Imagine You Are Siri Keeton.

[isunshower]

u/thegreatratsby you can read this even if you're not done i don't think anything i've put in here is too spoilery. so funny to me that we picked up this book at the same time hiiii

anyway. on my boyfriend's recommendation (crazy sentence i just typed. this is happening to me?!?!?!?!) i read blindsight by peter watts which is hard sci-fi that leans very hard into 1) horror 2) the question of "why is consciousness". author makes a pretty compelling argument for the fact that consciousness is not useful. oh well, peter. it's what makes us human. 

other things that were interesting: various cyborg characters, with varying definitions of how to be a cyborg; a scientific explanation for vampires that's never really dug into but is probably a whole book in and of itself; unreliable narrator who thinks he doesn't have emotions but secretly has been feeling emotions the whole time.

this is a good book i thought and you should read it if you're into hard sf and are okay with things not making a lot of sense and also somewhat graphic horror and the kind of read that makes you hyper-conscious of what your body is doing (watts' aliens are on some weeping angels shit). wait yeah so the premise of the book is the first humans sent to space to try and track down and make contact with some aliens after those aliens produce a light show on earth and then induce some physics fuckery

i don't have TOO much else to say, and i don't know how to explain the context of the thing i'm about to type, but one of the paragraphs i sent to my boyfriend is as follows: "it's sort of like this thing we talk about in anthropology sometimes - when the discipline first became popular there was a lot of talk about objectivity and trying to be separate from the people we observe, but in recent years the trend is more that we're an inextricable part of our own research and we change the community dynamic by intruding in it (/that objectivity isn't real) so there's more of a trend towards people writing about communities closer to home". as best as i can explain that in my "cultural anthropology and mostly theoretical undergrad degree" way. this is relevant to the unreliable narrator shit and i think it's interesting but unfortunately i have already taken my melatonin and therefore don't want to explain the whole sequence of events as to why

also on his recommendation i've been watching firefly. show of all time. thoughts on that to come, maybe? 

Comments

[thegreatratsby]

as someone who spent most of childhood in the depression pit and therefore dissociating in the "I'm not depressed, I just have dulled emotional response/no emotions" type of way, I did LOL at Siri's insistence that he does not have emotions, absolutely not. sure buddy. I read this one coming from the angle of physicist so it's cool to hear a take from anthropologyland, Siri is absolutely falling into the fallacy that it is possible to be completely objective and removed from a situation.

umm what else. I found the new biologist reciting kaddish for Isaac Spinzel weirdly touching. the beginning confused me with the red herring of where the aliens actually were? something self destructed? I still couldn't tell you exactly how they ended up in orbit near Rorschach to begin with but that doesn't feel super important. did you read the extras/supplemental bits at the end? I loved the little vampire lore tidbits there. also the reveal that Sarasti was basically just channeling the ship's AI the whole time was dope as hell I loved that, it had a lot of buildup but I did not put the pieces together myself until the actual reveal which is the best kind

there are apparently sequels but I'm putting that on backburner for now because I want to read a Greg Egan book.

FIREFLY ... SURE IS A SHOW OF ALL TIME. god. thousand yard stare

[isunshower]

i DID read the author's notes..... so so fascinated by all the vampire lore presented as very real science.