Echopraxia by Peter Watts
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Of roaches, bicameral, zombies, vampires–oh my.
I think this book could have started being interleaved between the pages of the prior book and it would have had a nice transitional set/segue. It stands alone but it also marries.
Where Blindsight captivated us in closed spaces and visions of the past to give character references for the moment Echopraxia keeps us in an adventure to the sun and back.
A world that has tipped beyond stress levels that humanity can handle. Wars, bioterrorism, ecology, power–the world on the brink of collapse and immolation. Wow.
So that’s the gestalt of Earth as we follow the ants.. or the roach. We fall back from lots of contact with high-end humans (or meta) into the following of the unaugmented, unboosted individual of Bruks who seemingly gets pulled into the whirlwind (literally) of the modified monks, attacking zombies lead by a vampire, a third party that watches and mails it in from afar. So many pieces moving on a board we don’t understand to an end we don’t understand.
All we know is what we know in the moment, then we begin to question did we know it at all?
A total mind trip. The blindness of who we are. The programmability of what we are. Where science, psychology, mythology–god and the distant space between with our alien friends..
We learn that we are so naive in everything that we are. These books open a rift in the space of our connectivity tissue. It doesn’t get to many answers but it prods you hard. Is the alien just a prop to make us think? Will there be a third book that exposes an agenda as the ending here is dark and little speculation into what is transpiring other than.. well.. It’s not my place to expose that to you.
Once again though I am left in awe of an author who does great research and provides me with deep thoughts that can not be answered easily. Good stuff!