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Comment by marliechiller | Hacker News Reader

No mention of Peter Watts' Blindsight? That book changed all sorts of notions of first contact and consciousness for me. I'm still thinking about it to this day. Absolute must read for anyone concerned with such things

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You can read the whole thing on his website (that's where I stumbled upon it so many years ago):

https://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm

Likewise, this is one I'll never get out of my head. Fair warning to would-be readers: anticipate the rest of your day becoming unproductive.

> No mention of Peter Watts' Blindsight?

It was a Hugo nominee and actively reprinted under Tor Essentials label; probably doesn't qualify as a book "you may never have heard of"...but to be fair, anything by Andy Weir or Hugh Howey probably shouldn't have made the list either.

>probably doesn't qualify as a book "you may never have heard of"

That's most of the ones being mentioned in this thread. I think maybe they are scifi books you haven't heard of...if you also don't normally read scifi.

It used the Chinese Room better than Searle ever managed to do.

B. F. Skinner got there first.

And evolutionary vampires!

I loved that about this book. For the first like 75% of the book you're thinking, "Okay, these vampires must just be a metaphor or a name they've given to something else." Nope, just actual vampires.

With a novel and not-implausible explanation for why crosses incapacitate them.

Yeah it's implausible. I mean, I don't think his genetics is right. So it's probably physically possible in some sense, but I don't it makes sense that it's that stable of a trait.

I think his explanation was that right angles don't appear in nature so the trait didn't get selected out.

I watched the video and that's what the fictional presenter says. I don't think it really makes sense though, but maybe you can get passed that because the species coming into existence at all is so contrived and unlikely?

The vampires appeared to have less of a gene pool and more of a gene cleanroom. Knife edge stuff there.

>I think his explanation was that right angles don't appear in nature

Which is weird, because they do.

My initial reaction to this was, only in approximation. But the cross would also only approximately be a right angle. So good point.

Lots of minerals break at right angles.

I remember reading this, and looking out my office window where the branches of neighboring tree (denuded of leaves because it was winter) made three or four near-perfect right angles in projection (along with intersections at other angles).

Blindsight is great. Along with Project Hail Mary the best of the sci-fi I've read the past few years.

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