Echopraxia by Peter Watts
📡 Favorite Quotes:
“People put a lot less effort into picking apart evidence that confirms what they already believe.”
“Fifty thousand years ago there were these three guys spread out across the plain and they each heard something rustling in the grass. The first one thought it was a tiger, and he ran like hell, and it was a tiger but the guy got away. The second one thought the rustling was a tiger and he ran like hell, but it was only the wind and his friends all laughed at him for being such a chickenshit. But the third guy thought it was only the wind, so he shrugged it off and the tiger had him for dinner. And the same thing happened a million times across ten thousand generations - and after a while everyone was seeing tigers in the grass even when there were`t any tigers, because even chickenshits have more kids than corpses do. And from those humble beginnings we learn to see faces in the clouds and portents in the stars, to see agency in randomness, because natural selection favours the paranoid. Even here in the 21st century we can make people more honest just by scribbling a pair of eyes on the wall with a Sharpie. Even now we are wired to believe that unseen things are watching us.”
“All science ever did was measure a teensy sliver of the universe and assume that everything else behaved the same way.”
“Reality went out the window the moment we started mediating sensory input through a nervous system. You want to actually perceive the universe directly, without any stupid scribbles or model-building? Become a protozoan.”
“Hell, rationality itself—the exalted Human ability to reason—hadn’t evolved in the pursuit of truth but simply to win arguments, to gain control: to bend others, by means logical or sophistic, to your will.”
🕵🏻♀️Characters:
👨🔬 Daniel Bruks: Daniel is the story’s main character. He is a biologist who has been sidelined by academia after a blunder he made while conducting a study simulating a pandemic. In a world where humans can install cybernetic enhancements in their bodies, Daniel has none, making him what they call a baseline human: someone who sees the world much as we do today. Much of the book’s conflict comes from his place on a crew of ultra-intelligent people, even though he cannot understand why he matters.
🕌 Lianna: Lianna serves as Daniel’s religious counterpart. Daniel is an atheist who sees God as a human invention, created to make sense of a chaotic world. Lianna, however, believes otherwise, and their conversations repeatedly return to the tension between science and religion.
🧘🏽 The Bicamerals: The Bicamerals are a group of meta human entities that are able to share thoughts and brain power among themselves without the need for verbal communication. It is a human hive mind, and through sharing their brain resources they are able to work through extremely hard problems at fast speeds. There are also many religious connotations in their conversations.
🪖Jim Moore: A military man, who is always hanging out with the Bicamerals. It is not quite clear from the story why exactly he is working with them, but that is fully in line with the tone of the book, where we don't understand why people are working together. He turns out to be the father of the main character Siri from the first book in this universe: Blindsight. His personal reason to be near the Bicamerals is to find out what happened to the original crew that went to Big Ben for a first contact visit, as his son is among them.
🩸Valerie: Humans resurrected vampires, a human-like species that once lived alongside them on Earth before dying out and passing into legend. But vampires returned with two major limitations: right angles can trigger seizure-like feedback in their visual systems, and contact with other vampires often provokes violent territorial competition rather than cooperation. Valerie wants to overcome both flaws so vampires can become a coordinated species and reclaim their place at the top of the food chain.
📜 Plot:
Peter Watts throws you right in the middle of a crazy sci-fi world with humans that have augmented intelligence, zombies, vampires that can run 10s of multiple scenarios in their heads - like a conscious super-intelligent GPU framework, and does not hold your hand through the story.
😑 The Baseline:
Daniel Bruks is a baseline human, meaning that his mind has not been enhanced, modified, or networked through the kinds of cognitive augmentations common in the world of Echopraxia. In that sense, he serves as a stand-in for the reader: observant enough to notice that extraordinary things are happening, but unequipped to fully understand the people and forces around him. While camping in the Oregon desert and conducting experiments on animals, Bruks is caught in a conflict between two rival groups. He has almost no idea what they are fighting over, or why he has become involved at all. One side consists of the Bicamerals, the posthuman beings whose mental capacity and internal division of labor far exceed anything available to a baseliner such as Daniel. Whenever he asks for an explanation, they mostly tell him not to think too hard and to stay close. Yet, for reasons that remain obscure to him, they seem convinced that he is extremely important.
🕷️Portia:
As a result of the conflict the Bicamerals flee the Earth, taking Daniel Bruks with them. although neither Daniel or the readers understand fully understand the reasons of their departure. When asked the just mention that their destination is Icarus, which is a remote installation positioned close to the Sun. Icarus is responsible for many technological advances in this world and it is built to (1) Study extreme solar phenomena which cannot be manufactured near or on Earth, and (2) Generate energy to power Earth and space infrastructure. Icarus is located in a isolated and hazardous environment. After setting foot there, our cast are cut off from Earth, which indicates that there is something unusual happening on Earth. The group also encounters a strange substance spreading through the station. It does not look alive from a biological standpoint, and is extremely simple with no visible organs, cells or even a nervous system. What they assume to be a strange inert material, turns out to be “part“ of a frightening intelligent being. They name this material “Portia“, after the jumping spiders which are among the most cognitively impressive arachnids known to us, in that their biology is simple and yet they are sophisticated and intelligent hunters. It is strongly suggested (although not clearly stated) that this is an alien entity capable of of cognition with the elaborate biological systems that we are used to imagining. This is where the love-craftian horror side of the story takes charge. As the humans study portia, they become mesmerized by the wonders it can perform. They do not study it from a distance and portia slowly grows around them in an attempt to trap them in the station. It is unclear what portia’s goals are. My interpretation was that it simply wants to study the humans on a microlevel to understand them and judge whether they are a threat or not. Many of the main crew, including the bicamerals, get stuck with portia and are killed. At this point of the story, Lianna also dies. This traumatizes Daniel as he had grown close to Lianna, through their theological conversation. Even though they were always on the opposite side of “the God argument,” he had grown fond of the back and forth.
🤦🏻♂️ Prophet:
The Bicamerals are the religious leaders, and Lianna is one of their followers. They have a strange take on human importance and the role of intelligence in our world. While studying portia at Icarus, they name it the hand of God. A small part of the team that survive the ambush at Icarus and make it back to Earth start showing strange symptoms. There is infighting between the team, and slowly they fall one by one, until only Daniel and Valerie remain. They go back to the Oregon desert (which was a nice full circle moment). Valerie keeps looking after Daniel and keeps experimenting on him. At this point of the story, it is clear that Daniel is slowly becoming an unreliable narrator as his mental faculties decline. This part of the story gives the impression that portia had invaded the minds of the rest of the team and is now acting as a “zombie virus“ studying and manipulating Daniel from the inside. So Daniel becomes the prophet that brings portia (the hand of god) to the people of Erath. The implication is that portia will take over the world, ending the human dominance as it slowly removes the sense of self all living things.
