Blindsight by Peter Watts

Synopsis: Two months have past since a myriad of alien objects clenched about the Earth, screaming as they burned. The heavens have been silent since―until a derelict space probe hears whispers from a distant comet. Something talks out there: but not to us. Who should we send to meet the alien, when the alien doesn’t want to meet?

Send a linguist with multiple-personality disorder and a biologist so spliced with machinery that he can’t feel his own flesh. Send a pacifist warrior and a vampire recalled from the grave by the voodoo of paleogenetics. Send a man with half his mind gone since childhood. Send them to the edge of the solar system, praying you can trust such freaks and monsters with the fate of a world. You fear they may be more alien than the thing they’ve been sent to find―but you’d give anything for that to be true, if you knew what was waiting for them. . . .

Published: October 2006 | ISBN-13: 978-0765319647

Mini-bio: Peter Watts is a Canadian science fiction author and former marine-mammal biologist. Wikipedia

More neuroscience fiction than science fiction, Blindsight is the story of a spaceship crew encountering an object they can’t explain.  More revealed about their own state of existence than the object’s in the encounter, Watts does not play nice.  Exploring the darker nooks and crannies of the human psyche, the novel is hard, edgy stuff that anything but romanticizes mankind in space. – From 10 Great Books in Science Fiction 3

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