It’s time to get close and personal with Blindsight, a Hugo-nominated science fiction novel by Peter Watts. The cover features a planet that looks overrun by the dark brambles from Sleeping Beauty, and the title makes me wary of possible ableism. Blindsight is a real neurological phenomenon. Simply naming it isn’t ableist, but the word “blindsight” is regularly misused in fiction. Plus, able-bodied writers have a bad habit of giving blind characters some sort of supernatural sight and then acting like it’s profound.
Blindsight opens with a prologue. Prologues are almost never the best way to begin a book, and when they are, they should be renamed “Chapter One.” But Watts put it in his book, so that’s what we’re covering. You can read through the whole prologue on Watt’s confusing website. Let’s get started.
Content Notice: severe ableism, graphic violence among children, the possible death of a child, and stigmatizing description of brain surgery.
Mystery Requires Some Context
It didn’t start out here.
This line is going for curiosity and intrigue, but it’s so vague that readers don’t have much to be curious about. Replacing “it” with something more evocative and tense would have improved it quite a bit. For instance, “The winnowing didn’t start out here.” Replacing “here” would also be an improvement: “It didn’t start in the burning rim.”
As is, I give it 2 out of 5 stars. However, the sentence is quite short, so maybe the rest of the paragraph will add something concrete to this mystery. Let’s look at the whole thing.
It didn’t start out here. Not with the scramblers or Rorschach, not with Big Ben or Theseus or the vampires. Most people would say it started with the Fireflies, but they’d be wrong. It ended with all those things.
No, that did not help. Watts just threw out a bunch of world terms without context. We don’t know what scramblers, Rorschach, or Theseus are, so those words are meaningless blather at this point. Vampires don’t need explaining, but they also aren’t particularly novel or intriguing. I’m hoping that Big Ben refers to the clock tower in London, but I suspect this book will disappoint me. The Fireflies are at least visually evocative, and because of the cult classic TV show, many readers will guess they are spaceships.
Alluding to events this way can be intriguing, but you can’t just vomit a pile of terms. You have to describe something that evokes the imagination. To do that, Watts needs to slow down and focus more on fewer things.
Example
It didn’t start out here. Most people would say it started with the Fireflies, on the day they converged around Big Ben and ate through our civilization in a matter of hours. But those people are wrong. That’s how it ended.
The current last line of the paragraph is also a little confusing. Watts states that people think it started with the Fireflies specifically. But then saying “It ended with all those things” suggests they thought it started not only with the Fireflies but also with the vampires, Big Ben, and the whatever-those-words were. If that’s the case, Watts should have reworded the paragraph to open with “It didn’t start out here. Most people think it started with the scramblers or Rorschach…”
I also couldn’t resist the temptation to tighten the sentence in my example. Closing with “ended” gives the paragraph more punch.
Moving on to our next paragraph.
For me, it began with Robert Paglino.
If I were given free rein with the strikeout tool, I would nix the entire previous paragraph and start here. The current start isn’t an effective teaser, and while “Robert Paglino” isn’t any more fascinating than all that, we at least know this person matters at some level.
But seriously, what is “it”? Maybe Watts means “the story,” but even that doesn’t work. This is a first-person retelling, meaning a future version of the protagonist is telling the story. They must have some reason for starting here. Watts doesn’t give us any real idea of what this framing is, missing his opportunity to put in a compelling teaser.
Oppression Should Be Condemned
At the age of eight, he was my best and only friend. We were fellow outcasts, bound by complementary misfortune. Mine was developmental. His was genetic: an uncontrolled genotype that left him predisposed to nearsightedness, acne, and (as it later turned out) a susceptibility to narcotics. His parents had never had him optimized. Those few TwenCen relics who still believed in God also held that one shouldn’t try to improve upon His handiwork. So although both of us could have been repaired, only one of us had been.
On the plus side, world information is worked in pretty smoothly here. We now know this takes place in a Gattaca-style setting, where everyone has been genetically modified by birth, and those who aren’t modified are a lower class. However, throwing in “TwenCen” is a mistake. It’s unnecessary to give a specific term here, it isn’t relevant to the rest of the prologue, and readers have enough to figure out already.
I’m also skeptical of the idea that with all the troubling and ableist implications of this type of mass genetic modification, only religious people are holdouts. Surely some other groups have ethical and practical concerns about altering someone’s genome to erase minor conditions like acne. While religion was the explanation in Gattaca, the movie only featured one set of parents whose reasons were religious. This is a sweeping generalization.
As for the kids, while this type of oppression is sympathetic, the way it’s phrased here is problematic. In the context of disability, words like “misfortune” and “repaired” are stigmatizing. They bring up the stereotypes that treat disability as a personal tragedy and view disabled people as damaged or broken. On top of that, Watts is framing Robert’s genetics as the issue instead of the way he is treated. From an in-universe perspective, the protagonist is saying this, which means they’re actually justifying and spreading the marginalization they faced.
Hearing the protagonist’s situation described as a developmental misfortune that’s been repaired is also concerningly ableist, but we’ll have to wait to find out more.
I arrived at the playground to find Pag the center of attention for some half-dozen kids, those lucky few in front punching him in the head, the others making do with taunts of mongrel and polly while waiting their turn. I watched him raise his arms, almost hesitantly, to ward off the worst of the blows. I could see into his head better than I could see into my own; he was scared that his attackers might think those hands were coming up to hit back, that they’d read it as an act of defiance and hurt him even more. […]
This transition is pretty disorientating. Watts was just giving us general exposition, so we don’t have enough context for where in the timeline this is meant to be. I assumed it was their first meeting. If you go back, it becomes clear that this is “when it started,” but that’s a long and complex paragraph ago. A reader’s working memory isn’t that long.
