Michele McCarthy: Welcome to “Science Fiction First.” I am your hostess, Michele McCarthy. Today I have with me, Jim McCarthy. Jim McCarthy: Glad to be here, as always. Michele: And Roy van de Water. Roy: Hi, how is it going? Jim: Hey, Roy. Michele: Thanks for coming today. Today we are going to talk about the book, “Blindsight” by Peter Watts. Blindsight is a hard-as-diamonds Sci?Fi book. It’s about a man named Siri Keeton, who goes on a journey all the way out to the Oort Cloud to find some aliens that are threatening Earth. Jim: I’ve been waiting to hear your summary of this book. [laughter] Michele: Quite a drama ensues from there. What did you guys think? Jim: Well, it’s kind of breathtaking. It’s big, complex. I’ve only read it on Kindle. It’s a big work. I really loved it actually. That’s my assessment in a thumbnail. Michele: What about you, Roy? Roy: It was definitely very technical and complicated. It brought up some fascinating concepts, but I felt like the author came up with the concepts and then figured out a story to tie them together. Michele: Like he had the concepts and then he said, “Here’s a story to tie these all together?” Roy: Exactly. Jim: Gives an excuse to talk about these ideas. Roy: Right. Michele: I got that feeling too. I read it twice, I listened to it twice. The audio is very good, by the way. Especially on the second listen, I felt like, “Hey, you are jerking me around. I can’t really tell what’s going on here.” [laughs] There was always doubt in my mind. “Did that really happen or didn’t it? What am I supposed to believe about this?” It happened a lot during this book for me. Jim: Yeah, it was intentional. Michele: By the author, you think it was intentional? Jim: Definitely. Michele: Conscious? Jim: Right. Michele: Which is a hilarious question while we are talking about this book. Jim: He was very much self-aware when he wrote the book, I think. Michele: [laughs] Jim: Which is the big theme of the book, for those who haven’t read it yet: self?awareness and consciousness. Michele: In all “Science Fiction First” podcasts there will be spoilers. We hold nothing back. If you want to read the book first, make sure you do it before you listen. Jim: Right. I’m not sure that we are very good spoilers anyway. But, in this particular book, it’s hard to spoil. I guess there are some plot points. Roy: Yeah, I think I can try to describe the ending to somebody as precisely as possible, and it still wouldn’t spoil anything for them. Because they wouldn’t understand….. Jim: Plus, they get three different endings. Michele: I think, he didn’t know what the ending was. I walked away saying, “No way.” You don’t know. You’re trying to make up an ending, but you’re not sure what happened. [laughs] Jim: He kind of mentioned that too. In the afterword, he mentioned that he read a book by another author. I forgot what the other book was. That author reached a very similar conclusion even though Peter disagreed with him at every point. Michele: Oh yeah, I forgot, I should have reread the afterword. Jim: There’s a whole story there between those two guys I figured too ?? like a life?long rivalry. Michele: I have not come across this idea before. I found it very disturbing. This book has been described as very dark by a lot of critics. The idea that self?awareness, sentience, and consciousness was not a benefit to a species: I found that very provocative. It really bothers me ?? that idea. I want to just dismiss it and not think about it. It bothers me so much. Roy: Right. Even he kind of contradicts himself in his own book about it. In all of those flashbacks where he’s dealing with his relationship with Chelsea, he ends up eventually not being able to make it work because he doesn’t have the same consciousness. He’s not able to empathize with her at all. Michele: Right. I felt like the author was sowing seeds of doubt in me, but I also felt he came down on the side of sentience in the end. Maybe that’s just me. Roy: That there was value to it? Michele: Yeah. Jim: What do you guys make of this Siri? Siri is the main character, spelled just like the Apple product and with great irony. This was written much before Apple, right? 2000 or something? Michele: 2006. Jim: 2006. Siri was out just recently. Siri is the primary narrator, and the central character ?? the hero, if you will. He’s what they call a “Chinese room”. Is that right? Does everybody agree with that? Roy: Yeah. Michele: Yes. Well, he describes himself that way. Jim: Yes, he describes himself that way. Roy: I wonder if Siri ?? the Apple product ?? is an homage to the character. Michele: It could be. Jim: It could well be. Roy: Siri, the concept, is very similar to a Chinese room. Michele: Right. Jim: That’s the hope, actually, is that it’s a good one, like this one. This was as good as you could get in a computer program, this guy ?? if that’s what he was. What was he? What do you make of him? Michele: The seeds of doubt were always being sowed about Siri. Was he a good guy or not? I finally went, “Oh, I get it.” All he’s doing ?? and he even says this ?? is, “I’m a synthesist. I just observe and tell you what’s going on.” He was supposed to be our eyes on this story that happened. He was just the narrator. That’s what I walked away with. Jim: Unless he’s lying about that synthesist stuff. Michele: Again, seeds of doubt. [laughs] Roy: Right, because even