Blindsight

Blindsight

★ What is the ultimate evolutionary direction of humanity? If only by abandoning self-awareness can we survive in the vast star ocean, is this evolution or extinction? A Hugo Award winner Peter Watts' representative novel, a masterpiece of hard science fiction in the past decade, won numerous science fiction awards such as the Aurora Award (Canada), the Grand Prix de l'Imaginaire (France), and the Seiun Award (Japan).
★ Redefining the "first contact" between humans and aliens, breaking the stereotypical "alien" image in previous works, and directly questioning the nature of life forms. It explores the ultimate questions of existence and consciousness with the literary techniques of serious literature and the ups and downs of science fiction adventure.
★ The new revised edition, ten years in the making, specially includes two bonus novellas/short stories, "The Colonel" and "Zero Sum," provided by the author, along with the complete afterword, to help readers better understand the characters' story arcs and the book's discussion of self-awareness. The sequel in the same series, "Echopraxia," will be published at the end of the year.
◎ Synopsis
On February 13, 2082, 65,536 alien probes surrounded Earth. At first, they were like countless black holes embedded in the atmosphere. Then they all burned out, causing all radio waves on Earth and in geostationary orbit to resonate simultaneously. Every infrared telescope could only see static. A brief, bright observation from an unknown life form.
Earth detected the source of the signal and subsequently sent three teams to the origin—a comet named Thes-Caufield in the Kuiper Belt near Neptune's orbit—for exploration. The first two teams were unmanned probes. As the second wave of unmanned probes was about to approach, Thes-Caufield, which had artificial instruments buried in its core, exploded.
Two months after the skyfire fell, the third probe team, including the protagonist, departed. On the way, news of the explosion arrived, and the spaceship automatically changed course, carrying the crew to the massive Oort cloud object, Big Ben.
The crew members gradually awakened from their interstellar hibernation: a linguist with four personalities; a biologist who replaced five senses with implanted mechanical devices; a combat commander; a vampire; and a synthesist—a topological information observer whose mind was artificially half-removed, serving as a liaison to report information to the central command. Will they face battle or negotiation? Can they decipher the alien life forms' code and uncover the truth behind the skyfire's fall?
◎ Media Reviews
Watts explores the nature of consciousness in this thrilling science fiction novel, perfectly blending a captivating alien environment with an engaging battle. He offers a chilling and fundamental subversion of the alien contact genre we know. — Publishers Weekly
Peter Watts takes the core of first contact and shatters it, resulting in a stunning, creative, and cautionary masterpiece. This is a rare work that can open a whole new chapter for science fiction. — Karl Schroeder, Canadian science fiction author
Peter Watts' aliens are neither humans with strange appearances nor bizarre organizations incomprehensible to humans—they are something new, and infinitely unsettling, forcing us to confront incredible possibilities regarding the nature of consciousness. Highly recommended. — Charles Stross, Hugo Award winner and author of "Accelerando"

2021-07-01

北京日报出版社

Ideal Country

464

9787547739792