Wow! This is going to be a different kind of review for me. I can honestly say I'm not sure I understand what happened in this book, but I kept reading because I felt some underlying "thing" driving me to the end.First, the problems: I never felt grounded in Watts' world. Terms to describe the so...
One of the best hard SF books of the last decade and most original first-contact stories you're likely to encounter. You've never met aliens like these before. It many ways, it's a mediation on consciousness and different ways of perceiving reality, using a post-human crew on a first-contact missi...
The author who kept running through my head while reading this was Julian Jaynes, whose The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind I read in March of this year. The alien, Rorschach is the kind of unconscious intelligence Jaynes believes humans were until quite recently. And ...
I struggled through two hundred pages of this hard science fiction novel. I finally just gave up. I couldn't relate or connect to the main character. The supporting characters were also two dimensional. Some of the science was intriguing, but the prose struck me as scientific shorthand, forcing ...
Watts writes stuff steeped in hard- and plain-whacked- science. At times he's channeling journal articles as well as Alfred Bester--it caroms from pulp to cog-psych theory and can jar. (He also writes like he found Camus too sunny, and sought here to make amends.)But a blast. Works as a revamped ...
Really interesting, chock full of ideologies, debates, and fascinating new technologies. It's great scifi. The only problem is that I completely disagree with the main premise of the book, which turns out to be that sentience is in fact a *problem* rather than Our Specialness. It's a cool twist to t...
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