The result is a shocking and mesmerizing performance, a tour-de-force of provocative and often alarming ideas.

“Peter Watts has taken the core myths of the First Contact story and shaken them to pieces. “A magnificent, darkly gleaming jewel of a book that hurdles the contradictions inherent in biochemistry, consciousness, and human hearts without breaking stride.” - Elizabeth Bear, author of Karen Memory They may be more alien than the thing they've been sent to find. Pray they can be trusted with the fate of a world. And you send a synthesist-an informational topologist with half his mind gone-as an interface between here and there. You send a monster to command them all, an extinct hominid predator once called vampire, recalled from the grave with the voodoo of recombinant genetics and the blood of sociopaths. You send a pacifist warrior in the faint hope she won't be needed. You send a biologist so radically interfaced with machinery that he sees x-rays and tastes ultrasound. You send a linguist with multiple personalities, her brain surgically partitioned into separate, sentient processing cores. So who do you send to force introductions with unknown and unknowable alien intellect that doesn't wish to be met? Or perhaps to something closer, something en route. It's talking to some distant star, perhaps.

Whatever's out there isn't talking to us. Now some half-derelict space probe, sparking fitfully past Neptune's orbit, hears a whisper from the edge of the solar system: a faint signal sweeping the cosmos like a lighthouse beam. Two months of silence, while a world held its breath. Hugo and Shirley Jackson award-winning Peter Watts stands on the cutting edge of hard SF with his acclaimed novel, Blindsight

Vampire blindsight