The official name is State of Grace, by the way.

[razorsmile]

A Different Kind of Singularity

The eve of the 22nd century. A world where the dearly-departed send postcards back from Heaven, and Jainist 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

Comments

[outlawpoet]

Peter Watts is the kind of writer where, without at least a little backstory, almost everything he writes (including blog posts) could have come from a crazy person.

I admire his dedication to attempting to write stories that REQUIRE technical asides to make any sense at all. It's science fiction in the classic sense, where the story hangs upon scientific/technological diffs from the present day.

That said, the man needs, like, an anti-thesaurus.

[razorsmile]

Peter Watts is the kind of writer where, without at least a little backstory, almost everything he writes (including blog posts) could have come from a crazy person.

I admire his dedication to attempting to write stories that REQUIRE technical asides to make any sense at all.

I vehemently disagree.

[outlawpoet]

really? I thought that was a large part of his charm, the need to understand to make sense of his writing.

I mean, take BLINDSIGHT. Stripping out all the technical explanations, it's a crew of a spaceship, who all hate each other, they meet an alien ship, immediately attack and kidnap two aliens, torture them, then act surprised when they get counter-attacked, everyone dying except the least competent member, who they shove out of an airlock in a life pod, who spends the next few years going back to earth, where everybody has died or is incommunicado.

Without the scientific background, the story makes no sense. Half of the joy of reading it is the way he manages to justify hoary old tropes like vampires and incomprehensible aliens speaking English with densely detailed technical backplots.

It's a beautiful thing, but as he even admits in that blog post, sometimes it gets away from him.

[razorsmile]

Ah. I misunderstood your point. I mistook it for an opportunity to be defensive :)