Similarly, who is “Pag”? Again, if readers go back, they can figure out this is short for “Robert Paglino,” but you can’t expect readers to remember what looks like an insignificant last name. Watts could have instead opened the previous paragraph with “At the age of eight, Pag was my best and only friend.” Since that comes immediately after the full name is given, it would be much easier for readers to make the connection.
Once we get past the transition, we have yet another instance of a storyteller lazily using bullying to generate conflict and sympathy for school-age kids. I will give it to Watts that these marginalized kids would likely be the targets of bullying, unlike all the protagonists targeted for having cool powers. However, a couple problems remain.
First, showing only extreme schoolyard violence not only normalizes it, but minimizes the psychological harm that harassment does. If people come to think of bullying as mugging, it’ll be hard to get them to take name-calling seriously. Second, where the hell are the adults? It’s their responsibility to keep kids safe, and it’s hard to get people to realize that when storytellers keep pretending the playground is some postapocalyptic survival zone.
Dark Elements Should Aid the Story
But I didn’t know what to do.
I hadn’t seen much of Pag lately. I was pretty sure he’d been avoiding me. Still, when your best friend’s in trouble you help out, right? Even if the odds are impossible—and how many eight-year-olds would go up against six bigger kids for a sandbox buddy?—at least you call for backup. Flag a sentry. Something.
I just stood there. I didn’t even especially want to help him.
That didn’t make sense. Even if he hadn’t been my best friend, I should at least have empathized. I’d suffered less than Pag in the way of overt violence; my seizures tended to keep the other kids at a distance, scared them even as they incapacitated me. Still. I was no stranger to the taunts and insults, or the foot that appears from nowhere to trip you up en route from A to B. I knew how that felt.
Or I had, once.
Finally, Watts creates something engaging. Something engaging that’s probably an ableist stereotype, but for the moment let’s pretend it’s handled respectfully. The protagonist’s lack of caring adds novelty to the typical bullying routine, and their struggle to overcome their indifference makes for a compelling internal conflict. They can recognize they should help, but without emotion to motivate them, they’re having trouble taking action.
But that part of me had been cut out along with the bad wiring. I was still working up the algorithms to get it back, still learning by observation. Pack animals always tear apart the weaklings in their midst. Every child knows that much instinctively. […]
What. The. $@#%.
No, most pack animals do not just kill members of their own pack that are sick, injured, etc. While animals aren’t always altruistic, many animals are known to protect or comfort other group members that are vulnerable. Packs are teams that work together for survival. Why would you kill a member of your own team?
Also, comparing a disabled child being physically assaulted by a large group to a “weakling” being torn apart by a pack is dehumanizing and ableist. Having a disabled kid that needs to be rescued is already following the helpless disability stereotype. Making this comparison just doubles down on the harmful idea that disability is inherently weak. The fact that Pag isn’t disabled by today’s terms doesn’t matter; Watts has made it clear that Pag is disabled in the context of this setting.
Then, Watts asserts that children instinctively know that animals kill each other. I don’t think he understands what the word “instinct” means. It means a natural inclination toward a basic survival behavior. Instincts are not random, fake factoids about other species.
This is pointless, edgy nonsense.
If you’re wondering about the “bad wiring” part, don’t worry, we will get to that.
In the end, propaganda worked where empathy failed. Back then I didn’t so much think as observe, didn’t deduce so much as remember—and what I remembered was a thousand inspirational stories lauding anyone who ever stuck up for the underdog.
Watts, you know that you’re calling your own story propaganda, right? Don’t get me wrong, this is one of the more interesting and less inane ways to describe stories. But if you’re going to criticize them, it’s not just those other stories that are coming under fire.
So I picked up a rock the size of my fist and hit two of Pag’s assailants across the backs of their heads before anyone even knew I was in the game.
The line about animals killing the weak was a lead-up to more violence among children. Color me unsurprised. But how exactly did the protagonist hit these two heads with one stone? It must have been quick; did they throw it? That feels pretty implausible. Did they barge in there and do it by hand?
This is a group of six kids and the punchers are in front – meaning the other kids should be behind them, facing them. To get to the back of their heads, the protagonist would have to run at the group and push their way in. That would give the kids a chance to react. That is, unless the protagonist did a sneak attack on the kids who aren’t doing the punching. I have no idea; this line is all we’ve got.
Next, the protagonist somehow uses the rock to take out a third kid while that kid is “turning to face the new threat.” Thankfully, the rest of the kids run away instead of using their bodies as cannon fodder as if they were horde minions.
Two of the enemy twitched at my feet. I kicked one in the head until it stopped moving, turned to the other. Something grabbed my arm and I swung without thinking, without looking until Pag yelped and ducked out of reach.
“Oh,” I said. “Sorry.”
[…]“Oh shit, you—I mean, you never…” He wiped his mouth. Blood smeared the back of his hand. “Oh man are we in trouble.”
“They started it.”
“Yeah, but you—I mean, look at them!”
The moaning thing was crawling away on all fours. I wondered how long it would be before it found reinforcements. I wondered if I should kill it before then.
