In a world that’s speeding toward the singularity (Bruks’ wife left him and her physical body to join other virtual minds in a reality dubbed Heaven) Bruks is a fossil, a man who needs to wear peripherals, such as the cutely named gimp mask, to access information. Unlike the bicameral monks or military officer Jim Moore, or Doctor Lianna Lutterodt, Bruks has never been augmented. Before Daniel knows it, he’s been whisked away on a spaceship called the Crown of Thorns which is on a mission to Icarus, a space station that’s started receiving data from Theseus – a spaceship lost a decade ago that was the subject of Blindsight.ĭaniel Bruks is our everyman.
This standalone aspect is facilitated by the introduction of Daniel Bruk, a biologist on a sabbatical out in Oregon who gets caught up in a conflict between Valerie the Vampire and the Church of the Bicameral.
And while I’m sure Echopraxia works better as a book if you read it side by side with Blindsight, in my view it also functions adequately as a standalone novel. As he says in the detailed “Notes and References” at the end of the novel (with 140 footnotes no less), if Blindsight was about consciousness, then Echopraxia is about autonomy and free will. The impression I got, though, was that Watts was continuing a conversation. Now, I haven’t read Blindsight so I can’t be sure how many of the concepts and notions introduced are original to Echopraxia. It makes for a slightly frustrating but often times exciting reading experience. So much so that the novel’s plot regularly stops, almost abruptly, so these concepts can be discussed and teased out. This is hard science fiction that’s having a grand old-time exploring difficult, nebulous concepts such as free will and faith.
(The first book, Blindsight, garnered multiple award nominations including a Hugo). Weaponised tornadoes, posthuman monks, sentient mould and the subtle conditioning of the human brain are only some of the concepts you’ll find in Echopraxia, the second novel in Peter Watt’s “Firefall” series.
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