Hugo and Shirley Jackson award-winning Peter Watts stands on the cutting edge of hard SF with
his acclaimed novel Blindsight Two months since the stars fell... Two months of silence
while a world held its breath. Now some half-derelict space probe sparking fitfully past
Neptune's orbit hears a whisper from the edge of the solar system: a faint signal sweeping the
cosmos like a lighthouse beam. Whatever's out there isn't talking to us. It's talking to some
distant star perhaps. Or perhaps to something closer something en route . So who do you send
to force introductions with unknown and unknowable alien intellect that doesn't wish to be met?
You send a linguist with multiple personalities her brain surgically partitioned into separate
sentient processing cores. You send a biologist so radically interfaced with machinery that he
sees x-rays and tastes ultrasound. You send a pacifist warrior in the faint hope she won't be
needed. You send a monster to command them all an extinct hominid predator once called vampire
recalled from the grave with the voodoo of recombinant genetics and the blood of sociopaths.
And you send a synthesist -an informational topologist with half his mind gone-as an interface
between here and there . Pray they can be trusted with the fate of a world. They may be more
alien than the thing they've been sent to find.
