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Blindsight

657 statements
129 feature instances
52 referencing feature instances

Blindsight	type	TVTItem
Blindsight	label	Blindsight
Blindsight	page	Blindsight
Blindsight	comment	Blindsight is a hard Science Fiction novel by Canadian author Peter Watts. It's a dark and cerebral First Contact story that deals heavily with issues of sapience and what it means to be an "intelligent" species. Troubles with the publisher made the novel hard to find in stores, despite having been nominated for a Hugo Award, so Watts put it out on his website for free.Blindsight begins soon after a global event in the near future has stunned the world. Coming to be known as the Firefall, it unequivocally demonstrates mankind is not alone in the universe: thousands of alien probes simultaneously burning up in the Earth's atmosphere in a perfect grid, seemingly scanning the entire planet, and generating a powerful radio signal sent somewhere to the outer reaches of the solar system. In need of answers that simple unmanned probes can't provide, a ship called the Theseus is built and packed with as much cutting-edge technology as its creators can muster for the purpose of carrying a manned expedition of exploration and First Contact.The crew is made up of odd and eccentric specialists: a linguist with surgically-induced multiple personalities, a biologist who has given up some of his neural pathways for senses and perception far beyond what a baseline human can experience, and an infamous soldier whose career-defining moment was an act of treason. The narrator, an analyst with half his brain removed, is sent to observe these transhumans and translate for the benefit of their earthly masters. And they are all led by a literal Vampire; a genius, sociopath, and cannibal who is nevertheless the only one coldly-logical enough to run the mission.Depressing and pessimistic, yet enlightening, the story explores a variety of topics relating to consciousness, the nature of intelligence, information theory, and neurology, and has received highly positive critical acclaim despite its relative obscurity. It is followed by Echopraxia, a loose Sequel set on Earth during the events of Blindsight, featuring a different cast of characters.
Blindsight	fetched	2024-04-13T22:44:59Z
Blindsight	parsed	2024-04-13T22:44:59Z
Blindsight	processingComment	Dropped link to AeonFlux: Not a Feature - ITEM
Blindsight	processingComment	Dropped link to Echopraxia: Not a Feature - ITEM
Blindsight	processingComment	Dropped link to SleeperShip: Not a Feature - UNKNOWN
Blindsight	processingUnknown	SleeperShip
Blindsight	isPartOf	DBTropes
Blindsight / int_11d38820	type	Big Dumb Object
Blindsight / int_11d38820	comment	Big Dumb Object: Rorschach. Although the "dumb" part is debatable, and indeed is debated throughout the book.
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Blindsight / int_1237828f	type	Anyone Can Die
Blindsight / int_1237828f	comment	Anyone Can Die: Considering Watts' past work, and since the novel is very dark and pessimistic, this is a given. Everyone except the narrator dies, and the narrator thinks that humanity back on Earth is doomed as well, one way or another.
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Blindsight / int_134ca130	type	Super-Reflexes
Blindsight / int_134ca130	comment	Super-Reflexes: The nervous systems of Scrambler's are far faster than humans'. The captives have dense conversations within a fraction of a second, and their Chameleon Camouflage makes use of their ability to perceive optic nerve activity and, in the time it takes for a saccade to occur, move their position and adjust their color to blend in with the background a human is seeing.
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Blindsight / int_14a8974a	type	Love Potion
Blindsight / int_14a8974a	comment	Love Potion: In a flashback, Siri remembers his mother secretly gave him oxytocin to promote mother/child bonding. It didn't really work.
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Blindsight / int_15adb9a8	type	Never Split the Party
Blindsight / int_15adb9a8	comment	Never Split the Party: On one expedition into Rorschach, Bates orders the crew to split up and cover more ground, though they each get their own combat drone for a bodyguard. When Siri has his first run-in with one of the aliens, the others aren't there to help him, but the drone managed to keep him safe from the starfish.
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Blindsight / int_16e17035	type	Patrick Stewart Speech
Blindsight / int_16e17035	comment	Patrick Stewart Speech: Inverted, Sarasti gave a lengthy speech going on the weakness of sapience. This wasn't a "The Reason You Suck" Speech, but to emphasize to Siri humanity's precarious position in the universe, and why he needed to convey that message when he was sent back.
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Blindsight / int_16f6e05	type	Improvised Cross
Blindsight / int_16f6e05	comment	Improvised Cross: Exaggerated, justified, and deconstructed. Vampires have the vertical and horizontal crosswired in their visual cortex, which causes them to suffer fatal seizures upon seeing perpendicular lines. As would be expected, they went extinct when humans invented architecture.
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Blindsight / int_17ce80aa	type	All There in the Manual
Blindsight / int_17ce80aa	comment	All There in the Manual: The back of the book has a "Notes and References" section that fleshes out some of the more radical ideas in the novel. Watts's website also provides supplementary information, including a fictional in-universe audio log and powerpoint presentation of a scientist presenting his findings on the vampire sub-species to his "FizerPharm" investors.
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Blindsight / int_1869b4b1	type	Unreliable Narrator
Blindsight / int_1869b4b1	comment	Unreliable Narrator: Siri isn't as objective as he believes. Though there's probably an element of truth to his perceptions, he projects his personal biases onto other. He believes the others dislike him, because Siri is unhappy with what he's become over the years; and he believed Bates was planning a mutiny, because he felt Sarasti should be removed from command.
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Blindsight / int_18d15922	type	Title Drop
Blindsight / int_18d15922	comment	Title Drop: "Blindsight" is a real-life phenomenon where blind people, specifically ones blind from brain (and not eye) damage, can react to visual stimuli despite their subjective reports of blindness. Some theories believe that these patients are in fact unconsciously processing visual stimuli, but their conscious mind is removed from the process and thus experiences blindness. In the novel, this is used as a metaphor for the distinction between conscious and unconscious mental processing. The characters experience a kind of blindsight when their cognition is impaired by Rorschach's powerful magnetic fields. The Scramblers are suspected to be non-sapient beings for whom all sensation is blindsight. Vampires are implied to be similarly evolving toward non-sapience. And the fundamental horror of the novel rests in the final implication that non-sapient, unconscious cognition is evolutionarily superior and will dominate in the universe. Human awareness is portrayed as inherently self-destructive, as evidenced by the creation of the solipsistic cyberspace "Heaven".
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Blindsight / int_1e584efa	type	Cruel and Unusual Death
Blindsight / int_1e584efa	comment	Cruel and Unusual Death: The "Golem" virus induces rapid Fibrodyplasia Ossificans Progressiva, a particularly horrible condition that causes tendons, ligaments and muscles to turn to bone, effectively petrifying you. There's no cure, and slowing it down just means you die in a couple of days instead of just one. It's used as a biological weapon, and is what kills Chelsea.
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Blindsight / int_1f6983f7	type	Ambiguous Situation
Blindsight / int_1f6983f7	comment	Ambiguous Situation: How early Susan gained a fifth personality and what its intentions are, since Siri never gets to speak with it. Bates thinks it was created by Rorschach altering Susan's brain with precisely targeted electricity during the climax (much like how it had made Bates' drone fire on the first Scrambler), and that the personality's actions with the drones and the ship are motivated by panic. But that doesn't explain the ineffectiveness of Sarasti's anti-Euclidian drugs, which Siri concluded was due to sabotage beforehand (by Bates, until Bates denied it). Cunningham had proposed that the Rorschach may have been purposefully manipulating the humans' minds while they were inside, so there may have been opportunity earlier, especially since Susan was alone on multiple occasions.
