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That's exactly what I found, but I think I'm more forgiving then your are. I agree, Watts is a smartass for certain* concepts, however I thought it worked in Blindsight because the story and concept is so original, and though-provoking that I didn't mind. It may because I didn't catch the technical contradictions like you did :)

Because of it's technical density, and thought-provoking concepts, I think it's a book that rewards rereading (my favorite types of books). I've read Blindsight twice so far, and the second time I was able to appreciate, and understand better the massive amounts of technical detail he was pumping into the book.

I may need a second reread of Echopraxia to get to a similar appreciation. In my first read (only a couple of months ago) I felt as if Watt's desire to be seen as smart starts coming off as a smartass. He buries every action in about 10 levels of subterfuge, and ambiguity, such that by the time I got to the end of the book, I knew I was missing about 50% of what was actually happening. What saved me was a Reddit thread Watts had done where he explained to his confused fans all the intricacies of the plot that he had hidden. Once I read through his explanation, I appreciated the book a lot more, and have to say if it was rewritten to be more understandable it would be at an equal or higher level of originality then Blindsight.

What do you mean the Noon series is a counterexample to what Watts had in mind?

* I say "certain" because he has a PhD in marine biology, so I assume his biological concepts are very rigorous.

>What do you mean the Noon series is a counterexample to what Watts had in mind?

Basically, Strugatskie's tried to anticipate what would happen if most of horrors that are imaginable by 20th century SciFi authors are taken care of and would not happen at all. Watts tries to extend horrors we are used to to new lengths.

If you look close enough, you'll see that these transhuman intellects are really parasites (trying to be symbiotes) that live on the body of humanity. They can't live outside, at least, it is not shown how they can.

The Noon series talk about individual people at their peak as authors were able to imagine at the sixties-seventies. They can be thrown into radioactive wasteland and live and thrive there: Обитаемый Остров - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoners_of_Power. They posses extreme fighting skills: the same Prisoners of Power - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolf_Sikorski was able to avoid being injured when ambushed with twenty soldiers roughly of mid-20th century average power, armed with machine guns and managed to destroy them all; the main hero of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_to_Be_a_God managed to fight many medieval-level fighters and not kill anyone - basically, all people in the Noon are equipped with "the switch" that father of Siri has and they still can control it consciously.

In Blindsight Watts presented a device that is called "mentoscope" in Noon - see Siri memories about his mother and father fight. In Echopraxia it is revealed that these devices are used to bring whatever is pleasurable to populace: "they know how to make dream come true" or something like that about Echopraxia's pilot's marriage. This is about the same level of usage as in Prisoners of Power when Maxim's memories was recorded in Saraksh.

In Noon's universe, however, the mentoscope is used to speed up learning and to bring the skills that are hard to obtain otherwise (hand combat system "субакс"/"subax" - why punch others to face when you can record what to do?). It is also used to suppress traumatic memories, bringing society member to his full potential again.

In Noon, everyone lives the fullest possible life, even people that are clearly brought to life by possibly hostile supercivilization. They help each other even when they do not agree. In Firefall, the chasm is so big I can't even feel a thing about anyone there (I still think about them, though). Why in hell people still use terror tactics in end of 21st century (Siri is the victim, Echopraxia's pilot's wife is the victim) instead of helping hand tactics?

The noon universe is a thoroughly depressing set of books.

Most of the plot invariably occurs not in the ideal Noon society, but in one or another form of recent/current dystopia: the totalitarian state of Inhabited Island's Saraksh, the feudalist gulag of EN-7031 in Escape Attempt, Arkanar's descent into a fascist police state in Hard to be God...

Over and over, the ideal humans from future-earth hold up a twisted mirror to our own life as they try to engage and help but discover there are no good answers - at best, they don't make things any worse; but often they fail in even that much.

Monday begins on Saturday is a much more upbeat story that's actually about people who are better than who we are right now, in an environment that lets them thrive; and you do need both those components for a utopia - contrast with A Thousand Years 'till the End of the World, which has people of similar character (or better; they overcome challenges of a difficulty that Monday begins on Saturday never presents its cast with in the first place) but in an antagonistic environment, and is again super depressing.

While Watts expands horrors we are used to to new lengths, the Strugatsky brothers are out to show that even ideally moral superhumans can't save us from ourselves.

Exactly.

But Noon series also show what life of these demigods can be. You are at the highest of your performance and climbing and you face problems that challenge you to climb higher from unexpected sides.

From what I know the robots that were used there and failed were wire operated. The battery tech in 1986 was not on par for autonomous robots like Boston Dynamics today.

Robots passed out due to general radiation damage to semiconductor components and related disruptions.

> My friend also prototyped well logging equipment with PIC16xxx microcontrollers which also can be operated with (relatively) high voltage (I remember 12V) and associated high currents.

12V is not that remarkable over TTL 5V levels common in electronics back then. Also, what do you mean by "associated high currents"? Currents are still low in signal circuits, unless you use something really old school like teletype current loop.

Yes, robots in Blindsight were wire-operated with relatively brittle optical links (see "aperture leakage"). You can't power robot through optical link.

Ionizing radiation damages batteries, look at the research.

The solution is to present power, sensor output and control input through high-current wires.

>Also, what do you mean by "associated high currents"?

If you apply 12V instead of 5V to a logic gate you will get current that is 12/5 higher, isn't? With speeder transition, lower jitter, etc.

Robots used in Chernobyl weren't battery operated, that's what I was saying. Look at historic footage, they all have quite thick power/signal harnesses attached.

They were meant for rather brute work, like bulldozing the contaminated fragments. Even today you'd be hard pressed to do that with batteries.

