things I say in comments sections…

To Peter Watts.

Thanks for making yourself available like this but it’s weird. Like I haven’t earned the right to say anything critical. Like you should be all distant, and act like a Wheel, or something… At the same time I feel compelled to let you know exactly how your stuff impacts me.

I liked Blindsight much better than Echopraxia. The story was clearer and I had a good time imagining what it was like to be Siri Keaton. And the idea that consciousness is a sort of niche adaptation (and easily trumped) freaked me out for weeks.

In Echopraxia there are perhaps too many moving parts for a sensibility raised on Hollywood through-lines (meaning myself). The motives of suprahuman intelligences are intrinsically hard to turn into a story that makes sense to readers who are by definition a lot stupider than the players. Yeah, well, unfortunately that’s the problem you set for yourself and luckily it’s not mine. I get to just sit there and read the end result. In Echopraxia, almost everyone was smarter than the reader, or else their bodies just bypassed the central committee of consciousness altogether. That was creepy but less horrible than I expected–and added to the confusion. It put players without personal motivations into the mix…

Daniel Bruks necessarily serves as our envoy into this world we barely understand, and he wasn’t nearly as interesting a person to me as Siri, until the very end of the book.The very end. So it was less fun. And yeah, I put it down and thought, well, now I have to read the whole thing over again because I’m not sure who did what, or what it means going forward to those people or that world.

I loved Starfish, and worked my way through some part of βehemoth. But, um, it kind of turned into a slog and I stopped. You know what I liked? Your novelization of Crysis: Legion. You were just having fun and it was great. I mean, you know what your neuro-horror stories do to people, and I’m not saying you should dumb it down because yours is some of the smartest stuff out there. But that was a nice change of pace. It was nice to see you having a good time.

I like stained-glass prose. I like Pynchon over Hemingway. I like Gibson over Asimov. I like Delaney even though I had no idea what was going on in Dhalgren.

I look forward to Omniscience. Most people don’t even seem to be aware that there’s a crisis in science and that certain cosmologists and physicists are about to turn their back on determinism. (Or why that matters). You brushed up against this in Echopraxia and I assume you’ll hit that pipe again…