Book 22 - Blindsight by Peter Watts

65,000 alien probes appear in a flash above earth, a forgotten deep space probe picks up signals from the very edge of known space and a crew composed of broken zombies and a monster are sent to have first contact with an alien intelligence.

That is the biggest undersell I've ever done. Peter watts manages to scare the shit out of you while making you think your little brains out. I spent the book equal parts in fear and in awe at the ideas, speculative philosophical debates and all round future-y stuff. The book starts off slow and a little confusing but it quickly changes and becomes an amazing journey with discussions and uncomfortable arguments about the state of being, of consiousness, of our place in our own world as we rapidly invent things better than we could ever hope to be. Each character is broken in some fundemental way and uses technology to make up for that problem. I won't spoil it by analyising everything because I'd rather you did it for yourself, its damned fun and rewarding too.

I havn't even spoken about the plot yet, the plot is deceptively simple on the outside, while seemingly just another First Contact story, it is so much more. It has a concept of aliens that has never been done before (As far as I know), First contact ends just about as you'd expect but the journey to that ending is way different than you could imagine.

My only real complient is that half way through it feels like our perspective shifts and we're following another character for a little bit, but thats probably my fault. It gets hard to keep up when one of the characters is split into 4 different personalities and one lives through machines and sensors.

Really really read this. The genius has even left it up for free on his site. Right within these bloody words

Maybe I might ended up overselling it a bit but only because it was such a bloody good book. read it nowww.