Mountain Devil

Recommend: No

This is a hard novel. To start with, this is a novel that is hard to source. I think it had a lead time of several months from when Caitlin ordered it to when it finally arrived in Blackheath. Once you’ve finally got it and cracked it open, you will find it is also a hard novel to read. When you’ve finally finished it, you will then find it is a hard novel to stop thinking about.

Echopraxia (and its prequel, Blindsight – the duo comprise the Firefall Omnibus edition) are curious books. They are first and foremost a way for Peter Watts to tell everyone about some cool thoughts he had. Don’t get me wrong, some of those thoughts are indeed pretty cool and very interesting. I just wish there was something resembling more of a readable book around them.

But the ideas. They are good enough to keep you engaged through segments 80 pages long where seemingly nothing happens and then you suddenly realise at some point everyone was put on a spaceship. Some of the better ones include: aliens who can directly sense our brain mechanisms and move only in the saccades of our vision (blindsight!), aliens who refine themselves into diffraction gratings relative to everyone’s eyes to perfectly blend in and viruses that work on consciousness directly to make humans puppets who are now incapable of realising this. In fact, everyone and everything tends to outclass us poor Homo Sapiens by a fair margin. Also, shout out to Peter Watts’ having a large language model in his book in 2006. That takes insight!

Consciousness and free will are the key themes here and are explored from an interesting perspective. Peter has strong views on free will (he says it doesn’t exist and if you disagreed with him in person, I think he would call you an idiot who hasn’t actually done any research). In Echopraxia, a key finding is that basically everyone can be a “zombie” (i.e. one without free will, not a traditional horror one) if someone can just rewire you. And a good enough mind can be considered to be able to rewire you with anything (making some sounds, drawing some shapes, anything).

Vampires are also a major theme for some reason. These are “scientifically rigorous” for what it’s worth, though I’m not sure what was driving the decision to include them. They’re basically supersmart, so allow for all sorts of “they were actually thinking 10 steps ahead moments”, but a bit odd in general.

Blindsight is the better of the two books. It has a tighter loop where the characters go out to be undertake the first encounter with a recently discovered spaceship in the far reaches of the solar system. When they get there, they can’t work out what it actually is. It’s a basic premise that is pretty solid.

Echopraxia is much less tangible and jumps around from Earth, to spaceship, to space station and back to a now really messed up Earth. I didn’t even know why they were on the spaceship really. To be fair, it took the main character ages to work it out too. There are a few deadend side plots that just exist to explore an idea (the main characters wife is in a virtual heaven).

Overall, these are interesting books. I wouldn’t recommend it (recommend/not recommend is an awfully blunt instrument), but if you’re curious and know you have the gumption to get through a 700 page book of this ilk, then join the awakened and blast-off.

Also, in the extensive after book notes, Peter noted that he was naked for the entire time while writing it. I believe him.