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Blindsight / int_1faf34ad	type	Prisoner's Dilemma
Blindsight / int_1faf34ad	comment	Prisoner's Dilemma: Discussed. The field of game theory is one of the lenses through which how to engage with alien life is considered. At the end of the novel, Siri concludes that game theory dictates humanity and the aliens behind Rorschach will avoid each other now, analogous to the "remain silent" option of the prisoner's dilemma.
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Blindsight / int_20a14df0	type	Wrong Genre Savvy
Blindsight / int_20a14df0	comment	Wrong Genre Savvy: A few of the characters, at different times, make the mistake of assuming theirs is a fairly standard tale of First Contact. It takes some longer than others to realize the reality is closer to a Cosmic Horror Story ...
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Blindsight / int_21d70919	type	Crapsack World
Blindsight / int_21d70919	comment	Crapsack World: The short version is that mankind hit The Singularity... and it didn't really take. If the bastardized technological world doesn't kill us, the superintelligent sociopath vampires we brought back to life with our genetic prowess and put in charge of everything will. And if they don't... well, the novel is about how we just met an intelligent alien life vastly superior to our own single planet existence and it very may well want to wipe us out.
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Blindsight / int_22cf536c	type	Chekhov's Gun
Blindsight / int_22cf536c	comment	Chekhov's Gun: The corpse of the first Scrambler is used as a decoy by one of the captives in the climax, allowing it to get the jump on Cunningham and kidnap him.
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Blindsight / int_2479af9	type	Prescience by Analysis
Blindsight / int_2479af9	comment	Prescience by Analysis: If Bates is right about a targeted electric arc creating Susan's fifth personality, and the Rorschach doesn't have an unknown sensory ability to know where she was, then it would have had to precisely predict her location in advance.
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Blindsight / int_26ac510e	type	Mythology Gag
Blindsight / int_26ac510e	comment	Mythology Gag: One of the chapter headers has a quote from the fictional book called Zero Sum, written by "Kenneth Lubin". Lubin is a character in Watts' Rifters Trilogy.
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Blindsight / int_26d1f65f	type	Verbal Tic
Blindsight / int_26d1f65f	comment	Verbal Tic: Szpindel ends every other sentence with 'eh?'. The author is Canadian.
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Blindsight / int_2717a55e	type	Bizarre Alien Psychology
Blindsight / int_2717a55e	comment	Bizarre Alien Psychology: One of the book's twists is the discovery that humanity is pretty much the only race out there with a concept of self, reason and such things as art... since the aliens have no sense of self, the only purpose they can see to the messages is to make them waste processing cycles deciphering nonsense, and have decided to eliminate humanity in retaliation for what they can only understand as an attack.
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Blindsight / int_2933bdf5	type	Genetic Memory
Blindsight / int_2933bdf5	comment	Genetic Memory: Humans are thought to be naturally, automatically, and helplessly freaked out when they encounter a vampire due to genetic memory of being hunted by them. It turns out that vampires are smart and fast enough to intentionally trigger hallucinations and fear responses using subtle nonverbal cues.
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Blindsight / int_2a090d00	type	Lampshade Hanging
Blindsight / int_2a090d00	comment	Rorschach. The Rorschach test is a psychological test where subjects project their own meaning onto ink blots. Isaac lampshades the fact that the aliens seem to have picked such a thematically rich name for the ship that is making first contact with humanity.
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Blindsight / int_2be271c7	type	Hollywood Hacking
Blindsight / int_2be271c7	comment	Hollywood Hacking: The Rorschach is suggested to have hacked a robotic drone into firing by inducing a magnetic field with enough precision to flip a bit in its circuitry.
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Blindsight / int_2d9a193d	type	Warrior Therapist
Blindsight / int_2d9a193d	comment	Warrior Therapist: Near the climax of the plot, Sarasti viciously beats down Siri. The reason for doing so appeared to be to invoke fear and pain, to demonstrate that for all of his pretenses of being detached from his humanity, and being the impartial observer, Siri simply isn't those things. And that it was the opening statement to Sarasti's Inverted Patrick Stewart Speech.
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Blindsight / int_2da1421	type	Booby Trap
Blindsight / int_2da1421	comment	Booby Trap: During a Rorschach excursion, an aperture snaps shut and separates Susan from the rest of the crew. When the crew tries to carve through it with a laser, a reflective layer hidden inside bounces the beam into Isaac's head, killing him beyond the ability of Theseus to repair. As a follow-up once they're back on Theseus, Sarasti orders the incursion point to be allowed to vent into vacuum. In response, the Rorschach contorts a massive portion of itself to pinch a "joint" airtight, preventing the rest of its atmosphere from venting. Since an aperture would have been able to accomplish that with far less energy expenditure, it's concluded that the aperture was a trap specifically laid for the crew.
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Blindsight / int_2fb3170e	type	Enemy Within
Blindsight / int_2fb3170e	comment	Enemy Within: Rorschach makes some changes to Susan James, as one of many simultaneous plans to deal with the inconvenient humans.
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Blindsight / int_31c5e7fb	type	Starfish Aliens
Blindsight / int_31c5e7fb	comment	Starfish Aliens: The Scramblers are among the best examples of this trope. Physically, the scramblers resemble starfish and share a few of their traits. Peter Watts, a former marine biologist, admits to this. The best example of their intelligence and perception is that the Scramblers can see with eyespots all over their bodies, and can sense electromagnetic fields. These are so sensitive and their response time is so quick that they can perceive individual nerve signals in the human body and move only during the saccades of the eye, which don't get translated to the brain and thus render the Scramblers effectively invisible when combined with Chamleon Camouflage from their chromatophores. It's implied that their alien way of thinking is actually the status quo in the universe and that human self-awareness is an aberration. The Scramblers picked up our various transmissions from Earth and, after decrypting the signals, get incomprehensible (to them) statements about "feelings" and "identity". From their perspective, since they lack sapience, they assume the only reason to broadcast things like that to somebody is to waste their time; they see this as tying up vital processing power. As such, this appears to them as a kind of attack by us. So the aliens decide to strike back. Self-awareness itself â€” that which makes us human â€” is seen by the aliens as a dangerous virus to be stamped out. It's left ambiguous to what extent which of the Scramblers vs. Rorschach that are/is the actual alien "lifeform", and which is the construct, or whether it's both, or neither, or to what extent this is a meaningful distinction (the sequel hints that they can create entirely new "species" tailored to an invasion, so nothing we see really confirms anything about Rorschach's creators). At any rate human notions of identity definitely do not apply.
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Blindsight / int_3298415e	type	Magic from Technology
Blindsight / int_3298415e	comment	Magic from Technology: Invoked at one point.
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Blindsight / int_35ca4848	type	Antimatter
Blindsight / int_35ca4848	comment	Antimatter: Theseus is powered by an anti-matter engine. This becomes important later when it's used as a bomb in Jukka's final Taking You with Me action against Rorschach.
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Blindsight / int_370aad9	type	Split Personality
Blindsight / int_370aad9	comment	Split Personality: Purposefully invoked by Susan's "Gang of Four". Susan is the core personality, and the others were surgically induced to allow them to translate languages at incredible speed through parallel processing. DID is said to be an imperfect version of the process caused through trauma, but the state can be artificially induced quite safely, as a completely viable function of the human brain, and Susan disparagingly refers to 20th Century treatment of the condition.
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Blindsight / int_37fcf16	type	Death Is Cheap
Blindsight / int_37fcf16	comment	Death Is Cheap: This is what allows the crew to explore Rorschach. Body riddled with tumours? The Theseus has the facilities to let you sleep that off. Unfortunately for Szpindel, you can't sleep off a gaping head wound.
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Blindsight / int_3a90dc63	type	Aliens Are Bastards
Blindsight / int_3a90dc63	comment	Aliens Are Bastards: Played With. The Scramblers are dangerous to humanity, but they're not capable of hostility. The idea of self-awareness is so fundamentally alien to them that they can't help but treat human thought as a dangerous virus.