Wow. Okay… so that stone that hit two heads somehow made at least one person fall to the ground twitching. And did the protagonist just kill one of those kids?
While we don’t know what disability the protagonist has yet, Watts has made it clear that the protagonist’s homicidal behavior is a result of lacking emotion and empathy. This is a toxic stereotype that stigmatizes people with neurodivergent traits such as alexithymia, who may struggle with or not feel empathy but still respect and care about other people.
Then, even if we set aside the disturbing and ableist complications of a protagonist who views injured kids as things to be put down, the characterization is all wrong. This is not the same character Watts was depicting half a page ago. That character may have not felt empathy as an emotion, but they intellectually understood it. They know they were responsible for helping their best friend. They also understood the cultural roles expressed by stories well enough to fight for the underdog.
Now the protagonist doesn’t even understand that human life has value. What logic leads them to think of these kids as subhuman while simultaneously worrying that they will crawl off to find reinforcements? What story did they see where the hero started finishing off injured enemies who could barely move?
It’s a story like this one, isn’t it?
With the retelling narrative premise, the story essentially has two different narrators: the future protagonist and the current protagonist. If the writer isn’t clear which one is narrating at a given time, it can create weird inconsistencies. But if the future protagonist was narrating the paragraph about empathy and friendship, they wouldn’t have been perplexed by their lack of emotional response to seeing their best friend in trouble. The future narrator knows exactly why that happened.
The change in personality, the weird animal stuff, and the astounding ableism are all being used to justify why the protagonist is inclined to do horrific things. While hurting others creates conflict for the protagonist, Watts didn’t need to go nearly this far. If the protagonist considered hurting a single injured kid, and Pag put a stop to it, that would have been enough.
Being edgy is the point. Logic and consistency are secondary concerns. Respect for other human beings is not even a consideration.
Ten Minutes of Research Isn’t Too Much
I actually did feel something then—faint, distant, but unmistakable. I felt angry. “They started—“
Pag backed away, eyes wide. “What are you doing? Put that down!”
I’d raised my fists. I didn’t remember doing that. I unclenched them. It took a while. I had to look at my hands very hard for a long, long time.
The rock dropped to the ground, blood-slick and glistening.
“I was trying to help.” I didn’t understand why he couldn’t see that.
“You’re, you’re not the same,” Pag said from a safe distance. “You’re not even Siri any more.”
“I am too. Don’t be a fuckwad.”
“They cut out your brain!”
“Only half. For the ep—”
“I know for the epilepsy! You think I don’t know? But you were in that half—or, like, part of you was…” He struggled with the words, with the concept behind them. “And now you’re different. It’s like, your mom and dad murdered you—”
“My mom and dad,” I said, suddenly quiet, “saved my life. I would have died.”
“I think you did die,” said my best and only friend. “I think Siri died, they scooped him out and threw him away and you’re some whole other kid that just, just grew back out of what was left. You’re not the same. Ever since. You’re not the same.”
Oh dear god.
Look, I don’t know exactly how those people who’ve had hemispherectomies would want to be represented, but I’m pretty damn sure it’s not as murderers. That’s the kind of propaganda that gets disabled people killed.
Also, I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t want to be depicted as people who died in surgery and came back as someone else. If you’re going to use real conditions in your story, the very least you can do is some research to get the basics right. In only ten minutes of searching on the internet, I discovered that kids who undergo this procedure do not have memory or personality changes, but they do lose control of one hand and half of their field of vision. If your main character has a real disability you don’t have and you can afford to hire a consultant with that lived experience, please do so. It makes a huge difference.
The most absurd thing is how easy this problem is to fix. This is a scifi setting; make up a scifi reason this happened! Just remember that making a fictional disability that turns someone into a killer still stigmatizes disability. So if you’re looking for an incident that turns the character into a killer, make sure the result isn’t presented as a disability or reminiscent of one.
Also, we finally know the protagonist’s name is Siri, and he’s a boy. Those things seem really trivial right now.
I still don’t know if Pag really knew what he was saying. […] Maybe, after fighting pod people in gamespace, he couldn’t help but see them everywhere. Maybe.
But you could make a case for what he said. […] There’s a reason they call it radical hemispherectomy: half the brain thrown out with yesterday’s krill, the remaining half press-ganged into double duty. Think of all the rewiring that one lonely hemisphere must have struggled with as it tried to take up the slack. It turned out okay, obviously. The brain’s a very flexible piece of meat; it took some doing, but it adapted. I adapted. Still. Think of all that must have been squeezed out, deformed, reshaped by the time the renovations were through. You could argue that I’m a different person than the one who used to occupy this body.
Nope. Nope. Nope.
The grownups showed up eventually, of course. Medicine was bestowed, ambulances called. Parents were outraged, diplomatic volleys exchanged, but it’s tough to drum up neighborhood outrage on behalf of your injured baby when playground surveillance from three angles shows the little darling—and five of his buddies— kicking in the ribs of a disabled boy. […]
And no one was outraged that this playground was an unsupervised violent crime zone despite having surveillance from three angles. It’s a kid-eat-kid world out there, folks. You can also see in that last sentence that Watts is presenting disabled kids not just as people facing marginalization but also as objects of pity. This is yet another dehumanizing and stigmatizing stereotype about disability. Combined with the other stereotypes that have been applied to Pag so far, it paints him as a pathetic, tragic victim who exists to teach Siri lessons, rather than have a full, meaningful life of his own.
