Why it endured
First contact with aliens who are intelligent but not conscious. Watts uses neuroscience and evolutionary biology to ask: is consciousness actually useful?
What they're saying
2 people recommend this book
“I thought I was going to enjoy this book because I was told that it has nice, hard-sci-fi-like aliens. Unfortunately, I learned that that this is a necessary but not a sufficient condition. The aliens were great and fun to contemplate, but there's something about the writing, the way the story is structured and the events that unfold that was simply off. The story is difficult to parse - Peter Watts doesn't hand it to you on the silver platter, for your enjoyment. He makes you work for it, and writes the story in a way that, I thought, required a lot of inferences and reading between the lines. There were also large passages containing some back story for the main character that I didn't fully understand the point of. In summary, I don't think I fully got all the details of this book in a first reading and I emerged somewhat confused about what just happened, and I'll just blame it on the book :) 3/5 3/5”
“Dives into the psychology behind advertising tactics, explaining why watch advertisements always display 10:10 or why fast food chains favor red and yellow, making it valuable for anyone in marketing but equally engaging for curious observers of human behavior.”
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