DOWNLOAD PETER WATTS ECHOPRAXIA

It explored conscious thought and sentience and the nature of life and just, wow. It has its thrill-my-bones moments, too, like when view spoiler [it seemed the main protagonist, Burks, would outwit his much smarter, wired adversaries, and save the day, only to be saved himself by Colonel Moore, acting as a military automaton. Rule rated it liked it. The novel is steeped in dialogue and situations that explore faith and God and the meaning of life. I feel it has all the right ingredients, but the actual execution of all those great ideas leaves something to be desired. Watts retards Echopraxia by shifting his conceptual focus from speculations based on hard science toward imaginings of a mystical hive-mind intelligence for which he openly admits there is not a single shred of existing scientific evidence.

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Here one of the central ideas echoprxia that consciousness is of limited usefulness, and in many circumstances a liabliity "the basic glucose-sucking awareness of its own existence.

And yes, as soon as I saw the name I thought "Watts has a friend named Brooks" and yes, spoiler alert, he does credit a Dan Brooks for help. He's referring to the conditions, but of cour Follows Blindsightwhich was that hard scifi first ecopraxia 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.

I will surely reread this amazing faith based hard science novel by one of my favorite authors. Still good, but just missing something.

Guess what I am.

You think you've heard this tale? Even here in the 21st century we can make people more honest just by scribbling a pair of eyes on the wall with a Sharpie. However, and perhaps this is inevitable, though good, Echopraxia is not quite as good. Just like Blindsightthis is a hard SF novel with footnotes and a lengthy bibliography to back it up.

Echopraxia (novel) - Wikipedia

I spent a lot of the book unsure why the main character was even in the book, much less the main character. In this sense, it is a very different book from Blindsightwhich discussed primarily the nature and purpose of consciousness. It was really weird with a lot of technobabble too, but you cared about pete in that one because of the emotional connection to the characters and the story you could actually follow.

There's even a similar sense about a lot of the concepts: Maybe it's allowed to have its rants, it's a dystopia after all, about the coming end of humankind, and the emergence of transhumans in their various forms, about how normal humans, roaches, do not have capacity to comprehend the nature of a supreme being.

After deciding to give up on this one, I felt a flood of relief and excitement at the idea of starting a new book. In the end, I pete much in doubt about how to rate this book. Vampires are so damn unpredictable, and it's worse because they can fly ahead with so many strange mental predictors to play everyone out in real life as if we're just pawns in chess.

Daniel Bruks is a biologist living a solitary life in the desert cataloging mutated species and running from a traumatic event in his past. Smart vampires, augmented humans, targeted plagues, an insolar journey to Icarus, alien fungi, and action and conflict to pull all these together.

His writing is neurotic and addictively uncomfortable in a way that makes us humans investigate that dark cave despite the creeps it gives us, makes us crawl deeper into the claustrophobic darkness, it echopraxoa us down the most unexpected corridors and, once wtats gratefully emerge out into the sunlight, makes us turn back and poke our heads in again.

A vampire and its entourage of zombie bodyguards lurk in the shadows behind. Daniel Bruks is one such baseline, manipulated into joining a scientific religious order out on a search for the source of signals from space, which may be an alien intelligence, but the hive mind thinks might be God. Four and a half stars. Echopraxia takes the philosophical approach of blindsight one major step further. There's cutting edge science dribbled throughout, sometimes related to the main plot, sometimes just as background.

While I found Synthesist Siri Keaton so bizarre and disturbing in Blindsight, he had a human past that was slowly revealed in flashbacks. A related idea is that we are trying to run twenty-first—century software on Pleistocene hardware; logical argument, for eaxmple, evolved to influence others, not to find the truth.

And I give points for the effort here, and the endeavor. I think I play a game with novels that most of us play to a more or less greater degree.

First of all, the prose is as least as information-dens Peter Watts' previous book Blindsight totally blew me away it's one of the best Science Fiction novels I've ever readso the follow-up Echopraxia was bound to disappoint. Wait, you might say.

There's a lot of interest in neurology and the myriad of ways brains can go wrong. This is not a mind-blowing novel, but a mind-big-bang one. As Watts himself likes to say, "neurons do not fire spontaneously It's just that Watts can be brilliantand in a world where that can be achieved multiple times, very good just doesn't cut it for me.

And the extrapolation of the real-life Portia spider was good stuff.