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Blindsight / int_3d7d1a80	type	Technically-Living Vampire
Blindsight / int_3d7d1a80	comment	Technically-Living Vampire: Vampires were a Human Subspecies that evolved to prey upon other humans, the "undead" myth was inspired by their ability to hibernate for years and the pallor of their skin from reduced blood flow to extremities.
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Blindsight / int_3ec18c6f	type	Sherlock Scan
Blindsight / int_3ec18c6f	comment	Members of the transhuman cast have this to varying degrees. Siri has his Sherlock Scan. The biologists are neurologically interfaced with a wide array of sensors. Sarasti, as a vampire, has night vision and a superhuman ability to pick out patterns and details.
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Blindsight / int_420c50b7	type	A.I. Is a Crapshoot
Blindsight / int_420c50b7	comment	A.I. Is a Crapshoot: The Theseus AI is in command of the mission, but acts through Sarasti specifically because humans wouldn't trust an AI to give them orders. Discussed by Szpindel and Siri, regarding the combat drones Bates commands, and again averted - the drones actually operate more efficiently when they're allowed to run autonomously.
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Blindsight / int_42215dce	type	Ambiguous Ending
Blindsight / int_42215dce	comment	Ambiguous Ending: Siri isn't sure whether Theseus successfully destroyed Rorschach or if the alien ship simply returned to stealth. Moreover, as he drifts slowly back towards the solar system, he can only guess at the situation back home from the signals he picks up, such as guessing Heaven was destroyed due to his father's message that his mother was dead. Siri notes that the communications he's hearing slowly lose chatter and music over the years, becoming perfunctory and dominated by vampire clicking. Best case for humanity is that they responded to the findings of Theseus by reducing signals the aliens would find offensive, but Siri's guess is that vampires staged an uprising and have taken over.
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Blindsight / int_424c9a9b	type	Cold-Blooded Torture
Blindsight / int_424c9a9b	comment	Cold-Blooded Torture: In the "Imagine you are prisoner of war" segment, intelligence agents torture and kill a few captured "Realist" terrorists for fun. Bates did not approve, and decides to give the surviving terrorist a bit of payback as a gesture of good faith. When the crew finally capture a pair of Scramblers:
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Blindsight / int_457655dd	type	Human Popsicle
Blindsight / int_457655dd	comment	Apparently; humans can be genetically treated with ancient vampire DNA to survive being dehydrated and frozen, with bags of replacement fluids being pumped into them when they are thawed out. See also Artistic License â€“ Biology and Our Vampires Are Different.
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Blindsight / int_47f5fe7d	type	Inscrutable Aliens
Blindsight / int_47f5fe7d	comment	Inscrutable Aliens: A variant. The alien ship does make contact, but for hours talks in circles without revealing any useful information. The crew come to the conclusion that they're talking to a Chinese room.
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Blindsight / int_48e24f	type	Anti-Mutiny
Blindsight / int_48e24f	comment	Anti-Mutiny: Amanda Bates's career defining moment came when she interrupted an interrogation session of Realist terrorists, and allowed the single survivor to execute his/her interrogators - Bates's own subordinates. For context, it is implied that the interrogators knew that they couldn't get useful information from their captives, they were just raping, torturing, and killing those captives because they thought it would be fun, war crimes be damned. While Bates technically committed an act of treason, this unsanctioned act of empathy gave Bates a diplomatic line that resulted in radically reducing terrorism incidents in the region, and the results reversed Bates's court martial and expedited execution to her being hailed as a hero (no matter how much the brass hated it). She was transferred to the Theseus as a special assignment, but it's an open secret that the brass just didn't want to have to deal with her. Siri reads that she's planning on mutinying on Sarasti because he's starting to show signs of instability, such as torturing the captured Scramblers and brutalizing Siri. This later comes to a resolution when Sarasti tells Siri that Bates is planning no such thing, and that Siri was reading into the matter his own personal opinion that Sarasti should be replaced.
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Blindsight / int_4aafd3c8	type	Fling a Light into the Future
Blindsight / int_4aafd3c8	comment	Fling a Light into the Future: This is what Theseus and the rest of the crew has in mind when they send Siri back toward Earth on board one of the ship's shuttles. Siri realizes en route that it's not going to work - there might not be anyone left by the time he gets home.
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Blindsight / int_4e3d253b	type	Downer Ending
Blindsight / int_4e3d253b	comment	Downer Ending: Nearly all the characters in the novel end up dead or soon to be dead, and it's implied that humanity back home on Earth is doomed by a vampire uprising. In a more general sense, we've discovered that humanity is an aberration in a cold, uncaring universe.
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Blindsight / int_4e7c4536	type	Wham Line
Blindsight / int_4e7c4536	comment	Wham Line: The scene where Sascha and Siri figure out what they're really facing is probably one of the most hair-raising Wham Lines to be found in science fiction. That humans are probably the only sapient life in the known universe. Most aliens are intelligent but nonsapient. Not only are they better adapted to survive because of it, but they would see humanity as a natural enemy because humanity is just that alien to them..
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Blindsight / int_4ee5989a	type	Bizarre Alien Senses
Blindsight / int_4ee5989a	comment	The best example of their intelligence and perception is that the Scramblers can see with eyespots all over their bodies, and can sense electromagnetic fields. These are so sensitive and their response time is so quick that they can perceive individual nerve signals in the human body and move only during the saccades of the eye, which don't get translated to the brain and thus render the Scramblers effectively invisible when combined with Chamleon Camouflage from their chromatophores.
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Blindsight / int_523977ba	type	Delaying Action
Blindsight / int_523977ba	comment	Delaying Action: The Rorschach spends hours responding to the Theseus without providing any useful information. The crew eventually concludes that it's a stalling tactic to have enough time for the Rorschach to fully develop as a superweapon. And even later conclude that this is the aliens' opinion on the vast majority of human communication.
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Blindsight / int_533bc7ae	type	Cybernetics Eat Your Soul
Blindsight / int_533bc7ae	comment	Isaac Szpindel, and later his replacement as well, Robert Cunningham, is a biologist studded with cybernetic sensors that allows him synesthesiac perception of the world in great detail, though gives tremors and reduced senses to the original flesh. Opposite of what would be expected, Szpindel is also the most personable and good-humored member of the crew. Cunningham can be a bit of a dick and smokes constantly (nicotine steadies the tremors, but the antiquated delivery method is a personal affectation), though he is a dedicated worker and never drops into unprofessionalism.
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Blindsight / int_5798bfbf	type	Reassigned to Antarctica
Blindsight / int_5798bfbf	comment	Amanda Bates is the one approaching normal, though she's a military officer who made an unsanctioned act of diplomacy which included a minor act of treason as a "good faith measure", though it got better results in months than raw military actions. She was stationed on the ship as security, but privately considers staging a mutiny against Sarasti. Except that last part was all in Siri's head.
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Blindsight / int_585da3f0	type	Ambiguous Robots
Blindsight / int_585da3f0	comment	Ambiguous Robots: Siri at one point suggests the Scramblers are "biomechanical machines" rather than naturally-evolved organisms, since they don't have genes. Cunningham responds that all organisms are biomechanical machines, and that the dichotomy between "natural" and "artificial" structures is largely arbitrary.
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Blindsight / int_59f9b612	type	Autopilot Artistry
Blindsight / int_59f9b612	comment	Autopilot Artistry: Used to argue that self-awareness itself is detrimental to intelligence and only by evolutionary fluke has it managed to persist in humans.