Watts also wants us to believe that in his world, the oppression is so severe that kids flagrantly commit violence against a disabled person while being recorded. Yet simultaneously, no one was outraged that a disabled person severely injured these non-disabled kids. Or for that matter, even demanded that Siri be separated from the other kids to prevent him from killing anyone. Oppression just works however Watts wants it to in any given moment.
Your Values Will End Up in Your Story
So I survived that and a million other childhood experiences. I grew up and I got along. I learned to fit in. I observed, recorded, derived the algorithms and mimicked appropriate behaviors. Not much of it was—heartfelt, I guess the word is. I had friends and enemies, like everyone else. I chose them by running through checklists of behaviors and circumstances compiled from years of observation.
Again, hemispherectomies do not turn people into cyborgs. But let’s just set that aside for a moment, as difficult as that is.
Watts is presenting this character as an emotionless genius. If separated from stereotypes about disability, an emotionless character who is trying to pass as normal could have a lot of novelty, conflict, and sympathy. It could also be relatable for all the people who struggle to meet social expectations. Murderbot is an example of a similar character done exceedingly well, though Murderbot isn’t emotionless.
But Watts has also decided to give Siri inexplicable computing powers. Even if these aren’t powers literally, this computer thinking is clearly designed to be a sign of Siri’s superiority. This suggests that Watts isn’t interested in giving his protagonist compelling struggles. Instead, he wants to deliver a boatload of candy. While Murderbot also has plenty of candy, readers know that’s because it’s a construct, and Murderbot’s candied abilities aren’t designed to erase its social problems.
Based on what we’ve seen so far in Blindsight, we can expect Siri’s lack of emotion and behavioral checklists to play whatever role is needed to justify why Siri does terrible things in any given scene. When being emotionless doesn’t make the story edgy, Watts can pull in the one emotion he’s established Siri has: anger.
I may have grown up distant but I grew up objective, and I have Robert Paglino to thank for that. His seminal observation set everything in motion. It led me into Synthesis, fated me to our disastrous encounter with the Scramblers, spared me the worse fate befalling Earth. Or the better one, I suppose, depending on your point of view. Point of view matters: I see that now, blind, talking to myself, trapped in a coffin falling past the edge of the solar system. I see it for the first time since some beaten bloody friend on a childhood battlefield convinced me to throw my own point of view away.
Well, there we have it. Siri is a wish-fulfillment character for men on the atheist to alt-right ideology pipeline.
If you’re wondering how the hell I got there, the key is the word “objective,” emphasized with italics. That word doesn’t exist in a vacuum; it’s a cultural signal of current-day rationalists, who are usually atheist white men. Many of them want to believe they are brilliant and objective. For them, objectivity means being free of bias and emotional influence.
The problem is that humans are not capable of that, and pretending that we are is dangerous. For the rationalists I’ve known personally, their denial of their own bias and emotion only meant they had no correction mechanisms in place. In other words, they were especially biased and emotionally driven. Yes, it was quite ironic.
In any case, rationalists will use claims of perfect objectivity to dismiss ethics. For instance, some dude might say: “White people score better on IQ tests than Black people. It’s just a fact.” Then if you try to explain why this statement is misleading and harmful, they will claim you are biased because you are motivated by values such as promoting equality. This is how they are lured into supporting hate groups. And as an emotionless objective genius who ignores morality in favor of dubious logic, Siri looks like their poster boy.
Moving on from rationalist wish fulfillment, Watts is once again trying to create a teaser but throwing in too many things. This time he at least has some context to fill it out, but he needs to stop meandering and choose something to focus on. It might be the disaster with the scramblers, the fate of Earth, or being trapped in a coffin. Choosing all of them is just confusing the issue.
It’s time for the last lines of the prologue.
He may have been wrong. I may have been. But that, that distance—that chronic sense of being an alien among your own kind—it’s not entirely a bad thing.
It came in especially handy when the real aliens came calling.
Oh hey, look, Watts actually created an effective teaser. We have some intriguing context and we aren’t zooming past a bunch of random stuff. Even so, Watts is giving up tension by emphasizing how cool Siri is. That’s one of the issues with making a super candied protagonist: their problems feel trivial.
Let’s consolidate the last three paragraphs into a stronger teaser, ignoring how this objectivity worship is absurd.
Example
I may have grown up distant but I grew up objective, and I have Robert Paglino to thank for that. He may have been wrong, but the distance he gave me—that chronic sense of being an alien among your own kind—it’s not entirely a bad thing.
I needed every drop of it when the real aliens came calling.
I took the first sentence from the previous zoomy paragraph and dumped the rest. Then to make the chain of logic clearer, I attributed the distance to Pag and took out the line focusing on the protagonist. Then I altered the last sentence so the alien problem wouldn’t seem easy.
I did take minor liberties with the content. I don’t know if this edit actually fits what Watts was trying to say about Siri – partly because what’s written here doesn’t make much sense.
Complete Your Arcs
Let’s take a bird’s-eye view of the character revelation this prologue is supposed to deliver and how it’s executed.
- Siri has an operation that renders him emotionless, but he’s still really observant about human behavior.
- He doesn’t view other kids as human and considers killing some of them.
- As a result, Pag tells Siri that he’s not the same person he was before he had surgery.
- Expositing, future Siri says the friend was making a valid argument.
- Then future Siri describes how after the incident, he was still emotionless and observant, but because of Pag, he was also objective.
