I've read "Blindsight" by Peter Watts. Here's a short review.

It's a sci-fi novel revolving around the concept of consciousness. I cannot decide if I like the novel or not.

The good:
1. The details of the plot and the author's lingo create a moody sci-fi atmosphere.
2. It's a novel I've read eagerly. It keeps you expecting something big around the corner.
3. There are no meaningless dumps of words. It's a distilled exploration of ideas.

The not-so-good:
1. I can't tell exactly why, but it feels like the author is an amateur. He lacks the refinement of a writer. Maybe it's the lack of deep, unbiased, open-minded thinking, or the unobstructed, penetrating vision, or the burning passion and care for his writing and the things he writes about, or the insatiable longing for the sublime, or the sincerity and bravery in exposing one's soul. But it's not like he'd been raised by the streets and grown callous. It's more like he'd been on Twitter for too long—farming attention, reading spam, countering trolls, occasionally spiraling down to trolling himself, all within the stifling confinement of one hundred or so characters—and had grown stubborn and cynical and superficial, like a young teenager who knows he understands this world fully. (None of that happened, though, and I'm surprised "Blindsight" was created before Twitter.)

2. Just like the freethinkers from Twitter, the author upholds rudimentary fallacies like it's some obvious facts:
	- Everyone commits war crimes. There's nothing unusual about them.
	- Every bleeding-edge human ought to be an atheist.
	- Every atheist facing something horrific or traumatic ought to question their beliefs.
	- Everyone who tortures people and then goes and plays with their kids as if nothing happened does so because they dehumanize their victims.
	- Every capitalist corporation only cares about brainwashing you into consumerism.

What's especially problematic is that the author furtively puts these facts-beliefs into the mouth of a narrator—something I believe no established writer ever does in a work of fiction. Or perhaps those were the opinions of the protagonist. Anyway, it didn't feel that way.

3. The acknowledgements part of the book implied there was a whole think tank behind the novel. And yet "Blindsight" feels like a draft, as if the author threw in ideas but hasn't yet figured out how to connect them into a meaningful progression of the story and the development of the characters. Spoilers ahead: The entire story is that the crew flies into the deep space and approaches the aliens, figures that the aliens are advanced yet not conscious, and kamikazes into the alien ship. How it all unfolded was a disappointment. There was nothing big coming around the corner.

The crew consisted of "freaks" with unusual medical conditions and augmentations. But you could easily replace them with regular humans, and while there'd be less flavor, the plot would be unaffected, which was another disappointment. I expected the protagonist to reach his full potential and understand everything without understanding how he understood it. And maybe on that basis, he'd finally change the course of events: stop passive observation and befriend, subdue, deter, or even join the aliens. Instead, the protagonist devolved into a vulnerable, uncertain, useless human. I expected something extraordinary from the vampire captain, who could see ten steps ahead any human, who could literally and figuratively see the invisible. Instead, he devolved into a complete irrelevance.

Well, whether I enjoyed the novel or not, I still appreciate it. It has value and provides food for thought. I may even read it again in the future. Only next time, I will not read the author's postscript, where he explained the rationale behind the ideas in the novel. It flattened the already flat story even further and further exposed the author's already exposed crude character. Next time, I will try to see if there are some hidden depths in the story that the author may have added *subconsciously*.