Echopraxia

Uh, yeah. ECHOPRAXIA. Heck I do NOT even know where to begin here. Well, maybe I do. Crud, then again, maybe I don't. In looking back at my review of BLINDSIGHT, the predecessor to ECHOPRAXIA, while it says many of the same things I feel about the current novel, I can't quite pin down a way to use those words to describe what's going on here.One thing that is common between the two books is that I went to Wikipedia to look up the meaning of ECHOPRAXIA (much like I did for the meaning of BLINDSIGHT over seven years ago. It tells me this:Echopraxia (also known as echokinesis) is the involuntary repetition or imitation of another person's actions.The definition goes into more detail, of course, but the defintion I quote above can give us quite a nightmare when we think about exactly what it can imply.Heck, I'm rambling, probably because I don't know quite where to begin. So maybe the logical place, the beginning, will do. The story takes place not long after the events of BLINDSIGHT near the end of the 21st century. The Earth is more than a bit messed up from the things we would expect: scarcity of resources, ravaging of natural resources, etc. Most people have mods implanted in them to help them perform various tasks - the total population of naturals is very small. One of these people is Danial Bruks (and if I could put the umlaut over the u it would be more accurate), a "natural" biologist who is out collecting samples in the desert one evening when he gets caught in the crossfire between an unseen attacker and an alliance of Transhuman Bicamerals and a vampire and her zombie hoard. You may remember the vampires and zombies from BLINDSIGHT. These are certainly not our friendly, neighborhood sparkly vampires, nor are they Dracula like - no they are much much worse. They are creatures who are actually extinct but were brought back to life, much to the dismay of most of the living creatures that come into contact with them. You may remember, also, that the vampires, and our vampire in particular, Valerie, ingest drugs that make it tolerable for them to be in the presence of right angles (yes, BLINDSIGHT gave us a scientific explanation for the Crucifix Effect). Transhuman Bicamerals are severely modified humans who together form a hive mind. These Bicamerals can barely, if at all, function as normal human beings, andcertainly can't communicate normally. They need modified humans to understand their gibberish and physical gyrations and who translate that information for the rest of humanity. The Bicamerals are brilliant and hold something like a gazillion patents.Bruks, the Bicamerals, Valerie and her zombies, and a few other folks head out in a spaceship to visit Icarus, a space station which, among other things, provides a not insignificant portion of humanity with its energy supply. It is there that they discover an entity that effectively changes the course of the novel as well as the life of Dan Bruks.Like BLINDSIGHT, this is a difficult novel to describe. On one hand, it is yet another Singularity story, although it seems just a tad different thanmost of the other Singularity stories, in that it is not the technology that changes so fast that we can no longer comprehend it - it is ourselves. It isa wonderful discussion on science versus faith (note that I did not say religion - that is a related but different argument, I think), with not just theusual arguments that go back and forth during our time, but the contention that even science can be relied upon too heavily, and in fact is yet another kind of faith. The followers of the Bicamerals think of them almost as gods, and Bruks is skeptical because after all, how can anyone actually understand what they're saying or communicating? There's no evidence - other than the aforementioned patents, for example - that anything they say is real and accurate. Lianne, a Bicameral follower and the closest person to a love interest that Bruks has in the story, tells Bruks he must take the Bicamerals on faith, while later in the novel Bruks says her only crime was faith.In the end, there are a ton of ideas in this book, and Watts writing and storytelling style are marvelous in engaging the reader to want to know more about what's going on with all this stuff. And, as with BLINDSIGHT, Watts provides an in depth and detailed Notes and References section, which includes *140* footnotes to support his statements. Most, if not all, of these footnotes are hyperlinked in the e-book edition so if you're really curious about his research for the book, you can follow along and read up on it yourself if you like.Another thing I find refreshing about Watts' writing, both here and in the short story collection I reviewed earlier this year, "Beyond the Rift", is thatWatts doesn't assume his readers are idiots. Rather, he assumes they are intelligent and can understand and make intuitive and logical leaps without being spoon fed everything. He challenges the reader to put on a thinking cap and work through the clues he's put into the narrative. All of which says that thisis not your typical beach reading (I think I said that about "Beyond the Rift", too). You'll be challenged by ECHOPRAXIA, and you'll be the better for it.I think it's just as well that I didn't go into too much detail about the plot of the novel. I think it's best that you read for yourself and make discoveries along the way. And just how does the title relate to the book? Look in the mirror.