Watts narrates this to illustrate a personal realization of Siri’s, but then he inserts a plot hook that’s far more important: Does Siri still think murdering people is okay??? Siri manages to stop himself from attacking his friend, but he defends his behavior toward the other kids. Then the scene is halted for exposition, leaving this important question unanswered.
This exposition isn’t great for the personal realization either. If this lesson is important enough to justify a prologue, it should be dramatized in real time. In stories, important new insights are turning points – receiving the insight should allow the protagonist to solve a problem they are facing. For instance, maybe recognizing he’s not the same person allows Siri to understand why he shouldn’t kill people. I’m not sure how that would work, partly because Siri’s motivation for killing makes no sense, but that’s not important. The realization is the highest priority, so if the conflict doesn’t match, it should be replaced with another one.
Without a meaningful arc centering on this realization, this flashback isn’t pulling its weight. Watts could have just told us that Siri’s friend said a mean thing to him once; we have no reason to see it unfold.
But that’s not the only issue here. How does being called a different person make Siri objective? He was already an emotionless and observant outsider before this event. Since we’ve jumped to future Siri, we don’t even know what he thought of the statement at the time, much less how it impacted him.
Maybe it’s supposed to be that Siri realized he was wrong, or that the idea taught him to embrace multiple perspectives, or maybe that he considers himself an outsider now. Hints of all of these are in the text; perhaps Watts hasn’t made up his mind.
Of course, none of these options would make Siri “grow up objective” because that’s not a real thing. An outsider perspective is still a perspective with its own biases. Instead, Siri could be more objective about some ideas. If he views himself as an alien among his own people, being more objective about human exceptionalism would work well. But the rationalists reading this book will probably buy any explanation for objectivity, because they have an emotional reason to – they’ll love the book, they’ll love Siri, and they’ll want to believe that they can be perfectly objective too.
Overall, Watts has an engaging voice, he knows how to create conflict, and he’s adept at adding novelty. But the actual ideas he’s expressing are poorly thought through. He tends to ramble and meander, he can’t choose what to focus on, his characterization is inconsistent, and he has a reckless disregard for accuracy. Most of all, he is turning oppression against disabled people into a dehumanizing storytelling device, just so he can make the story more edgy.
Do you want us to look at your story? Our content editors are at your service.
Wow, this is just … bad.
I’m all for characters who have a darker side, for people who are ready or willing or have it easy to kill, for instance, even if they’re heroes, but that is just bad. Even if you’d suggest that Siri has become something akin to a sociopath or psychopath (who, among other things, are characterized by a lack of empathy), that still doesn’t work out. Those kids on the ground are out of it, so there’s no need to consider killing them – they’re no longer a danger, the action was successful, anything else will just lead to trouble for Siri. Given how quickly he had them down, even killing them as an ‘example’ to disencourage further bullying wouldn’t be necessary – he’s proven himself more of a danger than they’ve bargained for, that’s enough.
And that whole ‘kill the weak’ thing – that could be something which is taught to children as a principle (the Nazis, for instance, did their best to breed empathy and the wish to help ‘the weak’ out of children, but with mixed success), but it’s not instinctive or natural. Humans have a natural tendency to stand together and work with each other, it’s what has allowed us to survive and thrive in the first place. We’re not ‘killing the weak’ to strengthen our group, we’re forming groups so ‘the weak’ have a protected place to be.
Siri sounds like every inaccurate and horrific stereotype of autism, even if the word is never used
I think Siri did get explicitly identified as autistic later in the book (or at least, autism-like), IIRC, but it’s been a while since I read it.
What I do remember is that the book treats autism and psychopathy rather interchangeably (did you know that autistic people and psychopaths both descend from vampires, by the way?) which is … full of unfortunate implications to say the least.
Siri is never explicitly identified as autistic, though you’re quite right about all the stereotypes they pile on him.
Instead, the vampires in the novel are identified as being autistic. Indeed, being autistic is a prerequisite for being a vampire, according to Blindsight.
Oh, joy.
Well I certainly got screwed then. Where’s my fangs?
I want to fly as a bat already, come on!
Also, I’m very perplexed and bemused as to why this book is so popular and why so many people [including Booktubers] love it so much, without bringing up any of these intrinsic problems. How did they miss it? Or is it just one of those things that people don’t really think about much, so it all went overlooked?
Do you know Searle’s Chinese Room thought experiment? Siri is supposed to be a person who is a perpetual Chinese Room, with no “gut” feeling or real understanding of other beings; so he has a career as someone who interprets the intellectual output of transhumans. And subsequently is sent to make first contact with the aliens who are super intelligent but non-sentient.
It also really shines as a work of hard cognitive sf, with many clear references to ongoing research and debates of interest.
I guess the setup for how he got to be who he is is problematic, but I don’t see where a line was crossed between this being a dark story about a dystopian future, and somehow advocating for it, or portraying it as inevitable. I mean can I write about a murder and not be accused of advocating for murder?
I thought the writing tended to serve the purpose of the story very well. I feel Murderbot was very much the opposite. The narrator’s voice felt entirely inauthentic as that of a machine struggling to come to terms with humans, and it was so matter of fact that I had trouble maintaining interest.
Ugh, sorry, first comment on this site and I misthreaded!
Something else I found extremely weird was why all the swearing?? Aren’t these kids meant to be eight? The dialogue was way too articulate and felt much closer to adolescents than eight-year-olds.
Probably being so Objective and Rational (TM) gave Siri the vocabulary of a teenager and also projected it onto nearby children like some kind of video game aura.