though he talks about the fact that he can’t empathize with people, he still seems to act in ways in which he very much empathizes with people, or he’s very concerned about their… Michele: Yeah, he clearly empathizes. He was clearly upset that Szpindel died. He was very upset when Sarasti attacked him. Jim: He was not keen on the vampire. He had a fear reaction to the vampire. Michele: He had lots of emotional reactions to the vampire. Jim: Lots of emotional reactions. The vampire was his tormentor / father. Michele: Which brings up another thing. [laughs] What do you guys think about…this is pure sci?fi, except there’s a vampire, which just seemed… Jim: The vampire’s put in a scientific context. Michele: It seemed like a weird thing to stick in this particular book. Roy: I agree, especially since it turns out he wasn’t the vampire at all the entire time. He was being controlled by the ship since the very beginning. Michele: Right. [laughs] Right. Jim: I happened to miss that one, actually. There’s so much in this book that I didn’t even know what I was missing, even glancing through it a couple of times. Roy: Some of it felt ?? the fact that Sarasti was actually being controlled by the ship, I felt like that was just added in at the very end. It didn’t seem to actually affect anything. Jim: Exactly, I think that’s one of the underlying points. Whether Siri felt empathy or not, or whether the Chinese room ?? which is basically like the classic Eliza program from many years ago, a talking computer that’s pretending it’s real by using the words you give it ?? the whole point was that if things behave correctly and behave well, then they’re good. If they don’t, they’re not. It doesn’t make any difference what’s going on inside of them. That was my take away for the whole book, that it’s purely a theoretical dialogue. If what motivates you is an algorithm to persist, with the data stream feeding your presentation…that’s a pretty good description of human life, as far as I can tell. People take input, they process it, and behave. Michele: You sound like the book right now. [laughs] Jim: The book had a big impact on me. I’m speaking in an underwhelmed way, because it’s almost unapproachable. It’s a really big book, and it’s a masterpiece of science writing. I’m not sure it’s a masterpiece of fiction writing. In fact, I’m sure it’s not. Roy: Almost all of those concepts that he talks about I started getting interested in and started researching Anton’s disease and Cotard’s Syndrome. They are real things. There are actual people who have that concept of Blindsight where they can’t see, but if you throw something at them, they’ll catch it. Or the exact opposite, where they will swear they can see, although they physically can’t and they will describe a room… Jim: Don’t we all have that? I would swear I’m not doing anything stupid, then come to find out I am. It’s a Blindsight phenomenon. My whole life is really that way. My conscience is so narrow compared to my existence. Michele: He chose out of five hundred ideas. Big ideas. Jim: Fifty thousand ideas. Michele: He chose Blindsight as the one to name the book. What do you think that means? That that is the one he chose? Roy: I was thinking that from the perspective of all of the different diseases and syndromes that he mentions, that one most closely models the end of the book. The idea that you are reacting purely on an instinctual level and that your conscience doesn’t even get the opportunity to get in the way. Jim: You are way smarter than you know. Michele: What part of the end of the book makes you put that together with the end of the book? Roy: He talks about the vampires are going to start overrunning the earth, right? Michele: Right. Roy: That they have a much higher chance of survival against whatever aliens the Rorschach ship came from. All of those vampires were reacting on a purely instinctual level. They were computers in the same way that the aliens were. Michele: That’s a good one. Jim: My taking of the central meaning of the book is an insight I had about two?thirds of the way through that the story was an allegory. The entire book, every name, every object, every creature, every event, every idea has an allegorical instantiation. The central allegory, the central figure is Rorschach. All of this is about humans locating themselves by projection and Blindsight. Michele: Right, and calling that scary, alien thing out there in space, calling that Rorschach… Jim: Is the key. Michele: I think it’s provocative to the reader to say that this book is going to make you look at yourself. Which is recursive. [laughter] Jim: This book claims that all you can do is look at yourself. Michele: We are so caught up in that, that it’s a problem. Jim: It’s our nature. That’s all. Michele: At some points, I feel he makes the argument that it’s a problem. Jim: You don’t have to be some sort of literary maven to get that Rorschach is telling us that what we are looking at and examining is telling us about us, not about it. Roy: Yes. I think that he especially brings that out when they are talking about interrogating the two starfish looking things. That the entire interrogation was really just to get information out of the interrogators. Michele: Yes, that was a good one. Jim: Yes, that’s pretty cool. Big Ben is the way that we organize historically. It’s the time keeper of the