Our cousins lie about the family tree," Sascha replied, "with nieces and nephews and Neanderthals. We do not like annoying cousins."

Neki kritiziraju kako je neuvjerljivo da su korporacije tako odgovoran posao dali u ruke emocionalno nestabilnim osobama, umjesto obučenim stručnjacima*. Opisani postupak priprema za posao koji između ostalog uključuje i vađenje jednog plućnog krila, ubacivanje metalnog mehanizma koji omogućuje izvlačenje kisika iz morske vode, modificiranje genetskog koda, krvi, ubacivanje virusa i raznih enzima drugih organizama, mislim da bi odvratio većinu stručnjaka. Don't read this if you're expecting action (there is little action) or if you're not in the mood to explore the nature of alien-ness because you'll be disappointed. That being said - the narration is very good and the story is engaging and very hard to put down once you get started. It’s my opinion that Peter Watts’s Blindsight is the best hard science fiction novel of the first decade of this millennium—and I say that as someone who remains unconvinced of all the ramifications of its central argument. Watts is one of the crown princes of science fiction’s most difficult subgenre: his work is rigorous, unsentimental, and full of the sort of brilliant little moments of synthesis that make a nerd’s brain light up like a pinball machine. But he’s also a poet—a damned fine writer on a sentence level, who can make you feel the blank Lovecraftian indifference of the sea floor or of interplanetary space with the same ease facility with which he can pen an absolutely breathtaking passage of description. His characters have personalities and depth, and if most of them aren’t very nice people, well, that’s appropriate to the dystopian hellholes they inhabit.

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So you've established a facility to harness geothermal power at the bottom of the ocean, in an incredibly scary, claustrophobic, dangerous environment, and you man it with the Right Stuff, yes? Like astronauts. You send down a group of smart, fit, psychologically stable people equipped to deal with the stress. But the underwater parts, the mystery, the AI parts - it all pays off in the long range as a whole. It’s my opinion that the book you hold in your hand is the best hard science fiction novel of the first decade of the twenty-first century—and I say that as someone who remains unconvinced of the correctness of its central argument. But that, that distance – that chronic sense of being an alien among your own kind – it’s not entirely a bad thing.

a b c Shaviro, Steven. "Consequences of Panpsychism" (PDF): 14 . Retrieved 8 October 2014. {{ cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= ( help)

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In part two we met all of Lenie‘s weird and dysfunctional colleagues. Things got stranger and tenser. And stranger still in the following parts. But somehow these pretty horrible characters started to grow on me. The characters of Starfish are society's detritus. Child molesters, murderers and other violent offenders, along with the victims addicted to their abuse. Society cannot help them. There is no rehabilitation for the criminals - none that works. They rape and beat and murder again. As for the victims, there is no help for them either. They seem to seek out abusive situations again and again. They are unable to integrate into "normal", "healthy" society. These are humanity's lost children. There is no place for them in the world. At least, there is no place for them on the world. The concepts are DEEP. Are we really human if we're hitched to computers. Can our brains hold more than one functional personality? Are there aliens so smart and fast that to them we'd look like imbeciles? If there are aliens, what are the chances that we'd ever find them, ever understand them, ever "know" them?

Or maybe not. In this book, management has apparently decided that instead of ruining perfectly good personnel, they'll send down a bunch of pre-damaged individuals instead. People already "preadapted" for stressful situations: the criminally violent, the perverted, and the emotionally traumatized. It's kind of an interesting idea, but I was never convinced that this set of people could refrain from killing each other, much less do a single meaningful day's work. Nice introduction in the prelude. Makes you anxious for whoever is going to end up living down there.Astonishingly readable book. . . . [Watts is] one of the two or three best hard SF writers around, and this is his finest book to date.” —Interzone a b c d e f g Elber-Aviram, Hadas. "Visions of Humanity between the Posthuman and the Non-Human" (PDF). Imachine: There is No I in Meme: 4–5. Archived from the original (PDF) on 14 October 2014 . Retrieved 8 October 2014. Please note: I don't review to provide synopses, I review to share a purely visceral reaction to books and perhaps answer some of the questions I ask when I'm contemplating investing time and money into a book. I have read a decent amount of sci-fi. One of my favourite books are Hyperion 1 & 2, Three Body Problem Trilogy, Dune, Book of the new sun and Diaspora by Greg Egan. Read some classics, too. I was never lost or really confused in these books. Hugo Nominees (press release)". Archived from the original on 3 May 2007 . Retrieved 3 October 2008.