Echopraxia

June 2, 2014
Hugo-winner Watts attempts “faith-based hard SF” in this dense, fast-moving companion to 2006’s Blindsight set in a late-21st-century world of genetically resurrected vampires, weaponized zombies, and Nobel-winning monastic hive minds. Daniel Brüks, obsolete in every way—human in a posthuman world, a field biologist despite biology’s merger with technology, an atheist despite religion’s recent triumphs over science—is dragged onto a Rapture-guided ship, the Crown of Thorns, and taken on a mission to investigate possible transmissions from the lost spaceship Theseus. Brüks is soon trapped between a vampire and a physics-breaking “postbiological” organism. Watts displays his knack for meticulously researched, conventionally unsympathetic characters, and their complex manipulations give color to an environment in which it is difficult to distinguish bloody catastrophe from “plans within plans.” The novel delivers an intricately inventive and coolly deterministic lesson in the futility of trying to outthink evolution, less a critique of human transcendence than an indictment of its basic assumptions. Agent: Howard Morhaim, Howard Morhaim Literary Agency.

August 1, 2014
A paranoid tale that would make Philip K. Dick proud, told in a literary style that should seduce readers who don't typically enjoy science fiction. A companion to Watts' Blindsight (2006), the book opens with a hyperintelligent vampire brought back from extinction by scientists in the 22nd century. She escapes her captors to hunt a reclusive hivelike sect of scientist-monks living in the Oregon desert. Caught up in the conflict is Daniel Bruks, a field biologist in a world that has largely moved beyond the old methods of science, who is on sabbatical in the desert-where he intends to hide from a mass murder committed using his research. In escaping the threats lurking in the desert, Bruks finds himself on a spaceship full of posthumans-along with the vampire. When the ship encounters an alien intelligence, Bruks guides us through the twisting plot to a funny, grim conclusion. Watts' nihilistic meditation on evolution and adaptation is by turns disturbing and gorgeous, with a biologist's understanding of nature's indifference. If at times it's hard to separate what is part of the vampire's or monks' plans and what is simply horrifying catastrophe, that also feels thematically appropriate. This scientifically literate thriller's tight prose and plot create an existential uneasiness that lingers long after the book's end.

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July 1, 2014

In the wrong place at the wrong time, Dan Bruks ends up on a spaceship bound for the stars, in the company of a band of posthuman monks and a resurrected vampire. The crew is hoping to follow the path of the Theseus, the ship last seen in Watts's Hugo-nominated Blindsight. They will encounter alien matter that will change how people view consciousness forever. Watts welds philosophy and science in original ways. His novels are interested in not only the possibilities of technology but the nature of sentience and humanity. This is not an easy read, but just as you think it will be another discussion of religion and postsingularity intelligences in the ship's galley, action breaks out. VERDICT The danger of hard sf is that the writing can sometimes seem clinical and dry, but Watts manages to keep his prose lush even when serving high-concept science. This book is quite an achievement and should appeal to those who enjoy the works of Ian MacDonald and Hannu Rajaniemi.

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