I find the criticism based on the word “objective” worrying. Objectivity is a term that mostly exists outside the discourse of “current day rationalists” and is seen as an important principle of modern law and society. It is a term that has been in use for centuries and that is not to be discarded because of yesterday’s twitter debate, if you pardon the hyperbole. We could argue whether a person can bear any attribute perfectly, but an honest effort to be objective is important and not something to be shunned or ridiculed. The same goes for rationality. I agree that neither objectivity nor rationality can be superficial, and that all factors must be taken into consideration, but – at least to me – your comment and the related part of the article has anti-intellectual, anti-scientific and anti-rational undertones, which is very dangerous, especially considering the current rise of anti-vaxers and conspiracy theorists to prominence. In the worst-case scenario denying objective scientific facts can cost lives. I also cannot overlook that the criticism based on the word “objective” in the article is based around a strawman of “rationalists the author has known personally”. You can do better.
Hey Sedivak, so I’m gonna try explaining this once on the assumption that you’re genuinely confused and not acting in bad faith: The issue is not with the concepts of being objective or rational. Those are good things, and in any reasonable space, they are so uncontroversial that they rarely come up. The issue is when people declare themselves to be more objective or rational than others. That’s not how it works. You demonstrate rationality and objectivity by being rational and objective, the same way you demonstrate being a good person by doing good things. Declaring “I am a good person” is meaningless at best, and makes you seem rather suspect. The same is true for rationality and objectivity. When Siri declares himself to be more rational than others, all he’s really doing is saying that only his biased perspective matters. This is the same thing done by a number of self declared alt-right “rationalists.” That is the issue here, that is what the article objects to, and that’s what I’m making fun of with my (TM) joke.
If you’re not familiar with this issue, I’d recommend checking out this video series: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xGawJIseNY&list=PLJA_jUddXvY7v0VkYRbANnTnzkA_HMFtQ
It’s long, but it covers the basics.
Thank you, this clarification helps a lot, because the original article based it’s criticism on the word objective itself as “a cultural signal of current-day rationalists, who are usually atheist white men”.
The issue of people declaring themselves to be more objective or rational than others, does not strike me as the leitmotiff of that part of the article. Instead I read it as four paragraphs of “humans are incapable of objectivity and people who promote it are unethical”. Also the term “atheist white men” is used as if it was something shamefull. Anyway, it’s possible that I misread it.
This is a great example of why I wish storytellers wouldn’t try to use definitive neurological explanations for their plot devices! There’s too much to get wrong or misunderstand, especially since we as a society actually know relatively little about how the brain works. These misrepresentations can have negative effects on real people with neurologic or psychiatric disorders!
Also, I got very annoyed with Watt’s excessive use of italics.
Great article!
I award that prologue one big Yikes™
I almost added it to my TBR a while ago, but something about the blurb put me off. I had a feeling the author was going to use the disabled characters as curio instead of actually humanising them and writing them as people, and I was right.
Seeing representation done badly reminds of how important it is to do it well.
Now, I’m going to write about my blind, autistic, non binary alien mermaid with respect and nothing shall stop me :D
Nope nope nope. – Love your comments.
I didn’t read the book but the scenes you showed feel quite creepy to me. This so obviously not ok. If you consider that stories tend to show the values and believes of the author,… I wonder what he wants to tell us here. Definitely won’t read the book.
Siri’s personality in this prologue seems like an interpersonal analogue of blind people getting supersenses.
Somebody hasn’t figured out yet that Ender’s Game is a messed-up narrative.
THE BEST PART
THE BEST PART
Is that this detached view of violence and this whole deal from the prologue, literally never comes up again in the whole novel except as fuel for Siri to angst over how he’s not a human being really and he doesn’t feel emotion, despite feeling emotion on the previous page
Oh and also it’s used as a crutch at times to argue the novel’s Big Thesis, which is that advanced aliens don’t need conscious thought and conscious thought is stupid.
But in characterization? FORGET ABOUT IT.
Siri claiming to feel no emotion while being constantly angry could be a great indictment of certain far right youtubers if Watts weren’t playing it completely straight.
Hey, now. Siri has more emotional range than anger.
He’s frequently also a huge sad sack who mopes about his sad backstory, or just kind of mutely horrified as he watches his teammates do horrific things to aliens while all yelling at each other how not sentient the aliens are, so it doesn’t count!
Yep.
It’s especially funny when you consider that, like, half of the book consists of flashbacks, but none that link to the prologue. Instead, the flashbacks are mostly about Siri’s fridged former girlfriend Chelsea. Considering how much time we spend with her, one might have expected her to be at least mentioned in the prologue.
I remember reading Blindsight and liking it when I read it a few years ago. All of the ‘big ideas’ were interesting and explored well, the whole ‘alien among his own kind’ angle certainly struck a chord with me.
How did all of this [gestures vaguely yet wildly] go over my head? Was I just that dense as to not notice it, or was I absurdly hyper-toxic and oblivious to it? Neither possibility is exactly a fun thought. I think I nee
The rest of the book is not *quite* as bad as the prologue would indicate. The writing is more coherent, Watts eases up a bit on the edge, and rest of the very Neurodivergent crew of the Theseus (how do I do italics in these comments? His overuse of italics, sadly, does not improve. ) are depicted sympathetically… somewhat. It’s hard to explain, but the best way I could put it (again, I may be misremembering, and I am honestly a little afraid to re-read it), is that they are depicted *well* but not *positively*, if that makes sense.
