I went in hoping this would resolve some of what Blindsight left dangling, or at least flesh out that world a little more, and honestly it does neither. What it does instead is set roughly the same period on Earth, a different crew, reconstituted vampires back in the mix now (they went extinct once humans invented right angles, don’t ask, it’s explained, sort of), baseline humans and augmented humans and a hive-mind of monks all trying to program a way forward together, and it just piles on a whole new layer of unanswered questions on top of the old ones.

Watts’ style here is even more stripped down than in Blindsight if that’s possible, and he’ll change direction mid sentence without warning you it’s coming. Took me a good chunk of the book, maybe a hundred fifty, two hundred pages, before I found the rhythm of it. There’s a colonel line in here, something like “we’re lucky if we even know what we’ve done, any why simple enough for either of us to understand would certainly be wrong,” and that’s basically the thesis statement for the entire book, delivered in passing like it’s nothing.

It reads less like a direct sequel and more like a parallel account of the same disaster from the ground, and the continuity between the two books takes even more of a back seat than I expected. I appreciated that as a standalone experiment. I did not love it as a follow up to a book I’d been sitting with questions about for years.

Full of big weird ideas, crisp prose in the technical sense, and I’ll cop to being less enthralled by this particular set of known unknowns than by the ones in the first book. Worth reading if you already loved Blindsight and want more of that headspace. Not the place to start, and not quite the payoff I was hoping for either.