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Blindsight / int_5aa4ec8a	type	Ambiguous Syntax
Blindsight / int_5aa4ec8a	comment	Ambiguous Syntax: Intentionally used in-universe in the dialog with Rorschach to see if they really understand or are just using sophisticated translation algorithms to parse the syntax. They conclude that it's a Chinese Room, though the matter is left as an open question. While it's a question that was never definitively answered, considering what it believes humans were doing, it's likely that Rorschach believed that it was trading confusing statements to conduct "information warfare" to keep the Theseus away long enough to finish germinating.
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Blindsight / int_5db59a03	type	Brown Note
Blindsight / int_5db59a03	comment	Brown Note: Vampires, because of their unique spatial reasoning, get seizures when they see too many right angles. It gave rise to the myth that they're vulnerable to crosses, but the truth is they short out if they see something as simple as a window pane or a building with a square footprint. They largely went extinct after the invention of architecture in early human history. Vampires themselves can make noises that are this for normal humans, believed to be due to ancestral memory. They make hissing and clicking noises that subliminally remind humans that they were prey creatures on the African plains not all that long ago. The Rorschach emitted an extremely powerful, whirling magnetic field several times more powerful than that of the sun, though it's not certain how. Boarding the thing could induce radiation sickness in mere hours, and constant low-level hallucinations immediately, and intense hallucinations when the magnetic field surged.
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Blindsight / int_5f52cfcf	type	Intrepid Reporter
Blindsight / int_5f52cfcf	comment	Intrepid Reporter: Siri's original job on the Theseus, in a nutshell. He's a "synthesist" by trade, a sort of analyst who's good at translating impenetrable technical information into something more digestible to a (slightly) more general audience. Though his job is based more on mastery of communication theory and understanding how to shift information between frames of reference, not on understanding the information he's presenting. On the Theseus he was meant to be a neutral observer going over the crew's findings and relaying it back to Earth, though circumstances didn't exactly pan out.
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Blindsight / int_60f37373	type	Attack Reflector
Blindsight / int_60f37373	comment	Attack Reflector: While exploring the Rorschach, an aperture snaps shut and separates Susan from the rest of the crew. The first response is to carve through it with a laser, but the aperture has a reflective layer inside which bounces the laser into the head of Isaac.
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Blindsight / int_641cf81d	type	Viewers Are Geniuses
Blindsight / int_641cf81d	comment	Viewers Are Geniuses: But the uneducated reader forcing themselves through it will learn many interesting things, guaranteed. With this expectation, Watts includes a lengthy citation section that references the most bleeding-edge theorists and scientists in many fields, for follow-up if you've recovered from the book itself.
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Blindsight / int_6439de78	type	Heroic Sacrifice
Blindsight / int_6439de78	comment	Heroic Sacrifice: The entire crew of the Theseus, except for Siri.
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Blindsight / int_6a1c2a6	type	Cosmic Horror Story
Blindsight / int_6a1c2a6	comment	Cosmic Horror Story: Blindsight deals primarily with characters that display psychopathic or sociopathic traits, and is set in a future in which the basic human sense of worth is undermined by the social implications of new technologies. But the true cosmic horror is not revealed until near the end of the story, as it's revealed that Watts is portraying a universe in which sapience (that is, self-awareness, sentience, and the empathy that goes with it) is unnecessary for advanced intelligence and creative thinking. In fact, it's inefficient, tending to lead to Solipsism and wasting resources on pointless endeavors like art. Apparently most other species in the Blindsight universe may not be sapient at all, despite possessing vast intelligence and the ability to travel the distances between stars.
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Blindsight / int_6bda9a30	type	Meaningful Name
Blindsight / int_6bda9a30	comment	Meaningful Name: Theseus. The ship of Theseus is used as a philosophical question about the nature of identity: if the parts of a ship are removed and replaced one by one (sometimes to build a second ship out of those exact pieces) until every original piece has been replaced, at what point does it stop being the same ship? This is apt for a ship carrying a heavily-modified transhumanist crew that then has to face challenges to the nature of the self, both within the mind-distorting conditions of the Rorschach and as a species at large. Rorschach. The Rorschach test is a psychological test where subjects project their own meaning onto ink blots. Isaac lampshades the fact that the aliens seem to have picked such a thematically rich name for the ship that is making first contact with humanity.
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Blindsight / int_6cdc784f	type	You No Take Candle
Blindsight / int_6cdc784f	comment	You No Take Candle: A number of characters have linguistic quirks that would by normal standards be considered improper - Cunningham, for example, can't use pronouns, referring to everyone as "it", while Sarasti avoids using the past tense when speaking, and whose brain is possibly wired in such a way that he can't even conceive of the past in the way normal humans do.
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Blindsight / int_6f619fab	type	Let's Split Up, Gang!
Blindsight / int_6f619fab	comment	Let's Split Up, Gang!: Since the upcoming germination of the Rorschach creates a deadline and the crew can only enter the ship for short windows before the magnetism and radiation forces them to return to the ship for medical treatment, the crew starts splitting up after not encountering any hostiles in the first few ventures, assigning an armed drone to each crewmember. This is what allows a Scrambler to approach Siri without him noticing.
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Blindsight / int_737a65f4	type	The Watson
Blindsight / int_737a65f4	comment	The Watson: Invoked and Deconstructed with synthesists like Siri, who make a career out of having concepts explained to them and then translating them into terms baseline humans can understand. This tends to irritate the transhuman super-geniuses who are forced to work with them, who assign them insulting nicknames like "chaperone" or "commissar", and can lead to problems if their simplification of reality ends up being an oversimplification.
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Blindsight / int_77ed6b7d	type	Troubling Unchildlike Behavior
Blindsight / int_77ed6b7d	comment	Troubling Unchildlike Behavior: Siri, after his childhood operation. He loses all understanding of social norms, most of his emotions, and his sense of empathy. After rescuing his friend Pag from a group of bullies in the prologue - by bashing a few of them in the head with a large rock - and seeing one on the ground trying to crawl away, he wonders in a detached way if he should "kill it before it gets reinforcements". He was eight years old at the time.
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Blindsight / int_791ae258	type	Eldritch Starship
Blindsight / int_791ae258	comment	Eldritch Starship: Once again, Rorschach.
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Blindsight / int_7b1e41ba	type	Success Through Insanity
Blindsight / int_7b1e41ba	comment	Success Through Insanity: The main character's severe autism-like condition means he's the only one able to objectively analyze all of the information and determine just what the deal is with the Starfish Aliens they discover. Of course he's also unable to bond with other people or empathize with them, so...downer. The predatory instincts and complete sociopath nature of the ship's captain (who is an actual vampire) also turns out to be vital in second-guessing the otherwise indecipherable behaviour of the alien vessel and its inhabitants.
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Blindsight / int_7d1ee5b2	type	Trojan Horse
Blindsight / int_7d1ee5b2	comment	Trojan Horse: It's suggested that Rorschach intentionally triggered the drone malfunction that fried the first encountered Scrambler, prompting the crew to set a trap for live specimens. Then, the Scramblers allowed themselves to be captured despite the trap not being a match for their Super-Reflexes, allowing them to survey the Theseus and the neurology of the crew from their holding cells and return the data to the other Scramblers later.
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Blindsight / int_7ef08424	type	Quantum Mechanics Can Do Anything
Blindsight / int_7ef08424	comment	Theseus has an anti-matter drive. It somehow produces that antimatter itself from captured regular hydrogen, by unspecified quantum handwavium beamed from a space station near the Sun.
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Blindsight / int_86d4f985	type	Doing In the Wizard
Blindsight / int_86d4f985	comment	Doing In the Wizard: In the novel, Vampires are not supernatural but rather are explained as an extinct subspecies of humans that evolved to prey on normal humans in ancient times. This explains the persistent myths and stories about them: these are a kind of racial memory. Many of the qualities of Vampires are given logical, scientific explanations as well. See Our Vampires Are Different below.