There is a tendency when depicting marginalized groups to sand away the rough edges. To give them few flaws, and to distance those flaws from their marginalization a much as possible. If the stigmatized representation of mental illness is of someone violent and dangerous, then a ‘good’ representation is of them as being either innocent victims of circumstance, manic pixie dream girls, or a normal-ish person who is well medicated enough that it never really comes up. And so on. Their conditions will seldom go beyond ‘quirky’ into anything an audience might find off-putting, they will rarely be upset or traumatized by their societal abuse in any lingering way, and they will *never* be angry or hold a grudge unless it is a flaw the character is working through.
Blindsight… doesn’t do this. The crew of the Theseus are damaged, angry people. It is made crystal clear at length that their ‘damage’ is the fault of society not accepting them, and that their anger is at least partially justified. But acknowledging that their suffering is not their fault does not make that suffering- or it’s scar’s- go away. They are allowed to be angry and unpleasant without being demonized for it, in a way that few similar characters (or real people, for that matter) are allowed. They, on some level, hate the world… and it is said, often and loudly, that that world partially deserves that hate and it’s consequences for it’s mistreatment of them. It is an *odd* dynamic, and not really a pleasant one, and one that does not always work quite entirely, but I see what Watts was trying to do, and I ate it right up as a kid. I have… mixed feelings on it now, but in the abstract it is a interesting and novel take, one I would not mind a more skilled author doing a version of.
Your comment about objectivity being an illusion actually comes up later. Siri, though less emotional than the average human, does indeed feel a great deal at times… and, not being used to it, is constitutionally incapable of processing them when they do come up. The flashbacks to the rest of his childhood- a father who was always away working, a mother who flat-out left, blaming himself and his condition for both of these, but having neither the language nor a willing ear to articulate it- is very much A Thing That Happens, and honestly hits a little too close to home. The death of Siri’s girlfriend is legitimately tragic, because Siri *wants* to reach out to her, emotionally, but is flatly incapable of it. The words refuse to come, and the gestures feel wrong in some hard-to-articulate way.
Saratsi the vampire (half of the names in this book start with an S, for some reason), however, is indeed emotionless and objective, and is because of it the most horrifying thing on the ship until the aliens show up. If Siri is a riff on Spock- rational and stoic, but with at least some interior emotion- then Saratsi is a Borg with free will, while the aliens are an even more extreme and horrifying step in the same direction.
Funny thing is, I suspect that modern Peter Watts would actually agree with most of your criticisms. The nominal sequel/sidequel, Echopraxia, seems more like him taking a mulligan on the broad concepts and beats with an extra decade of writing experience under his belt. More sympathetic characters, less emphasis on shock value, better exposition delivery, ect. It even retcons the first book to take the edge off of some of the abelism specifically.
Am I the only one laughing at an emotionless and “robot-like” person being named Siri?
And Blindsight came first, too!
For instance, some dude might say: “White people score better on IQ tests than Black people. It’s just a fact.”
Interesting fact – and a true one, too – the immigrant group with the highest rate of PhDs in America? Nigerian-Americans.
Putting that aside, anybody who attempts to pull the IQ test nonsense without first accounting for the cumulative effects of a high rate of childhood poverty + lead poisoning is obviously full of it.
Also, wanna bet this author was a big fan of Ender’s Game as a kid?
Funny that you should mention that. To quote Peter Watt’s own blog:
“Reactionary bigots, homophobes, science deniers; those types should be fought tooth and nail. But judging by some of the things I’ve seen emerging from Card’s keyboard lately, he’s leveled up way past those descriptors, all the way to Fourth-Degree Black Belt Loon— and I find it hard to engage in combat when my eyes are rolled this far back in their sockets.”
Even if he’s not a fan of OSC now, that doesn’t necessarily mean he didn’t like Ender’s Game as a kid, though I’ll withdraw my hypothesis pending more evidence.
What is that about lead poisoning? I have never heard about it in this context.
He is referencing something called the ‘lead-crime hypothesis’.
It’s worth a look on it’s own, but the tldr version is that rates of violent crime have been falling for decades, at least in the US. Childhood lead exposure causes all sorts of developmental problems in adulthood, but the most relevant ones are increased aggression and reduced impulse control. The lead-crime hypothesis claims that the decades-long decline in crime rates is at least partially the result of phasing out lead, most notably in plumbing and leaded gasoline. Since testing for and removing lead from houses is expensive, richer neighborhoods are de-leaded sooner, and so poorer families must, statistically, deal with the developmental issues caused by lead at a higher rate, acting as a compounding element of the principle of generational poverty, which is itself also a contributing factor to criminality.
The hypothesis is not universally accepted, but is worth a look for science nerds like myself.
For the record, it should also be noted that environmental lead exposure can effect a lot more than crime rates, and may be a factor in test score differences, along with numerous other biases in testing. It’s a complex subject and there’s a lot written on it.
https://www.who.int/bulletin/archives/78(9)1068.pdf
Thank you, Jarosch and Oren, for the information.
From the linked WHO paper it would appear that lead esposure in America could lead to 1-6 points decrease in IQ and (according to wikipedia) roughly the same magnitude of change in behavior in the affected individuals. The main cause cited in the paper was leaded petrol.
