There’s Susan James, a person with four personalities inside her head, all with different skills in order to try and decipher any alien communication there is also Isaac Szpindel, a biologist with so many added technological enhancements that he can’t feel anything with his own hands. Siri had half of his brain removed when young to stop seizures and so now has skills as a Synthesist, incapable of bonding with his shipmates but there to observe. What is unusual (but evidently a pattern in Watts’s novels) is that the specialists sent are all altered (retrofitted) or different from the ‘normal’ in some way. An old space probe has heard a message of sorts. Two months later a team of specialists are sent on the good ship Theseus to a place out in deep space. Siri is one of the team sent to deep space after the Earth is visited by Fireflies: 65 536 probes spaced in the sky along a lat-long grid covering the Earth, at 1035 GMT on February 13 2082. It is a tale of First Contact, told through Siri Keeton. If that is the case, then this is a book which does this admirably. Many critics currently point out that perhaps the best SF is that which is firmly based in science, but challenges using cutting-edge concepts. Perhaps that should be ‘HARD SF’, in both senses of the word, though perseverance will pay off. This is one surprise, amongst many, in this meticulously researched book.Īnd Yes, it is VERY Hard SF. It even shows why vampires are afraid of crosses!) (There’s more at Peter’s website: see link below.

It’s true: Peter shows the details at his website and in the eighteen pages of Notes and References at the end of this book. Well, that may be true (though I haven’t a Science degree myself.) What I wasn’t prepared for in an SF book was the statement that Vampires exist – or at least existed, about 700 000 years BP, as Homo sapiens vampiris. ‘You need a Science degree just to think about reading it’, I was warned. One from the archives, ten years ago this month.

Blindsight aliens