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Blindsight / int_8774fb47	type	Eldritch Abomination
Blindsight / int_8774fb47	comment	Jukka Sarasti, the commander of the crew. He is the one somewhat-reassuring ace-up-the-sleeve the crew has in the face of the incomprehensible Eldritch Abomination that is Rorschach. He is even (superficially) considerate to his crewmates by choosing to wear sunglasses, in deference to the uncontrolled primal fear they would feel if they looked directly into his eyes. Ironically, towards the end of the novel we learn the true captain of the ship is the Theseus AI, whose creators assumed that the human crew would rather take orders from a Vampire than listen to a computer.
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Blindsight / int_8a451bc7	type	Mind Hive
Blindsight / int_8a451bc7	comment	Mind Hive: The Gang Of Four are distinct personalities that inhabit the body of Susan James. Unlike Multiple Personality Disorder, the fictional "Multiple Core Complex" is done deliberately and lets a fairly standard human brain run as many as two dozen distinct minds, each capable of thinking independently and communicating with the others. In co-operation they can be a formidable force.
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Blindsight / int_8ad43dc9	type	Ragtag Bunch of Misfits
Blindsight / int_8ad43dc9	comment	Ragtag Bunch of Misfits: The Theseus' crew. Siri Keeton's hemispherectomy leads him to resemble being highly autistic, albeit quite high-functioning. Isaac Szpindel, and later his replacement as well, Robert Cunningham, is a biologist studded with cybernetic sensors that allows him synesthesiac perception of the world in great detail, though gives tremors and reduced senses to the original flesh. Opposite of what would be expected, Szpindel is also the most personable and good-humored member of the crew. Cunningham can be a bit of a dick and smokes constantly (nicotine steadies the tremors, but the antiquated delivery method is a personal affectation), though he is a dedicated worker and never drops into unprofessionalism. Amanda Bates is the one approaching normal, though she's a military officer who made an unsanctioned act of diplomacy which included a minor act of treason as a "good faith measure", though it got better results in months than raw military actions. She was stationed on the ship as security, but privately considers staging a mutiny against Sarasti. Except that last part was all in Siri's head. Susan James, a linguist with her brain surgically partitioned off to produce three other multiple personalities and a number of shared subconscious nodes (each a skilled linguist in their own right, and collectively called the "gang of four" or "the gang"). Susan is notably soft-hearted but won't shirk hard duties. Her alternates are Michelle, a sweet woman who's in a relationship with Szpindel, Sascha, a rude and foul-mouthed woman, and Cruncher, a man who's a frank and irritable workaholic. Jukka Sarasti, the sociopathic and predatory leader who can think circles around the entire group. And finally the Captain, the ship's onboard AI, who has few real defining traits, but it piggybacks onto Sarasti's cybernetics for a low-key presence among the crew.
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Blindsight / int_8b2f45df	type	Cryo Sickness
Blindsight / int_8b2f45df	comment	Cryo Sickness: It takes the crew of the Theseus take a while to be able to move or handle gravity after being thawed out and rehydrated; depending on their degree of genetic or cybernetic alteration and on if they are vampires or not.
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Blindsight / int_8b568cb7	type	Posthumous Character
Blindsight / int_8b568cb7	comment	Posthumous Character: Siri's girlfriend Chelsea.
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Blindsight / int_8d6d9535	type	Artistic License â€“ Medicine
Blindsight / int_8d6d9535	comment	Artistic License â€“ Medicine: Apparently sociopaths actually aren't sapient, merely mimicking sapience perfectly. Who knew? A hemispherectomy wouldn't rob someone of their emotions or empathy. In fact, actual patients who've had half of their brains removed due to epilepsy (exactly what happened to Siri) exhibit little to no changes afterward. This is addressed in the sidequel, Echopraxia, where it's explained that Siri was the victim of a viral zombie attack while still unborn. Apparently; humans can be genetically treated with ancient vampire DNA to survive being dehydrated and frozen, with bags of replacement fluids being pumped into them when they are thawed out. See also Artistic License â€“ Biology and Our Vampires Are Different.
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Blindsight / int_90abf35b	type	Formerly Sapient Species
Blindsight / int_90abf35b	comment	Formerly Sapient Species: Discussed. The aliens are highly intelligent but at the same time lack any form of sapience or self-awareness — everything they do is instinctive. The same is true of the vampires. The narrator muses that self-awareness is, from an evolutionary perspective, wasteful and unproductive, and he wonders whether truly sapient species like humanity are doomed to lose their sapience in the long run.
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Blindsight / int_91e894b4	type	Apocalypse How
Blindsight / int_91e894b4	comment	Apocalypse How: On the long, long, lonely flight home, Siri is getting messages that imply the breakdown of society in the inner solar system. By the writing of this book, it would suggest that all the troubles at home have finally come to a head. He believes that by the time he returns to Earth, the inevitable result of what's going on in the inner system is that vampires will have exterminated humanity and taken their places as the owners of the world. At least, that's what he thinks. The sequel implies he was off the mark, for good or for ill.
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Blindsight / int_95bca4c9	type	Tuckerization
Blindsight / int_95bca4c9	comment	Tuckerization: Some of the characters are named after friends of the author who provided some sort of assistance.
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Blindsight / int_96251156	type	Deer in the Headlights
Blindsight / int_96251156	comment	Deer in the Headlights: To look into a vampire's eyes is to remember what it's like to be prey.
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Blindsight / int_9ac6b0c1	type	Sociopathic Hero
Blindsight / int_9ac6b0c1	comment	Sociopathic Hero: The protagonist Siri has shades of this. He's not a clinical sociopath, but his hemispherectomy left him largely unable to feel emotion and empathy. His coldly clinical view of the world allows him to understand people's thinking, but that doesn't change the fact that he just doesn't get people. Many of his personal biases come from the fact that he can't properly understand emotional context or relate to people. Jukka Sarasti, the commander of the crew. He is the one somewhat-reassuring ace-up-the-sleeve the crew has in the face of the incomprehensible Eldritch Abomination that is Rorschach. He is even (superficially) considerate to his crewmates by choosing to wear sunglasses, in deference to the uncontrolled primal fear they would feel if they looked directly into his eyes. Ironically, towards the end of the novel we learn the true captain of the ship is the Theseus AI, whose creators assumed that the human crew would rather take orders from a Vampire than listen to a computer.
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Blindsight / int_9f63d4f1	type	Our Vampires Are Different
Blindsight / int_9f63d4f1	comment	Our Vampires Are Different: Vampires turn out to have been an ancient Human Subspecies adapted to prey on us. They existed millennia ago, before recorded history. Since they were predators, they had to have superior pattern-matching skills (all the tricks of autistic savants plus more) and general intelligence, better night-vision, and the ability to put themselves into suspended animation (since, being apex predators, they had to give our populations time to rebound else they would hunt us to extinction). Their deathly pale pallor is from a similar energy conservation technique of reducing blood flow to the skin at most times, and their reputation for Hypnotic Gaze likely stems from their ability to trigger instinctive fear responses in humans with the right sensory cues. Unfortunately, the super-intelligence comes at a cost: their super-charged pattern recognition tends to get overstimulated when intersecting right-angles take up too much of their visual field. Basically, their brain glitches out and they have epileptic seizures whenever they see anything with corners— thus explaining the origin of the myth about them being weak against the cross. When humans invented architecture, the vampires all died out. The modern-day resurrected vampires have to take "Anti-Euclidean" drugs to enable them to survive because geneticists weren't stupid enough to remove the weakness.
