Like a C J Cherryh book it makes you feel the danger of the hostile environment (or lack of one) out there.

It's state-of-the-art science fiction: smart, dark and it grabs you by the throat from page one. something new and infinitely more disturbing, forcing us to confront unpalatable possibilities about the nature of consciousness.' - Charles Stross, author of The Delirium Brief ' Blindsight is excellent. It is a rare novel that has the potential to set science fiction on an entirely new course.' - Karl Schroeder, author of Stealing Worlds 'A tour de force, redefining the First Contact story for good. The result is a shocking and mesmerizing performance, a tour-de-force of provocative and often alarming ideas. 'A magnificent, darkly gleaming jewel of a book that hurdles the contradictions inherent in biochemistry, consciousness, and human hearts without breaking stride.' - Elizabeth Bear, author of Karen Memory 'Peter Watts has taken the core myths of the First Contact story and shaken them to pieces. They may be more alien than the thing they've been sent to find.

Pray they can be trusted with the fate of a world. And you send a synthesist -an informational topologist with half his mind gone-as an interface between here and there. You send a monster to command them all, an extinct hominid predator once called vampire, recalled from the grave with the voodoo of recombinant genetics and the blood of sociopaths.

You send a pacifist warrior in the faint hope she won't be needed. You send a biologist so radically interfaced with machinery that he sees x-rays and tastes ultrasound. So who do you send to force introductions with unknown and unknowable alien intellect that doesn't wish to be met? You send a linguist with multiple personalities, her brain surgically partitioned into separate, sentient processing cores. Or perhaps to something closer, something en route. It's talking to some distant star, perhaps. Whatever's out there isn't talking to us. Now some half-derelict space probe, sparking fitfully past Neptune's orbit, hears a whisper from the edge of the solar system: a faint signal sweeping the cosmos like a lighthouse beam. Two months of silence, while a world held its breath. Canadian writer Peter Watts stands on the cutting edge of hard SF with the Hugo and Campbell Award finalist and Locus Award winning Blindsight Two months since the stars fell.

Peter watts firefall series