> f you apply 12V instead of 5V to a logic gate you will get current that is 12/5 higher, isn't?

The necessary current is determined by the load you drive, which is tiny in semiconductor applications. Electric power is current times voltage, that means with higher voltage you need less current.

>Electric power is current times voltage, that means with higher voltage you need less current.

It just do not work like this.

Logic gates are constructed from voltage-controlled variable resistors, to simplify things. When input voltage is 0 (Vgnd), some transistors have high resistance and some other low one. When you switch the voltage to Vcc (5V/12V), they revert roles and these that had high resistance now have low one.

The resistance they have at different input voltages is fixed in the manufacturing process and cannot be changed.

Thus if you put power voltage Vcc=12V you will have (for same input voltage) 12/5 higher current than for Vcc=5V.

The PN boundary (assuming that's what you are trying to explain) doesn't work like that.

The current at given voltage is determined by the work which has to be done for switching the load. For signal electronics, we're talking microamperes here, that's not anywhere near "high current". Even the TTY loop I mentioned, a 1920s tech used to drive large relays and solenoids directly is just 40mA.

The load is either 0V or Vcc. Which is 0 and 5V and 0 and 12V and you can easily guess everything else.

Also look here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-power_electronics

Energy dissipated by change of voltage in the capacitor is E=CU^2/2.

Now I stop.

What do Chernobyl robots and well logging have to do with Blindsight or Echopraxia?

Apparently it's mentioned in one line as part of a background explanation to justify why the Theseus crew had to enter Big Ben themselves.

The conditional was pure formality. We'd tried playing the odds, sacrificing drone after drone in the hope that one of them would get lucky; survival rates tailed exponentially to zero with distance from base camp. We'd tried shielding the fiberop to reduce aperture leakage; the resulting tethers were stiff and unwieldy, wrapped in so many layers of ferroceramic that we were virtually waving the bots around on the end of a stick. We'd tried cutting the tethers entirely, sending the machines out to explore on their own, squinting against the radiant blizzard and storing their findings for later download; none had returned. We'd tried everything.

Seems like a very small detail to harp upon.

Even if it's scientifically imperfect, it's excusable. The crew needed to enter Big Ben to advance the plot by [rot13:rkcrevrapvat gur arhebybtvpny rssrpgf bs gur fpenzoyref svefgunaq].

Dear lord, that "aperture leakage" thing was the straw that broke the spine of my respect to Watts and his work.

Remember I read Echopraxia first (but after the domestification of vampires) and Blindsight second. Echopraxia was such an astonishing mess of badly thought out things that when I started to read Blindsight I had very low energy to continue reading.

The Blindsight started with firefall, that is a 65K things that suddenly appeared and photographed the Earth while burning in atmosphere.

Do you know that current 1sqkm radio telescopes produce data that can't be processed at real time in any cluster environment in use at 2015-2016? They scan skies at precision I just cannot express in words, let's try math.

https://www.skatelescope.org/uploaded/2950_31734_2007_IAU_Ta...

"...with a resolution of few micro-angular-seconds..."

sin(5/57/60/60/1000000) equals to 2.4366472e-11. It is sine of roughly 5 micro angular seconds (1 radian is about 57 degrees). 1/sin(5/57/60/60/1000000) is roughly equal to distance where current SKA can distinguish 1 meter radio-emitting object and it equals to about 41 million kilometers - a fourth of the distance between Sun and Earth.

These Firefall objects just won't be "unnoticeable until their entry to the atmosphere" in the state of the art sky scaling systems of Blindsight's time.

Almost everything in Watts' works just don't add up. I cannot break the wall of disbelief because of that, sorry. What others see as a minor forgivable thing I see as another transgression against laws of physics, rate of progress, etc, etc.

How are you so upset by an offhanded reference in one sentence? If he had replaced it by another bit of technobabble to justify why drones were unfeasible in that situation, would it have mollified you?

Imagine you read the fiction where the only way for heroes to express their feelings is to utter word "fuck". How long would you read it?

The prose by Watts is so much against my life, hobby, sports and work experience that at some point of time I started read his work as something like this: "some uninteresting rant, fuck you, Serguey, some more pseudointellectual babble". I even started to re-research what I knew because I looked to myself so very wrong with what I considered correct and right. This is quite an achievement on Watts behalf.

And no, I cannot imagine how Watts would be able to satisfy me with the necessity for humans to enter that alien ship. In my opinion, it does not follow because of so many things before.

You seem to be projecting more upon the material than it is there. Watts is essentially a modern Michael Crichton with the misanthropy and body horror of H.P. Lovecraft. There's not a lot of profundity to be expected in his novels.

There probably is no such thing as truly hard sci-fi, as all speculative stories involves handwaving the details, but you seem to be expecting a level of hardness that you won't find in Watts work, or in most fiction.

Others keep calling Watts a "hard sci-fi author" and his work as "hard science fiction".

The "hard science fiction", as I learned being young adult, must present as less fictional hypotheses as possible, the minimum is none and reasonable requirement is one per short story or short novel. Watts keeps providing assumptions at the rate of one per ten pages, to exaggerate a bit.

I do not share your cultural background and 1) know nothing about Crichton and 2) do not love Lovecraft. But I remember reading translation of Martian Chronicles by Bradbury and he succeed with body horror in my opinion, to the point that I profoundly dislike his work up to this day. He wrote hard sci fi (without quotes - single assumption per short story) and to great success.

Again, I consider Watts a bad author with more or less interesting ideas - I keep arguing about them with others and myself. But I will not consume any new piece of his work because, in my opinion, they are very badly executed.