world. It’s a time mapping device in Great Britain, and one can rule the world with that clock by organizing the world’s time. Big Ben is another big thing out near Rorschach, it’s an enormous whatever you want to call it. Roy: I had a hard time understanding exactly what Big Ben was because at some point they describe it as a gravitational lens. At another it’s a gas giant bigger than Jupiter. I read those parts multiple times and I’m still really confused. Michele: I gave up on that part. Jim: Isn’t it a big enormous planet? An enormous cosmic phenomenon. Michele: It had an enormous mass, but it didn’t necessarily have an enormous volume from what I took away. Jupiter is huge. Jim: Right. Michele: If you drove by it in your spaceship, it would take you a long time. I get the sense that Big Ben wasn’t necessarily huge, it just had a huge mass. More like a dark hole or a singularity. Roy: Was it being controlled by the ship or was the ship following it? I never understood any of it. Michele: I gave up trying to understand Big Ben. Jim: This is what I think: It’s an allegory. Big Ben was in Britain when it organized the world’s time. This is the chronometer and the SpacioMeter. Michele: And it was the chronometer for everything that went on because everything was rotating around it. Like hands on a clock, everything was always rotating around it. Jim: Right, if you take the whole thing allegorically, you can figure it out what’s going on theoretically. Everything is named explicitly. Theseus was the founder of Greek civilization. It’s a founding myth. I had to look it up: I don’t know these things. I knew that it had significance. Theseus slayed monsters and that’s what founded civilization. Michele: How interesting. Jim: If you go through the book, you can track them all down. The question is, “Are you going to?” [laughter] Roy: Right. Jim: I really love what this guy taught me about Science Fiction though. I will say that, no matter what I’ll say. Michele: What did he teach you? Jim: He taught me that the science part could be almost all of it. It could be science writing with a trace of a plot. Michele: With a little bit of plot turning. Jim: With enough of a plot to be a puzzle. It’s a thinking man’s book. There’s no feeling: That was the problem. Michele: I felt the same way that I’m not in love with this book. I liked it and was more than happy to read it twice. I would read it again, and I took away all of these crazy ideas from it. It was really interesting. It did lack plot, it lacked emotion. Jim: The plot had really cool elements. He’s a very imaginative guy. Somewhere in there ?? I should have the quote in front of me, but, oh well ?? somewhere, the guy goes, “OK, so this great scientist, that great scientist, this great…or even some old hack who’s writing science fiction instead of science…” Michele: [laughs] I missed that. Jim: “…who’s struggling to get all the way to…” What’s the word? What’s the word when no one knows who you are? Roy: Obscurity? Jim: Obscurity! He was struggling to get to obscurity. That was the sense. I thought, I can relate to that. Ain’t that the truth, my friend? He was poking fun of himself as a writer, and the futility of fame. I really liked it, because it says that he’s completely on top of his game here. He knows what he’s doing. He’s writing science. He’s adding story to it because he has some sort of freakish surplus of ideas. Michele: I like what you say about that because it reminds me that it taught me about myself. When I read Sci?Fi…gentlemen, I like it hard. [laughs] Jim: Oh my goodness! Well, as you know I like to… Michele: [laughs] I learned that about myself from this book, because I liked it! Jim: I knew that all along. I could have told you that! Michele: [laughs] I liked it. I got that it had plot holes, and I got that it had all these problems, but I liked it because it was so hard. Jim: By that you mean not difficult, but so much learning that… Michele: Just, “science idea, science idea, science idea, philosophy idea, philosophy idea”…just throwing these ideas out in a way that’s provocative. Roy: I wonder, though, if it wouldn’t have been better for him to take each of those ideas and tell them as short stories. He has all sorts of fantastic ideas. The concept of heaven, the concept of the conscious, and all of that other stuff. Jim: Yes, that’s a good idea. Roy: The plot that he has doesn’t really work with all of those elements. He could have saved some of them for a different story. Michele: Yeah, I wished he would have slowed down. Jim: As a writer ?? a sometime writer, let’s put it that way ?? I know that when you end up…all of a sudden you go 40 pages or 20 big pages or 10 really rich pages with some person talking. Like a lecture almost, that’s the last recourse of a broken plot. That’s what you do when you’re out of stuff and you try to make a character say all your ideas. It worked for me in this book, oddly, but it confused me the whole time he did it. Did you ever read anything richer, in terms of very cool ideas? Michele: No. There would be a paragraph where I would be like, “What? What? What? What?” [laughs] Jim: Yeah. I think it’s a real masterpiece of science…fiction. It did teach me… Roy: You’re right. If he had taken the time to slow down and explore a little bit more, I think there could have been some really cool stuff. Michele: Definitely. Roy: I think