Peter Watts (rifters)

I need to give this a re-read. I really enjoyed my Blindsight re-read recently. But Starfish and Maelstrom after it are such uhh, not to pun to hard but, such high pressure intense sci-fi stories. Amazing ambiance, creeping horror, in such incredible backdrops.

Watts just kept going with his universe. It was and is so good. Such an incredible reflection of the world at the time of writing, and I've found it's lost so little of it's capturance. That it gets so many of the plights of the over-civilized world, and the perils lurking in the economic and governmental an attention systems of the planet. From the old site (https://www.rifters.com/attic.htm) to the new site (https://www.rifters.com/), Watts just really, across mediums, wanted to get his world out, to show it's timelines. Incredible.

Starfish is where it all started, and I remember it as both a slow burn, but also so hard core, so real. In a world both so our own but so far away, so separated (insert follow up deep joke here), but still within the world, still immersed (pun!) in the Earth of the story. Maelstrom, the second book, is also incredible, in very different ways. Watts reflected on Maelstrom 18 months ago, and it captures some of the amazing titular sceneage, of an overrun net, a howling wasteland from accelerated technological adversarialism. Incredible book. He goes to talk more to his own background, biology, but upon re-reading it, I think of LLMs, of the GPU milleniums burned recently, doing not that…

It was my first though as well. Idea of aliens, which can just "skip" the sight of humans is pretty cool. The same goes with concept of consciousness as a parasitic/optional part of inteligent species.

Blindsight is one of the best, 10/10 on Mohs Scale of sci-fi hardness. I love the description of scientific concepts behind sci-fi story at the end. Such a shame, there is so little books with that kind of deep research.

One of the best written, first contact novels out there. I have the luck of hearing Watts lecture on one of the Cons. He is even better in person.

If you are from Canada, it is good idea to check, where he is speaking.

Authors blog, filled with pop-scientific concepts and ideas [1], is well worth it.

[1] https://www.rifters.com/crawl/

I enjoyed reading Peter Watts' "The Freeze-Frame Revolution" (and the accompanying online short stories "Hotshot"[1] and "The Island"[2]) about a sublight interstellar ship and its crew - in that example, they have cryogenic storage that allows the same crew that left Earth to live in short spurts and then sleep for eons, but the struggle with disillusionment with the mission is central to the plot.

It also features something like "state propaganda" in the form of the ship's AI which is also programmed to carry out the mission, but it needs the help of the crew. I won't spoil more, but it's one of my favorites!

[1]: http://rifters.com/real/shorts/PeterWatts_Hotshot.pdf

[2]: https://rifters.com/real/shorts/PeterWatts_TheIsland.pdf

> The story follows a crew of astronauts sent to investigate a trans-Neptunian comet that has been found to be transmitting an unidentified radio signal, followed by their subsequent first contact. The novel explores themes of identity, consciousness, free will, artificial intelligence, neurology, and game theory as well as evolution and biology.

> Blindsight is available online under a Creative Commons license.

Here's the novel:

https://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm (HTML)

https://www.rifters.com/real/shorts/PeterWatts_Blindsight.pdf (PDF)

http://www.rifters.com/real/shorts/PeterWatts_Blindsight-v1.01-formatted-by-Ellen-Herzfeld.epub (ePUB)

You're not the first to consider this possibility, as you know. The novelist Peter Watts, in Blindsight, has a remarkably interesting, if also remarkably dark, take on the same idea. I won't spoil it here, since the book is an enjoyable read and freely available from the author's site: https://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm

("Philosophical zombie" would be a more precise term than "robot", btw, and might make soi-disant rationalists take you slightly more seriously because it's closer to the sort of language they like to use. I don't know why that would be a desideratum for anyone, but if it is for you, this may be worth considering.)

I couldn't tell whether you were joking about pirating it, but for others who might be interested, the author has made it available for free download from his website [1].

I love Blindsight as well, and I think I like the other book in the series, Echopraxia (not available for free download though) even more. Both books contain lengthy bibliographies citing various scientific papers the author has drawn ideas from, and on my first readings of both books I ended up spending as much time chasing down interesting references and reading them as I did reading the original books.

[1] https://rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm