As I conclude my reading of Blindsight by Peter Watts, my thoughts continually reflect back to the lines “Life isn’t either/or. It’s a matter of degree.” (250) spoken by Robert Cunningham to Siri Keeton. Their specific discussion involves a debate about whether the scrambler creatures from Rorschach should be considered alive in the absence of identifiable genes. This conversation shows that the spectrum of life cannot be defined using narrow human parameters or the constraints of natural versus artificial.
Originally, I thought the book would focus primarily on the Fireflies alien intrusion on Earth. Surely, the plot would center around the human interactions with this extraterrestrial race, I naively assumed. After all, the idea of first contact in an intrusive, but not necessarily violent, manner could fuel the story and keep me turning the pages faster than James could switch personalities.
However, as I ventured further into this world, the main focus shifts from the alien interaction to an in-depth examination of what qualifies as life. Although the alien race still moves the action of the story, there are constant questions about the definitions of life. In this book, the human species itself has changed in a number of different ways that clearly challenge what “life” really means.
Each character adds to the staggering range of varied life in our planet’s future. At the very beginning, Watts introduces a protagonist with half of his brain removed and replaced by “inlay” technology. Even Siri’s best friend believes he “did die” when “they scooped [Siri] out and threw him away” (16). As an alternate dehumanization, Siri’s mother is placed in the virtual world of Heaven, so that she can continue to exist even after her unaugmented body starts to shut down. The burial process is quite similar to current practices, with the significant exception that the person’s consciousness still remains in the simulated environment.
As another example of life after death, the commander of the Theseus mission is a member of the resurrected human supra-species of vampires. The entire vampire race is essentially reborn and straddling the line between life and death. The rest of the Theseus crew is each augmented in a different way, moving them into new forms of life as their “meat” is replaced by technology. During the team members’ visits to Rorschach, they often are killed or severely injured, but are physically repaired in their on-board coffins. Those words make me question how alive the central characters truly are. Even the ship is considered a living being with artificial intelligence that (in a brilliant play on words) fires its “attitude jets” (118). There are all of these variations of existence before the story even discusses the extensions of the definition of life to the aliens.
The drift away from “Human baseline” (278) starts with the people of Heaven and continues with the augmented humans, the synthesist Siri and the vampires. Pushing the spectrum even further are the living spacecraft Theseus, the biomechanical scramblers and the alien vessel Rorschach. At each step along this continuum, Watts forces his characters and his readers to ask what actually identifies life and to reexamine our limited definition of the living and the dead.
