| Quote: |
Two months since the stars fell... Two months since the sixty-five thousand alien objects clenched around the Earth like a luminous fist, screaming to the heaves 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 want 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... |
This was a sort of frustrating read for me.
There was so much that was just so well done in it. And parts that just aggravated and vexed me.
Anyway, Watts (who started out as a biologist) has really done his research for this book - especially with neuroscience and evolution. I really enjoyed the exploration he makes of sentience vs. consciousness. And when the crew reaches the alien vessel, the Rorschach, the strong electromagnetic fields do very weird things to the brains of the crew members, and the resulting hallucinations are fascinating. And the aliens are alien - two races (them and us) that probably cannot ever really understand each other. 
Time spent on the alien ship is so weird and dangerous, it is more like reading about a haunted house in a horror book than reading about a space ship in a science fiction novel. He did that very well! 
And the Darwinian tone of the book, while I can see some people having trouble with it, did work in he context of the book.
What I had trouble with was (to see the spoilers run your cursor over them)
[spoiler] the vampires. 
I can see why, given the strong Darwinian theme, that he wanted to use a commander of a different (and stronger and predatory) species than the crew.
But the whole thing with vampires being a separate hominid race, somehow resurrected from prehistory- that just didn't do it for me. 700,000 year old hominid fossils are not that common to begin with. As a carnivore, a vampire fossil would be even more rare than that of the regular hominids. And with the same basic body type, how would you even know it was a vampire rather than a regular hominid of that region's population? Or just a human with unusual teeth? And that the vampires are a result of a genetic mutation that turns them into predators that can only eat hominid protein, that also makes them get seizures from right angles (like crosses)? Um. Yeah. Right.[/spoiler]
And the ending was just meh. 
[spoiler]
I would have been perfectly able to accept it if the aliens had come to Earth and taken over, killing off all humans. It would have been depressing, but would have gone right along with the contents of the book The book did have a very strong Darwinian theme, and it was made clear that the aliens were probably a lot more advanced and fit than we are in a lot of ways. BUT to make it so that the vampires, the weakest part of the book for me already, are the ones who take over and kill off the humans was just...wrong. 
Major major major suckage in what was otherwise a pretty good book![/spoiler]
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