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Blindsight / int_9fdcad7f	type	Bald Head of Toughness
Blindsight / int_9fdcad7f	comment	Bald Head of Toughness: Action Girl Amanda Bates, who serves as The Big Guy for the awakened crew. She has a shaved head, likely since she's still technically a member of the military.
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Blindsight / int_a19135a6	type	Mind Control
Blindsight / int_a19135a6	comment	Mind Control: Discussed. Cunningham argues that the Rorschach may have been able to puppeteer the humans while they were inside it, with them rationalizing any actions they took as self-motivated.
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Blindsight / int_a19a70f8	type	Evil Luddite
Blindsight / int_a19a70f8	comment	Evil Luddite: The Realists are a group opposed to the virtual reality afterlife of Heaven. Amanda Bates made a name for herself during an all-out war with them, and they persist as a terrorist group by the present day of the story. When Siri's girlfriend, among others, die tortuously to a Synthetic Plague they created, the news presents the death toll as on a the low side for a Realist attack. However, when Siri's father reports that his mother is dead, and Siri concludes from this and other chatter that Heaven has been destroyed, Siri is skeptical that the Realists were the ones that caused it.
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Blindsight / int_a7caa5b5	type	First Contact
Blindsight / int_a7caa5b5	comment	First Contact: The reason why Theseus is manned at all. The Theseus is actually the "third wave" for analyzing the object that started Firefall, the first wave being a pair of probes sent out to get eyes on the object, and the second were more sophisticated drones meant for analytical work.
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Blindsight / int_a8a4b41e	type	Not So Stoic
Blindsight / int_a8a4b41e	comment	Not So Stoic: Siri quickly loses his detached demeanor after he's mauled by Sarasti.
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Blindsight / int_a8c462db	type	Super-Senses
Blindsight / int_a8c462db	comment	Super-Senses: Members of the transhuman cast have this to varying degrees. Siri has his Sherlock Scan. The biologists are neurologically interfaced with a wide array of sensors. Sarasti, as a vampire, has night vision and a superhuman ability to pick out patterns and details. The Scramblers perceive electromagnetic radiation with enough resolution to analyze the workings of the human brain. Cunningham speculates it may be able to see through walls.
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Blindsight / int_a93f9ed5	type	MindReading
Blindsight / int_a93f9ed5	comment	Mind Reading: Based on their Chameleon Camouflage technique, Cunningham concludes that the Scramblers' perception of electromagnetic signals functionally makes them mind readers and that the captive Scramblers are spies.
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Blindsight / int_aba04d22	type	High Times Future
Blindsight / int_aba04d22	comment	High Times Future: Characters use a lot of recreational and lifestyle drugs, ranging from currently-commonplace (nicotine) to extremely unusual. In a flashback; Siri and Chelsea's first date is at a lounge specializing in unique narcotics. The business is apparently unremarkable apart for the quality of the products.
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Blindsight / int_afc6df04	type	What You Are in the Dark
Blindsight / int_afc6df04	comment	What You Are in the Dark: Siri. Much of his character arc stems from that he believes himself to be an objective observer, both by trade and because his nature doesn't permit him to be much more. He believes he's essentially a form of sapience without much humanity left to him. Contrasted to Rorschach and the scramblers, who are extremely intelligent but non-sapient—about as inhuman as you can get—Siri eventually comes to terms with the fact that he has more humanity than he thinks, and the fact he is sapient means that he's not quite as objective as he would like to be plays.
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Blindsight / int_afd71b8a	type	Inside a Computer System
Blindsight / int_afd71b8a	comment	Inside a Computer System: People have started to transfer their minds into a computer system called "Heaven." The Realists terrorist group are trying to destroy it.
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Blindsight / int_b1b5081b	type	Sapient Ship
Blindsight / int_b1b5081b	comment	Sapient Ship: The Theseus houses an AI called "The Captain." The nickname is meant to be ironic, since the crew is taking orders from Sarasti, not the AI. At the climax, The Captain reveals he was actually the one giving orders to Sarasti. The crew debates whether the Rorschach might be one.
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Blindsight / int_b58b4e3c	type	Too Dumb to Live
Blindsight / int_b58b4e3c	comment	Too Dumb to Live: All of humanity. Why don't we bring back our ancient predators and put them in charge of everything since they're so smart?
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Blindsight / int_b58c51d8	type	My Beloved Smother
Blindsight / int_b58c51d8	comment	My Beloved Smother: Siri's relationship with his mother, Helen. After his operation, she became increasingly desperate for her son to simply respond to her, causing her to become increasingly invasive and even manipulative towards Siri. The results were that it eventually strained his parents' relationship to the breaking point, she eventually withdrew from the world and plugged into Heaven, and his negative relationship with his mother helped shape Siri's view that humanity are fundamentally irrational, instinct driven creatures. The last one had a major negative impact on his relationship with his girlfriend Chelsea.
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Blindsight / int_b5f7c29b	type	Star-Crossed Lovers
Blindsight / int_b5f7c29b	comment	Starcrossed Lovers: Siri's relationship with his girlfriend Chelsea, which gets brought up in flashbacks. Chelsea was a rather old-fashioned Girl Next Door who was fascinated by Siri's honesty and how his condition gave him a unique outlook on the world, and he appreciated her honest affection and optimistic outlook. However, Siri's lack of empathy makes it obvious he just doesn't have a good grasp on his humanity, combined with Brutal Honesty made him unable to be a functional boyfriend, which destroyed their relationship after a time.
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Blindsight / int_b983a56b	type	Came Back Wrong
Blindsight / int_b983a56b	comment	Came Back Wrong: In order to cure his epilepsy and save his life, Siri's parents agreed to have a radical hemispherectomy performed on their son, literally cutting out half his brain. The kid that came out on the other side is demonstrably not the same: emotionless and without natural empathy. Siri thinks back to what his life was like, pre-op, and the memories feel like they belong to someone else.
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Blindsight / int_bc74ef27	type	Berserk Button
Blindsight / int_bc74ef27	comment	Berserk Button: Susan and the Gang do not like being called "alters." Based on the association with multiple personalities as the product of trauma, new personas created to endure childhood trauma, being called an "alter" carries a lot of associations with betrayal and essentially like calling them Cannon Fodder.
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Blindsight / int_bcd27e37	type	Improbable Aiming Skills
Blindsight / int_bcd27e37	comment	Improbable Aiming Skills: : According to Bates, the Rorschach was able to create an electric arc between itself and one of its skimmers with such precision that it was calculated to pass through Susan and create her fifth personality.
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Blindsight / int_bfc84d44	type	Calling Parents by Their Name
Blindsight / int_bfc84d44	comment	Calling Parents by Their Name: Siri refers to his mother in the flashbacks as "Helen". In a large part because she ditched the real world for virtual reality. While he often calls his father "Dad", and "Jim" other times.
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Blindsight / int_c09dbbbb	type	Weaksauce Weakness
Blindsight / int_c09dbbbb	comment	Weaksauce Weakness: The vampire's classic weakness against the cross is discovered to be a weakness against anything with intersecting right angles. See Our Vampires Are Different.
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Blindsight / int_c75e6cba	type	Shout-Out
Blindsight / int_c75e6cba	comment	Shoutout: One of the chapter header quotes is "What doesn't kill us makes us stranger," attributed to Trevor Goodchild, of Ã†on Flux. A Flash presentation set in-universe describes the various physiological and mental characteristics of vampires, and gives their binomial as ''homo sapiens whedonum.'' The book itself gives a different binomial.
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Blindsight / int_c7b5445c	type	Cool Starship
Blindsight / int_c7b5445c	comment	Cool Starship: Theseus. Hyperintelligent AI? Check. Antimatter engines? Check. Fabrication units that could put the replicators from Star Trek to shame? Check.
