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Notes -
Thoughts
Okay, with that general synopsis down, I want to talk about the story, the things I liked and didn't like.
Firstly, I want to talk about the pacing. The whole first portion of the plot, up to and including Portia's attack on the crew and the ejection of Icarus into the sun, is incredibly gripping and packed full of interesting ideas (Portia's time-sharing, as well as the concept of God as a virus, are very interesting, and the epistemological discussions contrasting Brüks' empiricism and Ludderodt's faith are very well done). When they discover Portia it feels like the plot is building to some climax - but that climax happens very quickly at the book's midpoint, and on the journey back to Earth and onwards, the plot slows significantly. In the second half there's a lot of downtime which is almost entirely used to contextualise prior events in the story. The characters feel very passive in this part of the book, and it just seems like they're for the most part discovering and clarifying what happened in the earlier portions without really doing much of anything themselves. I am aware that this type of book isn't necessarily about the action, but the story arc does need to feel satisfying somehow.
The book's structure really does feel like Watts used Freytag's pyramid (in a strange way). Introduction, rising action, climax, falling action, conclusion. If you were to interpret that very literally with modern definitions of "climax", you would get the general structure of Echopraxia where the book's energetic peak is straight in the middle, and that means you have a lot of book to sit through and not too much tension to sustain you after Portia attacks and is (seemingly) ejected into the sun. Plot points are clarified and some of the development from then on is certainly very interesting, but it definitely doesn't feel like a particularly eventful second half of the book. Not in the traditional sense, anyway.
I want to re-iterate that I think Portia was incredible. Watts' aliens are always very well done, and Portia's ability to emulate a larger, more complex brain by modelling one part, then saving the results to feed into another part, was a very neat idea. The way Portia communicated with the crew was great, too, and very suspenseful. I feel like devoting more time to exploring Icarus and Portia would've definitely strengthened the book, because the main interaction with the alien is confined only to one of the five main chapters (and that chapter is by far the best section of the book). There's less focus on the dynamics of first contact per se here than there is in Blindsight, and I think this weakens it quite a bit. The curiosity that comes with exploration is a great driver.
And I suppose this is something that irks me, because there's some really neat ideas contained in here, but they never quite pay off in the way you'd think. Instead of the focus being on an adversarial dynamic between the alien and the humans (or post-humans) we get only a small sliver of that. Rather, the main conflict is a much more convoluted conflict involving super-intelligences trying to repeatedly outwit and one-up other super-intelligences in the service of their own goals. Seeing the characters be moved around and manipulated by intelligences greater than themselves with their own inscrutable agenda you can only hope to guess at is quite interesting for sure, however this conflict has less of a sense of unity and purpose for the reader, something I think is important if you want people to be invested. Sure, there’s a risk of making it too much like Blindsight, but at the same time I think there’s no need to change something that works.
Additionally, these post-human plans, when you manage to figure them out, don't always click in an extremely satisfying fashion either. For all her cunning, Valerie's plan is convoluted beyond belief. Her plan is to confront an alien organism whose biology and function she has absolutely no clue about, get a human infected with it (how do you know it can even "infect" until you've encountered it), and somehow... hack said alien in order to relieve vampires of their inability to tolerate each other.
I doubt Valerie could have predicted the chain of events here, so how could Valerie have known that what was on Icarus would aid her in the goal of freeing vampires? Even super-intelligent minds like Valerie's would be limited by information constraints. And why in the world would you do this anyway? If you wanted to free vampires from the cognitive shackles of "divide and conquer" and you had the ability to reprogram a completely novel alien organism, it seems easier and more straightforward to stay on Earth and manufacture some airborne biotechnology or something similar with the aim of reprogramming vampire cognition. There's no real need here to piggyback off the plans of the Bicamerals. Either I'm missing something, or Valerie's plan doesn't make a single bit of sense.
The Bicamerals' plan is less questionable. The Bicams themselves clearly didn't know exactly what was on Icarus up until they confronted it and understood the nature of what they had encountered. Then when they realised what they were dealing with, they infected Brüks with it. They were playing by ear, and found something that they could use. Okay. What I am struggling with, however, is understanding the game plan of the aliens - specifically why on Earth the alien Theseus went up against would intentionally seed the Icarus Array with a lifeform capable of turning the entirety of humanity into a super-intelligent hive-mind. That is an utterly suicidal move.
On that note, I want to talk about just how ridiculously omnipotent the vampires are. Valerie is essentially nothing short of a superhuman character, capable of subtly rewiring human brains on the fly, and she is also capable of rewiring her own brain to make her impervious to the Crucifix Glitch. She coordinated with other vampires in a rebellion in spite of "divide and conquer", and throughout the book Valerie is capable of manipulating and eventually murdering a super-intelligent posthuman hive-mind. Sure, vampires are supposed to be capable of achieving things that we couldn't (though if a reader's suspension of disbelief has already been stretched too far at this point I would understand).
What really breaks it for me is that the reader is also supposed to believe that despite these incredible cognitive advantages, vampires somehow went extinct when humans built architecture due to lack of access to their prey. Making this worse is that it is also implied that vampires were more able to collaborate with each other in the past and that their inability to tolerate each other was something humans put into their head. But if it is the case that vampires can out-manoeuvre humans even with these types of cognitive handicaps and despite the fact that right-angles are far more prevalent in the modern world than it would've been in human prehistory, there would be no standing a chance against them in the past. They would simply not have gone extinct in the first place.
I realise I sound as if I dislike this book, but I don’t. I enjoyed it quite a bit, in fact. It’s more that the parts that are done well are done really well, and the parts that are done poorly are a bit of a shame and really stick out as a result.
