Echopraxia by Peter Watts
I came to this straight off Blindsight, and Blindsight left my brain cells smoking, this follow-up does the same thing, I need some time to recover, still wanting more of that specific dread, and this strange difficult sibling will not resolve any of the open ended issues of Blindsight. It exists in the same 'universe' but can easily be read on its own, and as a companion "sidequel" to Blindsight, it's a resounding success, only where the first book went out to the edge of things to meet the alien, this one turns inward, into a dizzying exploration of faith, the mind, science and the bounds of human identity, tackling religion and the role of a deity and spirituality in a post-human society we might build out of hive minds. Our man is Daniel Brüks, a field biologist living in academic disgrace in the Oregon desert, an honest baseline human surrounded by others who are smarter, faster, and more adaptable than him, a fossil basically, and he stumbles into (or is drawn into) increasingly complicated confrontations between transhumans. He gets whisked into space on the Crown of Thorns, dragged forcibly into space as a tag-along to the investigation by a hive-mind cult, a vampire, and other humans who have some serious technological upgrades, and the justification for the transition onto the Crown of Thorns isn't great, I kept wondering why Bruks was okay with being kidnapped off-Earth. There is a vampire again, and the utter menace of Valerie throughout is scene stealing, that hovering level of terror that is created by the presence of the vampire Valerie on the ship, playing with other crew members like a cat with mice. The real find for me was Portia, the extrapolation of the real-life Portia spider was good stuff, and Portia was genuinely interesting (and I need to check out the real spider) but Watts never does anything that interesting with it. Same with the thread around military strategist Jim Moore, kept in the background for too long: Moore's an interesting character, but I was confused as hell in the end. There was the sheer amount of hard science that I didn't quite follow most of the time, and at points I basically felt too dumb to follow it. It's a book built less of plot than of ideas, a bit of a mess of ideas, strewn across a skeleton of a story, and after a fine introduction and setup, the plot grinds to a halt in space. But when they land, the scale of the ideas is Biblical, this is your mind blown out of the back of your head with crazy science and over the top ideas, the notion that its agents are vastly more intelligent than "baseline" humans, meaning that both the protagonist and the readers of the novels can't possibly comprehend the motivations and strategy of certain agents, that you're just a guy who tags along incomprehensible superior life forms on a quest and muddles through a hopeless situation without much understanding, feels more true every year. And then there's the appendix: 140 footnotes in the appendix and carefully noting departures from the established science, about 40 pages-worth of notes at the end of the book on the real science behind the story, and the references page (yes really) makes up for some flaws?? Nowhere near as good as Blindsight, and it felt a lot more dense (in a meandering sense) than Blindsight, very bleak, just as I expect a Peter Watts book to be. But even so, each novel is staggeringly intelligent, dense with science, technology, philosophy, and speculation, and Watts is certainly on another level. If Blindsight got its hooks in you, I whole-heartedly recommend seeing where he takes the wound.