Blindsight

Two months after the Firefall — thousands of alien probes burning up over Earth in one coordinated instant — a transmission is detected from the comet Burns-Caulfield, out at the rim of the solar system. Humanity's answer is Theseus, a ship dispatched to the Oort cloud carrying a crew assembled less for their humanity than for their usefulness. Susan James is a linguist whose skull holds four surgically separated personalities. Isaac Szpindel is a biologist wired so completely into his instruments that he perceives x-rays and ultrasound directly. Major Amanda Bates commands machines rather than soldiers. And Jukka Sarasti, the mission's commander, is a vampire: a predatory hominid subspecies resurrected from the human genome because it thinks better than we do.

Narrating all of it is Siri Keeton, a "synthesist" whose radical childhood surgery removed half his brain and left him able to model any mind without sharing anything with it. He is aboard to observe and translate, not to understand. What the crew finds is not the comet but Rorschach, an enormous alien structure orbiting a sub-brown dwarf, and the nine-limbed organisms inside it that respond to language, adapt, and resist — while showing no sign of being aware of anything at all.

Peter Watts, a former marine biologist, builds the novel around a genuinely unsettling argument drawn from real neuroscience: that consciousness may be an evolutionary accident rather than an advantage, and that a mind without it could outperform us in every way that matters. A Hugo and John W. Campbell Memorial Award finalist and winner of Japan's Seiun Award, Blindsight is the first book of the Firefall sequence, followed by the sidequel Echopraxia. Watts has made the complete text freely available online under a Creative Commons licence.