Have you ever read a book which you deeply disliked by the end, only for it to become a favorite after you properly digested it?

That was Blindsight for me. By the time I read the last paragraph and closed the book, I honestly hated it. Now, here’s the thing, I did finish reading it. I am by no means a completionist, I’ll abandon books at the first hint of annoyance, so I guess Blindsight never annoyed me, it just told me things I didn’t want to hear, but which were still interesting. The really alien aliens helped a lot. But yeah, by the end I was so against the book’s premise, >!that self awareness is an expensive glitch which has only survived in humans accidentally and most successful species out there don’t bother with it!<, that I felt kind of angry at Peter Watts and kept trying to argue with him in my head. I spent weeks, probably, trying to think of ways to disprove that book’s core ideas. And I hated Sarasti so much. And I felt to identified with Siri and thought he could do no wrong and was my golden boy.

And maybe because of all that thinking about the book, slowly I came around. I realized that premise was actually genius, and a wonderful cosmic horror concept. Aliens are not dangerous because they do game theory or assume they should destroy other civilizations before the other civilizations destroy them or any of that stuff that’s more fashionable today. Aliens are dangerous because they >!are so deeply different from us, that our forms of communication are interpreted like an act of aggression to them. If we’d just been like any other alien out there and didn’t “poison” or communications with pointless, self aware chatter, they would’ve likely been friendly to us!<.

So by the second time I read that book, it had become one of my favorites.

I’d like to read about the times something similar has happened to you all.

by Brad_Brace