Echopraxia by Peter Watts

[lightreads]

Echopraxia by Peter Watts

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Follows Blindsight, which was that hard scifi first encounter space horror novel arguing – rather revolutionarily at the time, less so now – that consciousness (the singular I self) is an evolutionary mistake, and a costly one.

Blindsight was interesting as hell; this book less so. As Watts himself says in the end matter, "Echopraxia is to autonomy as blindsight is to consciousness" (and if you can follow that, you are officially his target audience). He's referring to the conditions, but of course it also applies to the books. Watts himself admits that the examination of autonomy in an age of neuro programming isn't terribly interesting. It's not, particularly compared to Blindsight's genuinely mind-expanding concepts.

And what this book is doing, I don't think it does terribly well. It's what Watts calls "faith-based hard SF" – a future which posits that certain types of advancements in physics require a return to religious frameworks and a melding with science. Watts has some interesting tidbits in his notes (the notes being my favorite part of any Watts book) about what religious belief does to the brain. Makes it better at pattern-matching, for one. Which is interesting and all, but I never thought this faith/science meld went beyond some suggestive imagery (hive-minded monks speaking science revelations in tongues) and a lot of wordplay about God. It just didn't . . . well, honestly. It just didn't ever make more than "that's a nice party trick" sense.

Still. Being able to identify God as a virus running in a universe ruled by a digital physics model is fun. And I give points for the effort here, and the endeavor. It just ain't Blindsight.




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