• 26 Dec, 2025 *

Book Intro

Blindsight by Peter Watts is a sci-fi book narrated by an artificially-augmented protagonist named Siri Keeton. The plot follows Siri through his role as a member of the team performing first contact with a newly discovered alien species. This species—dubbed "Scramblers"—is not only a foreign being, but an entirely unique mode of being, to put it mildly.

Blindsight is very much a "hard sci fi" story, meaning it has no qualms drinking deep from the nitty part of the nitty-gritty. This could be off-putting for those who don’t really care about the author’s efforts at plausible realism as you get a lot of technical details dumped on you at many points throughout the book. For me, though, those details were pleasantly brain-tickling. If you love authors who show their work this book has details aplenty.

How’d I Like It

Blindsight is split into four main sections: A prologue, the Theseus ship, the foreign Rorschach, and an epilogue.

These sections are chronological but the narrative voice does jump around quite a bit. It didn’t feel jarring to me in the moment, however, in retrospect a lot of these "flashbacks" didn’t feel like they stood on their own very well. Structured as personal affects they often simply fell a bit flat. Siri, our protagonist, had his emotions genetically engineered away to make him a better "translater" which directly impact his first person narration. I enjoy the unique voice but scenes with 2 characters generally need 2 characters worth of emotion to feel compelling. Every one-on-one instead becomes Siri Keeton vs A Human, locked in verbal combat trying to explaining emotions to the flesh-robot boy.

Siri is programmed to be such a scientific marvel of reliable observation he circles around to becoming an unreliable narrator. Everything he retells is as he understood, in some aspects incredibly astute but in others hopelessly lost and deceived. Pretty cool. Writing a book where the main character feels no empathy is risky but mostly worked well to my eyes here.

Contrasting the pre-launch relations (family, best friend, "girlfriend") are the post-launch relations between the transhuman Theseus crew. These are so much more intriguing to witness as a reader. Everyone on the ship is a massive, almost inhuman, weirdo. Some are literally not human. The one-on-ones with Siri and other crew members aren’t one sided because everyone is equally foreign and consequently plays off of Siri and eachother in a much more real way.

The grand conflict with the Scramblers is incredible. It starts out weird and only gets weirder with time. This is truly where the story starts to coalesce as all the technical details of the book’s worldbuilding start coming together. Seemingly-benign trivia from 20, 40, even 100 pages ago suddenly becomes an emergency plot point. If you were paying an ungodly amount of attention (or re-reading) you could feasibly put things together and predict some of what will happen before the crew does. To avoid true spoilers I will gush that the developments were well and truly unveiled instead of described and leave it there.

The twists and turns in the ultimate final sequence felt somewhat... esoteric... but I suspect it would click more and more with future rereadings which I am definitely looking forward to doing in a year or two once I’ve forgotten everything.

Virus

There is an excerpt nearing the end of the story that I encountered in isolation which hooked me and put this book at the top of my "to buy" collection list before ever reading it.

The Scramblers learn and learn aggressively. All senses, 360 degrees, at a rate faster than we can even collect data let alone comprehend. Despite this, or because of this, they are unthinking. They absorb, pattern match, and emulate. But they have no conscience.

You could draw some pretty obvious and direct parallels to contemporary LLMs and AIs as they are marketed today based off of the Scramblers. That is exactly what Alex Martsinovich did in his excellent blog post, illustrated by a vivid imagining of how the Scrambler’s mode of being would react to out noisy life. I can’t write a recommendation of Blindsight better than this passage itself.

Imagine you’re a scrambler.

Imagine that you encounter a signal. It is structured, and dense with information. It meets all the criteria of an intelligent transmission. Evolution and experience offer a variety of paths to follow, branch-points in the flowcharts that handle such input. Sometimes these signals come from conspecifics who have useful information to share, whose lives you’ll defend according to the rules of kin selection. Sometimes they come from competitors or predators or other inimical entities that must be avoided or destroyed; in those cases, the information may prove of significant tactical value. Some signals may even arise from entities which, while not kin, can still serve as allies or symbionts in mutually beneficial pursuits. You can derive appropriate responses for any of these eventualities, and many others.

You decode the signals, and stumble:

I had a great time. I really enjoyed him. Even if he cost twice as much as any other hooker in the dome—

To fully appreciate Kesey’s Quartet—

They hate us for our freedom—

Pay attention, now—

Understand.

There are no meaningful translations for these terms. They are needlessly recursive. They contain no usable intelligence, yet they are structured intelligently; there is no chance they could have arisen by chance.

The only explanation is that something has coded nonsense in a way that poses as a useful message; only after wasting time and effort does the deception becomes apparent. The signal functions to consume the resources of a recipient for zero payoff and reduced fitness. The signal is a virus.

Viruses do not arise from kin, symbionts, or other allies.

The signal is an attack.

– Peter Watts, "Blindsight"

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