Blindsight

"Blindsight is one of the only books I’ve ever read where I said, ‘Oh, this has to be science fiction.’ There are many great science fiction novels where you could probably tell the same story in a different setting and still make it work. So a lot of Ursula Le Guin novels , which I love, are so much about people and culture that you could probably take out the speculative elements and still have a great story – which is not a bad thing. But Blindsight, a novel by a former marine biologist – and, I think he’d agree, a pessimist about people – has to be science fiction. It has footnotes. It has long chunks of technical exposition. But it is, above all else, an amazing haunted house story. The plot of Blindsight is that one day in the near future, aliens take our picture. We know they take our picture because millions and millions of flash bulbs go off in the sky, and we track these exploding flash bulbs back to where they came from. We send a crew on a ship to find the aliens that took our picture and figure out why they are here. What do they want? And the result is much, much stranger than anything you will get in Star Trek or Star Wars, or even books that are about aliens but still about people. In, say, CJ Cherryh’s Foreigner books, which are about an ambassador to an alien species, there’s still something like communication going on. Blindsight is much more existentially terrifying because, in the confrontation with aliens, it proposes something about the nature of us that I had never heard proposed before. It challenges an assumption we have about ourselves and our place in the universe that is fundamental. I don’t want to spoil what it is… Many authors will tell you that science fiction is about holding a mirror up to humanity. The aliens are really reflections of ourselves. Blindsight basically says, ‘The hell with that.’ What if they were really aliens, and when you look in the mirror, you don’t recognize what you see? The book is mostly set aboard this nightmarish alien construct, a growing ship called Rorschach. The conditions aboard Rorschach are extremely hazardous. There’s radiation everywhere, and there are electromagnetic fields so intense that they cause hallucinations. Things are happening to the characters’ minds which, if you’ve taken any psych classes or read a book like The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat , you’ll recognize as real things that can go wrong with the human brain. In fact, the book is named for one of these: blindsight is when people’s eyes work fine, but their consciousness has been disconnected from their vision, so they believe they’re blind. If you throw a ball at them, they can catch it, but they don’t know why they can catch it, and they will usually come up with an excuse. It’s all about digging into this gap between who we think we are and how our minds actually work, and then the gap between how our minds work and how an alien mind might work. And it is just so scary. People will often ask me, ‘Do you really believe the things this book says?’ I don’t really care! What I care about is that the book is great horror , and great horror that can only come through a confrontation with something that is abhuman, and very not like us. So if you enjoy Alien or even Prometheus books about people going out and finding something that’s not what they expect, I really recommend Blindsight. I just can’t say enough good things about it. It’s a very weird book. You probably won’t like any of the characters or understand quite a bit of what is going on, but it doesn’t matter. The characters are all variously tweaked and augmented humans. The linguist has what we today would think of as dissociative personality disorder: she has multiple headmates, alters. But in the future of Blindsight , this has been recognized as something normal, and they now look back on efforts to cure this condition as something monstrous. Other characters have had therapies where all their motor neurons have been reallocated, so they have spasms and twitches, because so much of their brain is being used for processing that they can’t really control their bodies. The protagonist had half of his brain removed to cure a seizure disorder, which is a real procedure, and he thinks it’s left him less human – it’s not clear to me that this is actually true. But his role is something we are just starting to see happen in real life – and I admire the book for predicting this, despite the fact that I despise large language models and ChatGPT and the like. His job is to take data produced by very intelligent non-human systems, both AIs and some of his colleagues who’ve been upgraded and tweaked, and render it understandable to regular people. He’s an advisor, but he himself doesn’t understand how he does what he does. He thinks of himself as like a rotator: he’ll take a pattern and change it in certain ways, and now people can understand it, but that doesn’t mean he understands the original pattern – which ties back to this idea of seeing without seeing. And in reality, when you train machines to do huge data analysis and to find patterns, those machines often don’t know why the patterns they find work."