读过《Echopraxia》 🌕🌕🌕🌕🌑
后1/4质量明显更高,否则顶多3.5,前半读着太累了,Watts叙事风格故意模糊的缺点就体现出来了。和盲视不同的地方在于故事的发展悬念不足。虽然从Burks角度看故事比从那些怪胎的要更符合人,但也同时意味着他根本搞不明白在干嘛。整体的科学框架继承自盲视,所以这方面没什么改变。奇点人类(暂且这么说)、吸血鬼、以及外星生物三方的博弈。最后的「新人类」动机什么什么?吸血鬼为了拯救自己的族类?外星人为了在星际间扩散?还是Bicams终于找到了自己的神灵?好像都是,但又不是。读者不应该忘记的是在前作里的终极棋手:船长-朱卡合体,在这里没有出现(AI被提到了,但着墨不多)。对自我意识的讨论也没了(前作里运用Jaynes/Metzinger还是很酷的)。最后的融合结尾就更像是铺垫,意犹未尽。
Book
Echopraxia
Douban Goodreads Skybridge
Peter Watts
publishing house:
Tor Books
2014
- 8
Prepare for a different kind of singularity in this follow-up to the Hugo-nominated novel Blindsight
It's the eve of the twenty-second century: a world where the dearly departed send postcards back from Heaven and evangelicals make scientific breakthroughs by speaking in tongues; where genetically engineered vampires solve problems intractable to baseline humans and soldiers come with zombie switches that shut off self-awareness during combat. And it’s all under surveillance by an alien presence that refuses to show itself.
Daniel Bruks is a living fossil: a field biologist in a world where biology has turned computational, a cat's-paw used by terrorists to kill thousands. Taking refuge in the Oregon desert, he’s turned his back on a humanity that shatters into strange new subspecies with every heartbeat. But he awakens one night to find himself at the center of a storm that will turn all of history inside-out.
Now he’s trapped on a ship bound for the center of the solar system. To his left is a grief-stricken soldier, obsessed by whispered messages from a dead son. To his right is a pilot who hasn’t yet found the man she's sworn to kill on sight. A vampire and its entourage of zombie bodyguards lurk in the shadows behind. And dead ahead, a handful of rapture-stricken monks takes them all to a meeting with something they will only call “The Angels of the Asteroids.”
Their pilgrimage brings Dan Bruks, the fossil man, face-to-face with the biggest evolutionary breakpoint since the origin of thought itself.