Blindsight

Watts, Peter

ISBN 10: 0765312182 / ISBN 13: 9780765312181

Published by Tor Books, New York, 2006

About this Item

SIGNED and inscribed by author on the title page, 2007. First printing with full number line. Sharp, unread copy with one board corner bumped and a bump to top of spine, or it may be a production irregularity. Dust jacket bright and free of tears, with slight wear at extremities, now protected in new archival protector. This book, which was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novel, the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel, and the Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel, has seen its reputation grow since its publication. In it, Watts explores themes of consciousness and adaptation.

Seller Inventory # 001795

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Blindsight
• Publisher: Tor Books, New York
• Publication Date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0765312182
• ISBN 13: 9780765312181
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition.
• Condition: Near Fine
• Dust Jacket Condition: Near Fine
• Signed: Signed by Author(s)
• Book Type: Book

About this title

Synopsis

Two months since the stars fell...

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. Two months since that moment of brief, bright surveillance by agents unknown.

Two months of silence, while a world holds its breath.

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. Whatever's out there isn't talking to us. It's talking to some distant star, perhaps. Or perhaps to something closer, something en route.

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?

You send a linguist with multiple personalities, her brain surgically partitioned into separate, sentient processing cores. 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 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 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. 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 them all to the edge of interstellar space, praying you can trust such freaks and retrofits with the fate of a world. You fear they may be more alien than the thing they've been sent to find.

But you'd give anything for that to be true, if you only knew what was waiting for them...

About the Author

PETER WATTS lives in Toronto, Canada.