However wikipedia cites a study according to which it was estimated (in 2007) that by 2020, all adults in their 20s and 30s will have grown up without any direct exposure to gasoline lead during childhood, from which I understand, that in this age group, lead may no longer be a factor significantly contributing to the aforesaid problems. The WHO paper, which is from 2000, confirms the steep decline in Pb blood levels.
A 2018 longitudinal study conducted in New Zealand did not find any significant correlation between changes in Pb blood levels and crime rates (wikipedia).
While it’s true that that age group will no longer have grown up with leaded gasoline, many people in that age group are still at high risk of lead poisoning, largely from paint or from contaminated soil. This correlates pretty strongly with poverty, which in the US also correlates with being African-American for a whole host of reasons. If you have money you can move into a new home, do lead abatement, or at least paint your walls.
I’m really glad you brought up the lead poisoning and childhood poverty. Too often the IQ gap is brought up with zero context.
There was also a quote from Ted Bundy before the prologue. That’s just. That’s something.
So that is a society where it is more acceptable to be an emotionless killer than having epilepsy… I see.
My MC is a killer (well, not quite, but he is a special operative turned spy and then mercenary, none of his jobs being specifically to kill, but he had his share of hostile casualties) and he is ok with that by compertamentalizing and focusing on that it is a burden of his job. When things get personal with the villain, of course his approach is to kill him.
On the other hand, the villain is also a killer, but i don’t portray him like a “madman” or a “lunatic” or even “psychopath”. In fact killing people is, in a way, also a burden of his job, being a mobster. He is just ruthless.
Are they good people? absolutelly no. Can they be engaging? i hope so. What i won’t do is to make it appear as a good thing.
Thanks for tearing this book apart, I’d have needed this review so much earlier.
When I was younger and when I was a Rationalist™ myself, I thought this book was the pinnacle of good writing. It had realistic science, intriguing ideas, and lots of edge which appealed to my depressed and science-hungry late-teen/young adult self. Even then, I found the book incredibly hard to understand, but I thought this was just due to me not being Rational™ enough.
Unfortunately, my own writing got influenced by it. I ended up writing a self-published sci-fi story that had all of Blindsight’s shortcomings (a protagonist with little agency, too much edge, difficult-to-understand writing, being massively overburdened, prioritizing scientific accuracy above everything else, etc.) dialed up to eleven due to my inexperience. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not gonna blame Blindsight on my personal shortcomings, but I think it gave me a false sense of validation on how my mistakes weren’t so bad because Watts had made them, too.
That being said, I can’t quite agree with the idea of Siri being a wish-fulfillment character for Rationalists™. Blindsight got published the same year as The God Delusion, but he likely started writing much earlier. I don’t think Rationalists™ were big enough yet for them to be a profitable target demographic. Plus, going by the quote about O.S. Card Jarosh provided, Watts just doesn’t strike me as being an alt-righter.
Then there’s also the fact that, when speculating on the author’s values, it pays to look at the work as a whole. Because, while Siri might think he’s super-rational and objective and all, the ending shows he’s anything but. Due to his biases, he imagines things that never happened, and the vampire Jukka Saratsi even gives him a speech about how he isn’t half as impartial as he thinks he is. It’s part of what leads to the book’s tragic ending. Siri comes off more like a deconstruction of the rationalist type than anything else.
But I agree that the writing as a whole is rather poor and I enjoyed watching you tear through that prologue.
I’m sure you have been asked that before, but where can we make suggestions for further critiques?
If you’d like to suggest a book to critique, our contact form is the best place to do it. You can find that under “Contact Us” at the bottom of the page. Just be aware that we get a lot of critique suggestions so it’s not possible for us to get to them all.
>I ended up writing a self-published sci-fi story that had all of Blindsight’s shortcomings (a protagonist with little agency, too much edge, difficult-to-understand writing, being massively overburdened, prioritizing scientific accuracy above everything else, etc.) dialed up to eleven due to my inexperience.
Bruh. You literally just summarized all of the problem in my first novel. Don’t forget “heavy with philosophy”.
Goddamn. Well, we live and learn, I guess.
Editor’s note: I’ve removed a comment for attacking the post’s author, something we do not allow.
oof.
I think it’s uncharitable to try and analyze a character like this based solely on the prologue. Siri presents himself as being emotionless and “objective”, but the end of the book makes it clear that he’s completely incorrect, an unreliable narrator whose biggest errors and omissions are those regarding himself.
Siri believes he doesn’t have emotions, but based on his actions, he clearly does. He has a kind of emotional blindsight – his emotions exist and inform his actions, but he doesn’t have a conscious EXPERIENCE of them. As a result, he’s force to come up with post-hoc rationalizations for what he’s done, like someone with blindsight jumping out of the way of a bus. He believes himself to be perfectly objective, but he projects his own feelings and desires onto the people around him, like when he believed that Bates was planning to mutiny against Sarasti because of his own fear and distrust.
There’s certainly a lot to criticize about Blindsight, but I don’t think just taking the word of an unreliable narrator at face value within the context of only a single chapter is a very effective way to do it.
I think the problem with Blindsight is that Watts was looking for inspiration for his ideas in all the wrong places.
The central theme of Blindsight, the idea that intelligent life capable of building civilization doesn’t need self-awareness, is pretty interesting, but solution for that isn’t found in neurodivergence.
The autistic, the sociopaths and what-not are just as sentient as the neurotypical, still capable of emotions, still as interested in arts and such.
I don’t know what a non-sentient hominid evolved to hunt other hominids would be like, but it wouldn’t be like Sarasti.