I’m hoping that Big Ben refers to the clock tower in London, but I suspect this book will disappoint me. Vampires don’t need explaining, but they also aren’t particularly novel or intriguing. We don’t know what scramblers, Rorschach, or Theseus are, so those words are meaningless blather at this point. Watts just threw out a bunch of world terms without context. Most people would say it started with the Fireflies, but they’d be wrong. Not with the scramblers or Rorschach, not with Big Ben or Theseus or the vampires. However, the sentence is quite short, so maybe the rest of the paragraph will add something concrete to this mystery.

For instance, “The winnowing didn’t start out here.” Replacing “here” would also be an improvement: “It didn’t start in the burning rim.”Īs is, I give it 2 out of 5 stars. Replacing “it” with something more evocative and tense would have improved it quite a bit. This line is going for curiosity and intrigue, but it’s so vague that readers don’t have much to be curious about. Let’s get started.Ĭontent Notice: severe ableism, graphic violence among children, the possible death of a child, and stigmatizing description of brain surgery. You can read through the whole prologue on Watt’s confusing website. Prologues are almost never the best way to begin a book, and when they are, they should be renamed “Chapter One.” But Watts put it in his book, so that’s what we’re covering. Plus, able-bodied writers have a bad habit of giving blind characters some sort of supernatural sight and then acting like it’s profound.īlindsight opens with a prologue. Simply naming it isn’t ableist, but the word “blindsight” is regularly misused in fiction. Blindsight is a real neurological phenomenon. The cover features a planet that looks overrun by the dark brambles from Sleeping Beauty, and the title makes me wary of possible ableism.

It’s time to get close and personal with Blindsight, a Hugo-nominated science fiction novel by Peter Watts.

Blindsight by Peter Watts