Blindsight, by Peter Watts I saw a mention of this book somewhere on the Internet recently, and was intrigued enough — I think that there was a picture of an octopus involved — so I got it on Kindle. A good read: it’s a dystopian, “hard sci-fi” story about first contact, with a lot of speculating and philosophizing about consciousness and awareness in intelligent beings — the story’s premise is built on the possibility that awareness is an evolutionary drag on intelligence.
The crew is post-human, with various enhancements meant to interface with each other and with the equipment they use; their leader is a resurrected “vampire” (that is, a member of an extinct superhuman subspecies that once preyed on humans), and “the Captain” is the ship AI, which really does not talk with anyone but the vampire. They are sent out to study and make contact with an obviously extraterrestrial artifact orbiting a nearby rogue planet, and things go from there…
This book did not read as fast as, say, Titanium Noir — it took a long weekend rather than a day — but it was engrossing, and kind of creepy, and well worth reading.
