Paperback, 384 pages
English language
Published March 4, 2008 by Tor Books.
Two months since the stars fell...
Two months since sixty-five thousand alien objects clenched around the Earth like a luminous fist, screaming to the heavens as the atmosphere burned them to ash. Two months since that moment of brief, bright surveillance by agents unknown.
Two months of silence while a world holds its breath.
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. Whatever's out there isn't talking to us. It's talking to some distant star, perhaps. Or perhaps to something closer, something en route.
So who do you send to force introductions on an intelligence with motives unknown, maybe unknowable? Who do you send to meet the alien when the alien doesn't want to meet?
You send a linguist with multiple personalities, her brain surgically partitioned into separate, …
Two months since the stars fell...
Two months since sixty-five thousand alien objects clenched around the Earth like a luminous fist, screaming to the heavens as the atmosphere burned them to ash. Two months since that moment of brief, bright surveillance by agents unknown.
Two months of silence while a world holds its breath.
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. Whatever's out there isn't talking to us. It's talking to some distant star, perhaps. Or perhaps to something closer, something en route.
So who do you send to force introductions on an intelligence with motives unknown, maybe unknowable? Who do you send to meet the alien when the alien doesn't want to meet?
You send a linguist with multiple personalities, her brain surgically partitioned into separate, sentient processing cores. You send a biologist so radically interfaced with machinery that he sees X-rays and tastes ultrasound, so compromised by grafts and splices that he no longer feels his own flesh. You send a pacifist warrior in the faint hope she won't be needed, and a fainter hope that she'll do any good if she is needed. 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. And you send a synthesist—an informational topologist with half his mind gone—as an interface between here and there, a conduit through which the Dead Center might hope to understand the Bleeding Edge.
You send them all to the edge of interstellar space, praying you can trust such freaks and retrofits with the fate of a world. You fear they may be more alien than the thing they've been sent to find.
But you'd give anything for that to be true, if you only knew what was waiting for them....
If you like Vandermeer's Southern Reach, but wish it were a little (just) less fantastical, you'll love this. Watts throws lots of ideas at you, all supported by extensive references and citations. Well worth the read
I loved the attempt to describe an alien that is fundamentally /alien/. trying to find a scientific basis for having vampires in the story was... interesting. the "climax" of the novel made no sense, although in its favour, I guess that made it a surprise. the casual and incredibly pervasive misogyny was tiresome, and seems to be on the part of the author rather than just another characteristic to make the protagonist unlikable (it wasn't necessary), considering that there are relatively few slurs in the novel but four misogynistic ones, and one of those is slung by the author in his endnotes at three scientists whose work he thinks insufficiently deals with their areas of research.
part of me wants to know how the core ideas spin out in the sequels but the much bigger part of me wants to avoid anything else by this author.
Who can introduce p-vampires in a serious sf story and get away with it? Peter Watts, is the answer.
