Book Review: Peter Watts’ “Echopraxia”
by Miles Raymer
2022 Update:
I enjoyed this book much more the second time around compared to my first reading. It’s smarter, more coherent, and more interesting than I remember. I think I understood it better, both because I’m more familiar with some of the ideas Watts was working with, and also because I’m less allergic to the notion that “religious-esque” phenomena may arise from tinkering with human consciousness. Still hoping Watts will get around to continuing this series at some point…
Original Review from 2015:
In Echopraxia’s “Notes and References,” Peter Watts admits that this book might be a literary “faceplant.” I’m inclined to agree. This second installment in the Firefall series is impossible to assess without comparing it to its stunning and disturbing predecessor. Blindsight was innovative, expeditious, and chillingly fulfilling; Echopraxia is desultory, slow, and largely unrewarding. It signifies an unwelcome turn for an otherwise promising series.
Many of Echopraxia‘s failings are apparent from its first pages and persist throughout the novel. As a writer of hard science fiction, Watts has an understandable tendency to dwell on abstruse technological topics. This is not a problem as long as he includes a followable story and engaging characters to balance out his recondite descriptions of antimatter generators, morose musings about the inadequacies of human consciousness, and detailed structural portraits of ships designed for deep space travel. Blindsight achieved this balance with exceptional poise, but Echopraxia swings egregiously toward a heavy reliance on technical tropes while leaving plot and character far behind.
Biologist Daniel Brüks, Echopraxia’s protagonist, defies Watts’ every attempt to render him an interesting and believable character. Brüks is an intellectual “baseline” (i.e. an unaugmented human amongst transhuman companions)––a loner and natural skeptic whose defining feature is bemusement as he is swept into an extraterrestrial conflict he neither understands nor cares much about. Brüks is accompanied by a host of characters who are about as dull as he is (with the possible exception of military strategist Jim Moore, who we eventually discover is related to Siri Keeton, Blindsight’s protagonist). The origins of their motivations, goals and conflicts are unclear at the outset and arguably even less clear at the novel’s conclusion.
Watts retards Echopraxia by shifting his conceptual focus from speculations based on hard science toward imaginings of a mystical hive-mind intelligence for which he openly admits there is not a single shred of existing scientific evidence. These “Bicamerals” augment their brains to dissolve the illusion of individual consciousness in favor of an opaque and thoroughly religious groupthink that is vague to the point of meaninglessness. And yet, they are capable of generating (or at least overseeing) physical events and predicting real phenomena in ways that are sure to infuriate even the casual skeptic. It’s hocus-pocus legitimized by scientific jargon and the worn out assertion that science provides only provisional and not ultimate truths.
Perhaps the most distressing fact about Echopraxia is that almost all of its worthwhile moments and insights are recycled from Blindsight. The characters encounter the same (or at least a similar) alien lifeform as in the previous novel, but with far less exciting and meaningful consequences. Brüks participates in plenty of clever discussions about the evolution and limitations of human sentience, most of which would be more at home in Blindsight than they are in Echopraxia. Watts is indubitably a master at sabotaging his readers’ expectations, but does so this time around in ways that fail to logically align with a central storyline, character development, or thematic message. Nothing makes this point more emphatically than the remarkable contrast in the functions of two novels’ titular concepts; the idea of “blindsight” was a crucial element of how that story played out, whereas the word “echopraxia” doesn’t even show up until this book’s final act, and exerts little to no impact on unfolding events.
If there is a genuinely good book hidden somewhere in the pages of Echopraxia, exhuming it would take a lot more time and effort than I’m willing to shell out. However, having recently heard that Watts plans to continue the Firefall series, I have to admit that there is enough here to provide an adequate (if tenuous) bridge between two excellent novels. This is especially true in light of Watts’ frustratingly oblique but nevertheless tantalizing hints that Siri Keeton may again take center stage. Echopraxia’s conclusion also contains some underdeveloped but potentially illuminating ideas about madness, faith and betrayal that could be put to good use down the road. Watts is a talented and erudite thinker, so if he decides to come out for round three, I’ll give it a fair shake.
This is a harsh review, probably harsher than Watts deserves. Blindsight set such a high bar that perhaps it is unfair to expect him to produce a worthy successor. But with an eight-year gap to work with, it’s hard to believe Watts couldn’t come up with something much more entertaining and intellectually firm. As it is, Echopraxia is an ugly hodgepodge of scientific thought experiments and mystical ruminations that fails to recapture or embellish the raw force of Blindsight’s narrative unity.