I finally finished Peter Watts' latest novel "Echopraxia." It is a sequel to his brilliant "Blindsight." (I will just come out and say it: you are stupid if you don't take my advice and read Blindsight...if you get through it, then definitely read Echopraxia). I think that, given the correct screenplay adaptation and the right director, Blindsight could be one of the best Sci-Fi films ever made (but most likely it would be made into dumbed down treacle with more emphasis on CGI than ideas).Watts was a professor of Marine Biology before he became a full time writer, and his Hard Sci-Fi has an emphasis on the "hard" for two reasons: it ain't easy reading, and he is the first author I know who has citations and a bibliography at the end of each novel to give us more information about the science behind the story. Think of perhaps Cormac McCarthy with a doctorate in science. Deep thoughts and difficult yet beautiful prose that is hard to unpack, but worth it.This isn't Space Opera, there aren't any heroes...and it isn't utopia...technology, genetic engineering, AI, the Singularity, etc., don't save us from ourselves. The world he predicts is as complex and screwed up as the world we live in now. You could say it's somewhat dystopian, but let's admit...the world we live in at present is dystopian if you are going to call his work dystopian.Blindsight and Echopraxia take place at the end of the 21st Century, so the future isn't so distant from our own, and, with many of the sociopolitical and scientific trajectories we are on at present, the world he created is largely plausible. This isn't some moralistic or ideological tract hiding behind a narrative. It's more an "it is what it is" tale where everything is a double-edged sword....just like in reality. If anything, not ramming black and white ideas down our throats allows for more reflection about who and what we are, and what could be the potential results of our present circumstances and collective decisions.I'm not going to go into a description of the story line, because that is the point of reading the book. But I will say that there are more ideas packed into a few pages of these two books than one gets from 20 books usually.Read them and then tell me I'm wrong.

Wow. There was a lot going on in this book. More than a hundred footnotes at the end of the book. That's how dense this world-building is. My brain was burning up calories like those Russian chess players do. I built up a sweat.Quite an exciting novel.

A great follow up to Blindsight. Reccomended.

Wie dem Fatum entgehen? Whatever, das Watts rulez - hart! Werd es nochmal lesen. Das Englisch ist elaboriert, nicht einfach. Hätt nie gedacht "Vampire" in Hard-SF zu akzeptieren.

De la science-fiction « dure » .ReligionLes mythes ancestraux :Vampires génétiquement améliorés (le prédateur de l'homme).Soldats zombis (la vie sans conscience).Cyborgs (l'homme modifié).Intelligences artificielles.Une exploration du phénomène de la vision aveugle, des actions automatiques inconscientes... Un univers envoutant, à la fois mystique et scientifique, spirituel et technologique. Un voyage au travers d'une fiction vers les grandes questions ayant à trait à la conscience, au regard des derniers résultats scientifiques.

H.P. Lovecraft once wrote, "The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age"As it turned out, Lovecraft was predicting Peter Watts.A lot of great things can be said about "Echopraxia" - where "Blindsight" perhaps suffered a bit under the weight of its own intricacies, "Echopraxia" presents an ingeniously crafted narrative, with interesting characters and rich world building, surgically paced to allow for just the right amount of breathing room between sequences of heavy action or contemplation.But the true fingerprint of Watts' genius is his unbelievable talent for ideas - he steers you through difficult, scientific concepts that range orders of magnitude in scale; from Planck length processes to interplanetary distances; from genetic sequencing to mundane field biology to global epidemiological crises; from garden variety religious practice to cognitive neuroscience - all so wonderfully coherent that you follow him, in a blur of page-turning, to the terrible secret of all thinking beings, to concepts so profound that, upon reflection, they not so much move you as violently shake you.That is Watts' true gift - he makes you think the unthinkable, and cross conceptual boundaries you didn't even know existed. This book is a mind-expanding substance.