Original URL: https://www.theregister.com/2014/08/22/echopraxia_peter_watts_book_review/
Echopraxia scores 'diamond cutter' on the sci-fi hardness scale
Book review: Plenty of science and philosophy, no soppy rubbish
Posted in Bootnotes, 22nd August 2014 15:00 GMT
Page File There’s hard sci-fi and then there’s the likes of Peter Watts’ Echopraxia, a book that should come with its own scientific reference library to aid reading. Usually, being a fan of science-heavy writing and having a smattering of real-world knowledge is enough to unlock a hard sci-fi world – you just kind of lean back and let the science wash over you. You might only understand one in every five concepts, but you glean enough to work out what’s going on in general.
Regrettably, the same cannot be said of this book, which is likely to put a lot of people off before they’ve gotten 20 pages in. (The novel is the long-awaited sequel to Watts’ Blindsight, published in 2006. Although it’s not strictly necessary to have read the previous book for this story, it’s a mark of how tough the writing is that I abandoned Echopraxia at around the 20 page mark to go back and read Blindsight in the hopes of enlightenment. If you also missed the earlier book, I’d advise you to do the same.)
For example, most of the story takes place on board a rotating spacecraft, where the author frequently makes casual reference to the Coriolis effect as a perfectly ordinary thing of which we should all be aware, like:
Brüks winced and relayed the order, tossed a ‘bulb of coffee across the compartment (Coriolis turned it into a curveball but Moore caught it anyway with barely a glance), grabbed one for himself and twisted the heat tab en route.
And:
Lianna dropped easily ahead of him, fending off Coriolis with a push and a kick…
Or even:
Coriolis was a subtle trickster.
Having looked it up, you’ll find (if you didn’t already know) that the Coriolis effect has to do with apparent deflection of moving objects when they are viewed in a rotating reference frame, so the whole thing makes plenty of sense. However, the uninitiated would be forgiven for wondering just who or what this Coriolis was and when it would ever be explained by Watts – to which the answer, of course, is never.
Another one of our dystopic futures (this one's Blade Runner)
This kind of exclusionary writing has many fans of course, but it’s often tempered with fast-paced writing and easy-going plotting, both of which are in rather short supply in Echopraxia. Instead, you get long involved arguments about the nature of self in a bleak dystopic future-Earth where we didn’t bother with any solutions to pressing issues like climate change and population growth.
Instead, boffins seem to have focused most of their energy on creating a neurological pick’n’mix of alterations for humans to inflict on themselves. Here we have vampires, but not as you know them; instead they’re the resurrected genealogical relation of humans, an extinct species that scientific tinkering has brought back from the dead. We also get zombies – usually of the military variety – humans who have excised various bits and pieces of their personality and morals, along with their willpower of course, to become the perfect killing machines for one nefarious purpose or another.
The future is a bleak, dreary landscape
Most of the rest of humanity also has augmentations of one kind or another, connecting them to the “quinternet” or making them super-good at their job (hurray!) and have also stuck a metaphorical stick into their consciousness and had a good poke around – excising bad memories to make them happier people or removing aspects of themselves they’re not that keen on. In fact, huge swathes of humanity has abandoned the body altogether and live entirely in “Heaven”, a virtual reality world where they can conjure up exactly the life they want to live, without any interference at all from anyone else.
Daniel Brüks starts out in a place a little bit like this...
Sitting on the bottom rung of the new world order is biologist Daniel Brüks, who refuses to upgrade himself in any way and proudly sees himself as a dinosaur of his age. Hiding away on a science project in the middle of the desert, Brüks inadvertently finds himself swept up in a skirmish between a vampire and her zombie horde and an advanced hive-mind religious order called the Bicamerals that ends up with him on a spaceship. The ship is off to try to find out what happened to the spacecraft of Blindsight, which set off for a presumed alien signal after the entire Earth was pinged by what very much looked like an advanced extra-terrestrial civilisation.
That’s about all the plot there is, more or less, as Watts’ novel is less a spaceship-based story and more a serious, albeit fascinating, treatise on what exactly a person is if their memories, perceptions and abilities are all as malleable as the way they wear their hair. Of course a weighty philosophical and metaphysical tome isn’t a bad thing per se, but it doesn’t exactly make for easy beach reading.
...And he ends up somewhere a little bit like this
There are moments of levity, particularly in the arguments between Brüks and Bicameral spokesperson Lianna on the nature of religion in a scientific world. The Bicamerals and other pseudo-religious groups in the novel have gone through science and out the other side, now claiming once again that there is a god, but couching it in scientific terms, leading Brüks to postulate at one point that the only god he might understand would be one that was into porn:
There was really only one sort of program for which foreknowledge of the outcome didn’t diminish the point of the exercise, and Brüks had never been able to find any religious orders that described God as a porn addict.
But aside from these, the tone is rather unremittingly despondent. In a bigger disappointment, the ending is a mystifying damp squib – you’re not sure exactly what happened but any of the theories you come up with don’t seem to do the preceding chapters much justice. Where Blindsight is a highly intellectual story with a philosophical bent, Echopraxia is a philosophical discourse with a smattering of plot points - still brilliant but heavy work. ®
Author Peter Watts
Title Echopraxia
Publisher MacMillan
Price £24.99 (Hardback)
More info Publication web site