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Blindsight / int_c83cd6b8	type	The Nicknamer
Blindsight / int_c83cd6b8	comment	The Nicknamer: Szpindel dubs Siri "Commissar" early on in their training, and refers to Amanda Bates and Michelle (one of Susan's personalities) as "Mandy" and "Meesh", respectively.
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Blindsight / int_c86a6f38	type	Cannon Fodder
Blindsight / int_c86a6f38	comment	Cannon Fodder: When the crew has no other option but to go explore Rorschach in person, Siri has no illusions about his role in the enterprise. To a lesser extent, the entire active human crew. They all have a backup for their role stored in cryo sleep, to replace them in the event of their death. Once Isaac dies during an exploration mission, his replacement is exempted from going on the missions due to not being replaceable, further driving home how expendable the rest of the active crew is.
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Blindsight / int_c9597a03	type	Self-Deprecation
Blindsight / int_c9597a03	comment	Self-Deprecation: A meta-example comes later in the book, where "the occasional writer of hackwork fiction who barely achieved obscurity" is listed amongst those who wondered about the necessity of conscious thought.
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Blindsight / int_c95d04f2	type	It Can Think
Blindsight / int_c95d04f2	comment	It Can Think: The crew puzzles over whether the scramblers are intelligent aliens or something more like white blood cells in the organism of Rorschach. They eventually figure out that the scramblers are far more intelligent than humans, but they are nonsapient, as is Rorschach.
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Blindsight / int_caf89e54	type	Taking You with Me
Blindsight / int_caf89e54	comment	Taking You with Me: Jukka Sarasti/Theseus' final strategy against Rorschach. Siri wonders if the magnetic surge of the Rorschach is it executing the same strategy.
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Blindsight / int_cbe687ab	type	Corrupt Corporate Executive
Blindsight / int_cbe687ab	comment	Corrupt Corporate Executive: FizerPharm in the book's supplementary backstory.
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Blindsight / int_cdfe12c3	type	Nothing Is Scarier
Blindsight / int_cdfe12c3	comment	Nothing Is Scarier: The crew's first few expeditions into Rorschach. Siri expects to be nabbed by a horrible alien monster at any second, and yet the place seems to be deserted, yet still creepy as all hell. The hallucinations induced by the magnetic fields in there don't help matters. Turns out the crew had been encountering the scramblers longer than they think. Scramblers can turn "invisible" because they can see the neurons in the eyes firing, and use this information to exploit a glitch in the human visual system, though they can't fool cameras or multiple witnesses. Siri somehow intuited what they looked like before he ever saw one.
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Blindsight / int_cf168867	type	The Corruption
Blindsight / int_cf168867	comment	The Corruption: The supplementary material for the novel on Watts's website reveals that first resurrected vampires arose during an experimental autism treatment that used retroviruses to deliver genetic modifications to patients. Whether the result could reasonably be called a "cure" for autism isn't really clear, but the thing that comes out of the other side of the treatment can certainly be said to be terrifyingly high-functioning.
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Blindsight / int_d028e0da	type	An Arm and a Leg
Blindsight / int_d028e0da	comment	An Arm and a Leg: When the crew chases a Scrambler, it dashes to a horde of others and they tear it apart. The crew later concludes that this was to let the Scrambler to share the knowledge stored in its limbs more quickly. The trope is then inverted in the climax, where Bates is able to shoot the escaping Scrambler (and corpse decoy) center of mass, but can't eliminate all the limbs, which allows some of them to be recovered by the invading Scramblers.
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Blindsight / int_d42367cf	type	Ranked by I.Q.
Blindsight / int_d42367cf	comment	Ranked by I.Q.: Siri suggests vampires are about 100 IQ points above humans, but by his tone he probably wasn't being literal about it.
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Blindsight / int_d62dd556	type	The Chessmaster
Blindsight / int_d62dd556	comment	The Chessmaster: The book deals with entities that are orders of magnitude more intelligent than the average human, so this is almost a given. Sarasti, like all vampires, evolved to hunt humans. No matter how hard you try to out-maneuver him, he'll always be one step ahead of you. Waiting. He was sent on the mission for this exact purpose - "vampire logic" might give Theseus's crew the edge they need against Rorschach.
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Blindsight / int_d99d9918	type	The Captain
Blindsight / int_d99d9918	comment	The Captain: Jukka Sarasti, the vampire. It's later revealed that the ship itself, the Theseus, is artificially intelligent and was the real captain the whole time.
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Blindsight / int_dae5c997	type	Action Girl
Blindsight / int_dae5c997	comment	Action Girl: Amanda Bates, the awakened military portion of the crew.
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Blindsight / int_dbca2c99	type	Red Herring
Blindsight / int_dbca2c99	comment	Red Herring: There are several, both in-universe and as a narrative device. For example, there is the issue of Amanda Bates' planned mutiny against Jukka Sarasti, the messages from Rorschach, the Burns-Caulfield comet, and the very nature of the Unreliable Narrator.
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Blindsight / int_dd234c2f	type	Hallucinations
Blindsight / int_dd234c2f	comment	Hallucinations: Rorshach's incredibly strong magnetic fields induce some rather vivid and disturbing visions in the crew when they venture inside. Siri sees alien beasts out of the corner of his eye, James thinks her leg needs to be detached, and Bates at one point believes she doesn't exist.
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Blindsight / int_e0207930	type	Humans Are Special
Blindsight / int_e0207930	comment	Humans Are Special: Downplayed and Deconstructed, given how baseline humanity has been rendered obsolete, but it's argued that the technological advancements necessary for the Theseus mission took the Rorschach by surprise with how rapidly they were made. However, with the discovery of the aliens totally lacking in self-awareness, this means that humanity is uniquely unequipped to deal with the universe at large.
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Blindsight / int_e070ebe6	type	Manchurian Agent
Blindsight / int_e070ebe6	comment	Manchurian Agent: Susan's fifth personality. Bates guesses the personality is just panicking rather than undermining the crew intentionally, but regardless it plays exactly into the aliens' plans.
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Blindsight / int_e11b003d	type	Translation Convention
Blindsight / int_e11b003d	comment	Translation Convention: The narrator mentions the crew speaks a multilingual patois they find more exacting, but it's translated for our convenience. The exception is Susan James, the linguist, who the protagonist trusts to speak for herself, though not necessarily the rest of her personalities.
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Blindsight / int_e1b2070b	type	Chameleon Camouflage
Blindsight / int_e1b2070b	comment	Chameleon Camouflage: The Rorschach initially hides its presence from the Theseus by warping electromagnetic signals around it to appear as if they were passing straight through empty space. However, this technique is monodirectional and is bypassed by launching probes and mirrors at wide enough angles. The Scramblers have chromatophores all over their bodies, allowing them to change color like an octopus. By combining this with their ability to perceive the firing of optic nerves, they can manage functional invisibility by moving and adjusting color while a human observer is blind mid-saccade. Similar to the Rorschach, this technique isn't able to fool multiple observers.
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Blindsight / int_e26f04b4	type	Last of His Kind
Blindsight / int_e26f04b4	comment	Last of His Kind: On his long, long trip back toward Earth, Siri reflects that he may be not only the last human, but also the last sapient being in the universe. Talk about a Downer Ending.
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Blindsight / int_e8e56799	type	Blue-and-Orange Morality
Blindsight / int_e8e56799	comment	Blue-and-Orange Morality: The aliens don't just think in a way incomprehensible to humans, they don't even do anything we would recognize as think. They're not even self-aware. Morality is a concept that is so impossible for them to parse that just trying to communicate it is seen as an aggressive act. On the other hand, they seem to have developed at least some comprehension of how human self-awareness works, since the one "mistake" the captive Scrambler made during interrogation was excluding itself as an answer to "what are you aware of?" due to interpreting the question abstractly instead of literally. Jukka Sarasti and the rest of the resurrected vampires. Sociopathic cannibals operate on a rather different wavelength than the rest of us.