the Icarus stream is another great example. I would have loved to hear more about that. Michele: He could still do it. He could still… Jim: He’s not going to do it, though. Michele: [laughs] Yeah, he won’t do it. But he could! Jim: This is what he did, and this is an imaginative solution to that problem. Michele: I like it, in that it’s so different from everything else. It’s so hard core, so dark, and so unusual in the way he did it. Jim: There’s something innovative…that’s what innovation feels like. Michele: Yes, it’s innovative. Jim: It makes everybody a little bit displeased. Michele: It makes us all uncomfortable. Well, it makes me uncomfortable. Jim: I go, “What do you mean, teaching me stuff so explicitly? How dare you!” Michele: I was like, “What do you mean, sentience is bad? That’s a horrible idea!” [laughs] Jim: I get the feeling sometimes that with this guy I may be just the villager with a torch. That I’m not in his playing field. I don’t know if he’s stealing all of these ideas. I don’t know what he’s doing. That’s part of the coolness. It’s a Rorschach. If it was me, he’d be stealing these ideas from other people and turning them into a little fiction. Presenting them as original. He isn’t doing that. Clearly, he’s not trying to do anything like that. He had a lot of footnotes, didn’t he? For fiction, he had plenty, citing his sources. When I project into it, I see all these purposes and cross?purposes. I admire it. I go, “This is what James Joyce should have been.” That’s how I feel about it. Michele: Really? Jim: Yeah. This complex. If you want to do modern sensibility, and modern thinking, you would be like this. Not just strung out on early… Michele: I have to agree with that. This is much better than the normal Joycean fiction that you come across. I would much prefer this ?? much, much prefer this. Jim: This strikes me as a genuinely modern form that he’s stumbled upon. Michele: Let’s wrap it up. Any final thoughts? Would you recommend it? Jim: Yeah. Definitely. Don’t expect anything that’s going to get your heart. Roy: I’d recommend it from a technical perspective ?? explore some cool ideas to talk about afterword ?? but I would be hard?pressed to recommend it on any of its story. I would definitely recommend, just open it up to any page and enjoy it. Don’t read it trying to burn to the ending, because you’ll just be disappointed. Michele: I’d highly recommend it for people who like hard Sci?Fi. If you do not like hard Sci?Fi, you’re probably going to stop right after you start reading it. You’re probably not going to like it at all. That would be my recommendation. Hard sci?fi or philosophy ?? I think you could get either out of it. Jim: It definitely kicks the living tar out of “Gödel, Escher, Bach.” Michele: Definitely. It’s way more fun than that book. Jim: It’s a really good piece of science writing, not just some sort of ersatz good. The guy has invented a type of fiction. That’s a big deal. Fiction writers go nuts trying to do that, and he just did it as if it were his own… Michele: You’re right. He deserves a lot of credit for that. Jim: However, like you both said, the plot isn’t there. The heart isn’t there. I would forgive everything as a fiction reader, except there’s no heart. Michele: I’m just thinking of friends. I wouldn’t send my friends to this book unless I knew that they really liked hard Sci?Fi, or philosophy, or extremely innovative literature. Roy: There are some better ?? in terms of raw amount of ideas and even some philosophy thrown in. There’s, I think it’s called “Eight Steps to the Millennial Project: Eight Steps to Colonize the Galaxy.” That one is similarly packed with a ton of ideas, and it doesn’t claim to be a fiction book. There is no plot, and it’s meant to be a non?fiction book. It’s able to be just as entertaining without being as frustrating. Michele: Interesting. Jim: You found it frustrating? Roy: Yeah, especially trying to understand some of the pieces. There were parts where I think the author was deliberately vague so that you’d have to picture it in your head. I had a really hard time with some of it. Normally I’m OK with that, but I had to reread three or four times. I still couldn’t picture in my head exactly what was going on. Michele: He definitely did that. Jim: I think some of that was even made up. There’s a reason he’s doing fiction instead of science. I had to learn to let go of my own expectations to understand what I was reading. That’s new, to actually give up and go, “I’ll just roll with it.” Both of you have mentioned things I’ve already forgotten. They seem critical when you mention them. Michele: The first time I read it, I didn’t have any problem with it. I just read it straight through, except that certain ideas would make me upset or happy or whatever. It’s when I knew we were going to talk about it that I started going, “Oh man, you’re not being clear here. I can’t understand what you mean.” That’s when I got more frustrated. [laughs] Jim: It seems like it’s a Rorschach when we’re talking about it in the correct way. We’re going, “This is what I see in it.” Michele: That’s very clever of the author. Jim: I know. He gets off the hook for a lot on that. [laughs] Michele: Thanks for joining me in this podcast, gentlemen. Jim: You’re welcome. My pleasure. Michele: I hope to talk to you guys soon. And the rest of you…talk to you later. Bye!