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I was fortunate the other day to come across Blindsight by Peter Watts. I don't remember now where I spotted the link, but it was noted as being published under a Creative Commons license so I'd downloaded the PDF and carried on with whatever I was doing at the time. I was tidying up my desktop yesterday when I noticed it and decided to take a look. I've only just resurfaced.
It often seems to me that Science Fiction writers must start out with what is essentially just magic, then casually apply whichever scientific terms seem most impressive or vaguely relevant. For this reason, I generally prefer outright fantasy - at least it's honest. It's not that I have a problem with artistic license, or that I think sci-fi ought to be more accurate than it generally is, it's just that when the science is bad, and the author clearly knows significantly less about the subject than even you do (or just doesn't care) I find it uncomfortable to read. Blindsight is different. It's not only plausible, it's almost educational. On looking up the website again afterwards, I found that Watts is actually a scientist and there is a whole category known as Hard Science Fiction - and I wish I'd known about it before!
This book proves, at least in my opinion, that you can do the job properly without compromising the story. The science probably isn't 100% perfect, but at least I couldn't tell you what or why, which is all that matters from my perspective as a reader. Clearly, Watts has had some trouble finding a market for his work (he basically says so on his website), but I suspect that has more to do with publishers not being able to just pick some standard formula for knowing how and where to market it. I, for one, enjoyed the book and commend the author not only for the amount of effort and research that has evidently gone into it, but also for releasing it under such a license. Even though the book was licensed under Creative Commons for promotional purposes, few copyright holders are prepared to risk their assets in this way. I hope that plenty of people reward him with a donation so that he might consider releasing future work under a royalty-free license also. I won't say anything about the story here, because I'm not much of a book reviewer, and anyway, it's free - go and get your copy if you want to know more!
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