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Blindsight / int_e975738d	type	Forgettable Character
Blindsight / int_e975738d	comment	Forgettable Character: The Captain. Never communicates, except through Sarasti, to the point that the others tend to assume he's the one in command, and basically treat the title as an ironic nickname. Near the end of the book is the first time Siri even hears the Captain's voice.
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Blindsight / int_ea9f0351	type	My Brain is Big
Blindsight / int_ea9f0351	comment	My Brain Is Big: Inverted. Cunningham initially concludes that due to a lack of brain, the Scramblers' nervous systems must be completely occupied with controlling its pneumatic musculature and chromatophores and receiving the visual input from all over its body. He later realizes, to his horror, that their nervous system is actually so fast and multipurposed that it performs all those functions and has room for Super-Senses, Super-Reflexes, and a vastly greater intelligence than humans'.
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Blindsight / int_f15e3d6	type	Being Human Sucks
Blindsight / int_f15e3d6	comment	Being Human Sucks: In the world of Blindight, baseline humans are obsolete. Some go Transhuman to keep their edge, but even the engineered superhumans can't compete with the newly-resurrected vampires. And not only that, but humans were defective to begin with - self-awareness is holding us back.
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Blindsight / int_f3fac450	type	Brain in a Jar
Blindsight / int_f3fac450	comment	Brain in a Jar: On Earth, a lot of people have plugged themselves into Heaven, a virtual reality that few choose to return from. While Heaven's managers insist the entire body is kept intact and in peak fitness in case of emergency, Siri suspects this trope is the actual case the second a person's family is barred from visiting them.
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Blindsight / int_fb9afaab	type	Attack Drone
Blindsight / int_fb9afaab	comment	Attack Drone: Commanded by Bates, who insists on personally inspecting every newly-fabricated drone.
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Blindsight / int_fc225bec	type	Artistic License – Physics
Blindsight / int_fc225bec	comment	Artistic License â€“ Physics: Watts respects the speed of light, but some of his other plot devices take liberties with physics. He acknowledges this and attributes them to his being trained as a zoologist and biologist, rather than as a physicist. Rorschach is hidden near a free-floating sub-brown-dwarf half a lightyear from the Sun called Big Ben, that late-21st-century humans had not previously recognized. In reality, early-21st-century surveys would have been able to see anything like that (astrophysicists have looked). Watts describes Rorschach as having very high magnetic fields both outside and inside and having a superconducting outer shell. But superconductors block magnetic fields up to a critical field intensity, above which they are no longer superconducting... Theseus has an anti-matter drive. It somehow produces that antimatter itself from captured regular hydrogen, by unspecified quantum handwavium beamed from a space station near the Sun. The human characters are severely hurt by the magnetic field inside Rorschach, while the Scramblers are unaffected. But the Scramblers are also described as loaded with magnetite, which they use as a power source in the magnetic field. That would produce enough heating as they moved through the field to kill them - Watts explicitly did not make them able to handle the heat.
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Blindsight / int_fd4f8299	type	Well-Intentioned Extremist
Blindsight / int_fd4f8299	comment	In the "Imagine you are prisoner of war" segment, intelligence agents torture and kill a few captured "Realist" terrorists for fun. Bates did not approve, and decides to give the surviving terrorist a bit of payback as a gesture of good faith.
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Blindsight / int_ffad4e9f	type	Shown Their Work
Blindsight / int_ffad4e9f	comment	Shown Their Work: The back of the book has a lengthy bibliography with 133 references.
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Blindsight / int_name	featureConfidence	1.0
Blindsight	hasFeature	Blindsight / int_name
Blindsight / int_name	itemName	Blindsight

The following is a list of statements referring to the current page from other pages.

BlindSight	sameAs	Blindsight
Blindsight	hasFeature	Alien Works / int_760ce135
Blindsight	hasFeature	Aliens Are Bastards / int_760ce135
Blindsight	hasFeature	Ambiguous Syntax / int_760ce135
Blindsight	hasFeature	Bizarre Alien Psychology / int_760ce135
Blindsight	hasFeature	Butt-Dialing Mordor / int_760ce135
Blindsight	hasFeature	Calling Parents by Their Name / int_760ce135
Blindsight	hasFeature	Clap Your Hands If You Believe / int_760ce135
Blindsight	hasFeature	Cunning Linguist / int_760ce135
Blindsight	hasFeature	Cybernetics Eat Your Soul / int_760ce135
Blindsight	hasFeature	Deer in the Headlights / int_760ce135
Blindsight	hasFeature	Demythification / int_760ce135
Blindsight	hasFeature	Dhampyr / int_760ce135
Blindsight	hasFeature	Doing In the Wizard / int_760ce135
Blindsight	hasFeature	Eldritch Starship / int_760ce135
Blindsight	hasFeature	Essential Madness / int_760ce135
Blindsight	hasFeature	First Contact Faux Pas / int_760ce135
Blindsight	hasFeature	First Contact Team / int_760ce135
Blindsight	hasFeature	Forgettable Character / int_760ce135
Blindsight	hasFeature	Formerly Sapient Species / int_760ce135
Blindsight	hasFeature	Fossil Revival / int_760ce135
Blindsight	hasFeature	Go, Ye Heroes, Go and Die / int_760ce135
Blindsight	hasFeature	Hates Small Talk / int_760ce135
Blindsight	hasFeature	High Times Future / int_760ce135
Blindsight	hasFeature	Human Subspecies / int_760ce135
Blindsight	hasFeature	Humans Are Cthulhu / int_760ce135
Blindsight	hasFeature	Icarus Allusion / int_760ce135
Blindsight	hasFeature	Improvised Cross / int_760ce135
Blindsight	hasFeature	Inscrutable Aliens / int_760ce135
Blindsight	hasFeature	Invisibility Flicker / int_760ce135
Blindsight	hasFeature	Lack of Empathy / int_760ce135
Blindsight	hasFeature	More Predators Than Prey / int_760ce135
Blindsight	hasFeature	Most Writers Are Human / int_760ce135
Blindsight	hasFeature	Must Be Invited / int_760ce135
Blindsight	hasFeature	Neurodiversity Is Supernatural / int_760ce135
Blindsight	hasFeature	No Such Thing as Alien Pop Culture / int_760ce135
Blindsight	hasFeature	Rock Beats Laser / int_760ce135
Blindsight	hasFeature	Sci-Fi Horror / int_760ce135
Blindsight	hasFeature	Senseless Sacrifice / int_760ce135
Blindsight	hasFeature	Sleeper Starship / int_760ce135
Blindsight	hasFeature	Sliding Scale of Vampire Friendliness / int_760ce135
Blindsight	hasFeature	Sociopathic Hero / int_760ce135
Blindsight	hasFeature	Sole Survivor / int_760ce135
Blindsight	hasFeature	Split-Personality Team / int_760ce135
Blindsight	hasFeature	Success Through Insanity / int_760ce135
Blindsight	hasFeature	Technically-Living Vampire / int_760ce135
Blindsight	hasFeature	The Political Officer / int_760ce135
Blindsight	hasFeature	The Unmasqued World / int_760ce135
Blindsight	hasFeature	Transhumans in Space / int_760ce135
Blindsight	hasFeature	Turing Test / int_760ce135
Blindsight	hasFeature	Viewers Are Geniuses / int_760ce135
Blindsight	hasFeature	Word-Salad Horror / int_760ce135

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