one of the two or three best hard SF writers around, and this is his finest book to date.” -Interzone 'A brilliant piece of work, one that will delight fans of hard science fiction, but will also demonstrate to literary fans that contemporary science fiction is dynamic and fascinating literature that demands to be read.” -The Edmonton Journal Watts puts a terrifying and original spin on the familiar alien contact story. “Watts explores the nature of consciousness in this stimulating hard SF novel, which combines riveting action with a fascinating alien environment. They may be more alien than the thing they've been sent to find.Īt the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied. Pray they can be trusted with the fate of a world. And you send a synthesist-an informational topologist with half his mind gone-as an interface between here and there. You send a monster to command them all, an extinct hominid predator once called vampire, recalled from the grave with the voodoo of recombinant genetics and the blood of sociopaths. You send a pacifist warrior in the faint hope she won't be needed. You send a biologist so radically interfaced with machinery that he sees x-rays and tastes ultrasound. You send a linguist with multiple personalities, her brain surgically partitioned into separate, sentient processing cores. So who do you send to force introductions with unknown and unknowable alien intellect that doesn't wish to be met?

Or perhaps to something closer, something en route.

It's talking to some distant star, perhaps. Whatever's out there isn't talking to us. Now some half-derelict space probe, sparking fitfully past Neptune's orbit, hears a whisper from the edge of the solar system: a faint signal sweeping the cosmos like a lighthouse beam. Two months of silence, while a world held its breath.

Hugo and Shirley Jackson award-winning Peter Watts stands on the cutting edge of hard SF with his acclaimed novel, Blindsight

Blindsight by Peter Watts