In this way, it reminded me a great deal of Miéville's Embassytown. I ended up waiting to finish it on a free day, where the book and I could spend as much time as we needed. Although Watts mentions he's a biologist by training, you wouldn't know it: between all the astronomical events, the neurological side effects of radiation and methane exposure, and the philosophy of consciousness, it feels like half a college curriculum in here. This is a very dense book, packed with ideas. You fear they may be more alien than the thing they've been sent to find.īut you'd give anything for that to be true, if you only knew what was waiting for them. You send them all to the edge of interstellar space, praying you can trust such freaks and retrofits with the fate of a world. 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 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. You send a pacifist warrior in the faint hope she won't be needed, and the fainter one she'll do any good if she is. You send a biologist so radically interfaced with machinery that he sees x-rays and tastes ultrasound, so compromised by grafts and splices he no longer feels his own flesh.
You send a linguist with multiple personalities, her brain surgically partitioned into separate, sentient processing cores. So who do you send to force introductions on an intelligence with motives unknown, maybe unknowable? Who do you send to meet the alien when the alien doesn't want to meet? Or perhaps to something closer, something en route. It's talking to some distant star, perhaps. Whatever's out there isn't talking to us.
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. Two months of silence, while a world holds its breath. Two months since that moment of brief, bright surveillance by agents unknown. Two months since sixty-five thousand alien objects clenched around the Earth like a luminous fist, screaming to the heavens as the atmosphere burned them to ash.
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