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Comment by NikolaNovak | Hacker News Reader

In Peter Watts' novel Blindsight, human protagonists enter a completely alien world - not Star Trek "people with rubber ears", but different biology/consciousness-patterns/etc entirely.

As one of the plot points, 'aliens' (again, not the Star Trek humanoid kind) eventually 'hack' the human nervous/visual systems through various means (electromagnetic fields, visual patterns, movement types, etc) to hide things in plan sight.

My internal vision of scenes from that book is eerily similar to the videos in the article.

(On aside, would highly recommend Peter Watts to Hacker News audience :)

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Seconded. Blindsight remains one of my favorite meditations on the Mind's I (not a typo) that I've read.

Echopraxia, the 'sequel' (the events occur at the same time as the events in Blindsight, with a completely different group of characters) has grown on me over time, too. At the very least, it gave me a great appreciation for Portia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portia_(spider)

Isn't that what Children of Time by Tchaikovsky is for? :)

Ha! Good point. No argument there.

Same! Echopraxia did not really resonate on the first read, and I think it was misaligned expectations. As Peter himself said in one of his Reddit AMAs, it starts with action and continues with a lot of action.

But it's fundamentally not about action; in fact, it's hard to see the protagonists having much agency, and certainly no clear goals. It's almost existential in that sense; but based on that beginning, my mind was searching for a story and hero and conclusion.

On the second read, having the framework of the events in my mind, I could focus on the ideas, and it resonated much better. Now I re-read both books semi-regularly (just like Dune and Neuromancer:)

Yep! I'm glad to hear that someone else had the same misaligned initial expectations. Keeping it vague to avoid spoilers, but the fact that I'm still unsure if the protagonist's action at the very end of the story was an example of agency or not has been a lot of fun to think about.

Same thing with the Expanse series. The TV version captured Ilus very well I think, and some of the creatures with a completely different biology. Especially the terrifying idea of something as simple as some algae type stuff that ends up making everyone blind for a certain time, because why wouldn't our eyes be an attractive for alien microorganisms.

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