Good write up, and I agree with most of what you have said here, although the end in the desert was my favourite part of the book - probably because the whole "assigning different thought processes different voices and perspectives based on personal relationships" thing was how my brain worked as a child, and still is to an extent, but it was also because I too was confused by Valerie and kept falling out of the story because I was annoyed with her non stop hail marys paying off.
This I assumed was just the first of many attempts they would make to hive-mind humanity, because they consider it treatment for the unenviable condition of having consciousness. Well, they would consider it treatment if they were capable of considering - you know what I mean.
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Ooo, a fellow Watts fan, there are dozens of us!
I would personally rank Blindsight as a 10/10 novel while EP would be a 7.5, borderline good but nowhere near as interesting as Blindsight.
As much as I love his work, frankly speaking, a lot the worldbuilding relies on rather contrived incompetence in the world at large:
In both BS and EP, we're told that humanity has access to superintelligent AGI, and a concrete example was the Captain of Theseus.
For all their intelligence, it seems to me that they sat on their hands and fingered their buttholes while the Vampires were busy destroying human society. Not even a peep about them stepping into the fight.
Further, the Vampires are implausibly powerful, and unchecked.
There's some contrived reason for them not tolerating VR, handwaved as them "seeing the pixels" in it, but at the end of the day, why the fuck are they running around unchecked except for their crucifix phobia and the medical implant to cure it?
Buddy, if I was instantiating a superintelligent apex predator that was stronger, smarter and faster than me, I'd be breaking its back and ensuring it's a de-fanged paraplegic before giving it the time of day.
It's not like anyone cared about their rights, so the issue is why not?
Similarly, cognitive and physical enhancement is common in other humans, you'd think some of them would be in a position to stand up for themselves?
At any rate, Watts is a fundamentally misanthropic doomer. He legitimately believes that humanity is doomed because of climate change, and he has a visceral opposition to humans actually doing well for themselves because of technological advances.
Still, he's one of my favorite authors, and if you haven't already, read the Sunflower novels and short stories, they're pretty great.
I agree with all of the points you made, I'll add one more - there is also the fact that having aligned super-intelligent AGI completely obviates any use vampires may have had, which is something you see perhaps unintentionally acknowledged a bit in Blindsight when it is revealed that Sarasti was likely just the Captain's meat-puppet all along. In that case, there is no reason to keep vampires around. They seem to be redundant and it almost seems as if all they offer is the potential to massacre a few hundred people before the superintelligent AGIs step in to clean up the mess. The fact that the AGIs don't do this when the vampires are running amok is yet another plothole, but you've already mentioned that.
He's quite the kook for sure and harbours quite a few very questionable positions that can make me wince at times. It's part of the reason I don't visit his blog often other than to check for the occasional fiblet.
A lot of the creators I like tend to share this quality, honestly.
I have read almost all of the stories in the Sunflower Cycle, with the exception of Hotshot. The Island and the first half of The Freeze-Frame Revolution are among my favourite pieces of writing he's done, especially this oddly mournful part of FFR where Sunday describes an early memory with the Chimp. Unfortunately I think FFR takes a bit of a dive in quality later on, I found the protagonist's conflicted loyalties in the first half to be a much more compelling narrative than the more standard and clear-cut "revolt" against the Chimp that occurs in the latter half of the book. The ending also feels incomplete and lacks a sense of climax, and while I think this is a bit more forgivable given that it is only an instalment in an episodic story, I do believe if you're writing a novella with a downer ending or a cliffhanger it needs to feel more deliberate and foreshadowed than how the ending played out.
Oh, and there's also the as-of-yet unfinished "Hitchhiker". That one has a very disturbing setup and if the quality of that story remains at this level it might end up being my favourite Sunflower story yet.
Why should they? Maybe they prefer Vampires, they are probably better pets than humans anyway. Humans by definition can't understand what super-AGI wants, and, moreover, according to Watts, it's not necessary for them to want anything at all, conscience is just a random glitch, not very useful for intelligence. So why we're assuming AGIs would want to protect humans? Maybe they'd want to wipe them off, using Vampires? Or maintain a constant human-Vampire war where neither side wins but both sides are busy enough to keep them under control and guide them to a necessary direction and stimulating their development (remember Babylon 5 Shadows?)
Whether they have consciousness or not is irrelevant to whether they act to achieve a certain goal. It is possible for AGI to be both non-conscious and still agentic, the same way Scramblers are.
Humans design the cognitive architecture of AGIs, and I'd imagine we would (try to) program AIs to take account of our interests. While misalignment is certainly possible, no real indication is provided in the world of Blindopraxia that the AGIs developed are routinely coming out misaligned - Captain for example seemed very well aligned with the mission it was tasked to achieve, and there's no evidence I can recall in these books of AGIs having negative influence in the larger world (if they are, they pose as much of a danger to humanity as Rorschach and Portia).
We of course would, but who says we'd succeed? Who says we'd even know whether we succeeded? We have pretty poor understanding of what comes out of where even of current models, if that continues, the future AIs would be a complete black box to us, and we'd have to pretty much rely on asking them "do you want to kill all humans today?" and trust the answer.
After all, in the same setting, people tried to control Vampires and failed. They tried to control Bicamerals and only kinda succeeded because of Vampires' help. Why would we assume they are actually in control of the AIs and not that the AIs just let them think they are, because humans tend to react violently to the perspective of the loss of control, and who wants that trouble?
Or maybe more, because they are smart enough to not reveal their intentions while there's still a chance humans can do anything about it.
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