thing I didn't like was how the author just dumped pages and pages of his character-notes as background information for that character. At least that's how it felt on the multi-page flashback digressions. I skipped pages and pages of the book because it was irrelevant to the story.

    by comrade1234
  • Blindsight is fantastic. The sequel, Echopraxia, is also excellent; it is very different, and I expect many people were disappointed that it wasn't just more of the same.

    Also a big shout out to his less well-known novel, The Freeze Frame Revolution. It's about the crew of a "stargate"-seeding spaceship trying to stop the ship's AI, but being hampered by the fact that the AI is both near-omniscient and that they only work in short shifts before being put back in hibernation. He also wrote a handful of short stories set before and after the novel.

    There's something very refreshingly direct, unvarnished, no-nonsense, and clear-eyed (some would say cynical) about Watts' style of writing. His prose tends to be tough (quite like early Gibson's noir style, with the punk attitude intact), but also beautifully cinematic. The only other write that I think comes close, aside from Gibson, is Dan Simmons with his Hyperion Cantos, but he's not nearly as darkly cynical.

    by atombender
  • I liked the ideas in Blindsight more than I liked the book. The writing is heavy-handed (trying to be gentle here), especially given how interesting the underlying questions were.
    by gtsnexp
  • For a dissenting opinion: boring, marginally pretentious book. Tries to bring up some interesting ideas, but loses the plot along the way. Also random Dracula in space. Couldn't get myself to finish it.
    by tga
  • I very strongly connected with a single idea from the book, that trying to decode random bits of information requires one to waste resources and therefore can be considered an attack. Every time I try to read a message that comes from an LLM, my brain hurts almost physically, trying to detemine whether it was posted by a human or a meatproxy.
    by open_bear
  • This is one of the books that left me with the most profound sense of unease. And it deserves very high prait for being able to do that.

    While people might remember it for other more striking ideas, I was impressed with how it expounds the theory behind the claims that "intelligence implies violence". That entire narrative was quite chilling.

    That, and the way the author explains how to establish a means of communication using just... pain.

    It's a brilliant book.

    by hannofcart
  • This is one of my favorite books and it's fun to read for anyone interested in the AI consciousness debate. https://hpmorpodcast.com/blindsided-00-announcement/ is a podcast that read the book last year. And https://blindsight.space/ is a Watts' approved website that has a short film/movie trailer for the book.
    by sxp

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