Alan's Reviews > Echopraxia

"Then we're stupid and we'll die."
—Pris, in Blade Runner (1982)

When you open a book and the very first page you see drops the word "bleak" (a word I used to describe Peter Watts' Maelstrom too, by the way, back in 2009), one could be excused for feeling a little reluctant to continue:

Watts's literary science fiction is engaging and stunningly bleak, but he asks all the right questions about our evolution.
—The Washington Post, on Echopraxia

More about both parts of that observation later...

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This novel is a sequel of sorts—the hard-SF vampires of Blindsight are back, and deadlier than ever. But Peter Watts doesn't seem to do traditional series. Echopraxia is still an independent work—which is a good thing.

Watts' meticulously-researched work reminds me of Greg Egan's—another hard-SF author who's unafraid of extrapolating from what we know to its logical conclusion, no matter where that takes him. Echopraxia also draws on the same research as Tor Nørretranders' brilliant, methodical deconstruction of consciousness, the nonfiction The User Illusion. At one point, Echopraxia actually brings in process theology, an area of philosophy that my wife studied extensively as part of her Ph.D. research.

You may also be interested in the book's Reddit Q&A, but I would strongly advise that you not peruse that thread until after you've read the book itself.

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So Echopraxia is often bleak, no doubt about it. Observations like these are scattered throughout the book:

These deaths were the closest that Darwin's universe would ever come to altruism.
—p.27

"Art," Moore said. "I remember."
—p.174

Truth had never been a priority. If believing a lie kept the genes proliferating, the system would believe that lie with all its heart.
—p.177

"Oh, they get bored sometimes. Kids, you know. But all it takes is a little judicious injustice, some new atrocity visited on the little people. Get them all fired up again, and off they go."
—p.231

And I thought I was cynical... this last quote resonated with me strongly, though, living as I do just a mile or two from downtown Portland, Oregon, where kids—and others—have been all fired up for months now as I write.

This is tough stuff to read. The choice Watts presents for us, over and over, is not to evolve or die. It's to evolve and die, or just die.

And, despite his care, Watts doesn't get everything right.

That's what it sounded like, anyway: the soft muffled whoomph of far-off ordinance.
—p.28

Sigh... explosives are ordnance, dammit... although I will concede that ordinances often do more damage.

Giving up on Echopraxia because of all that would be a mistake, though. Maybe a better word for Watts' fiction would be "uncompromising." After all, it's not unrelievedly pessimistic, not at all. One of the repeated messages in Watts' novel: baseline humans aren't superior—but we have been really lucky. Watts describes baseline humans as "cockroaches," which in context is a compliment; roaches really are adaptable and ubiquitous, despite all efforts to eradicate them. It's a trait we mere humans have done well to emulate.

On the other hand...

"Let's just agree that neither side has a monopoly on assholes."
—Lianna, p.183

And I really liked the sarcasm of this observation:

"I'll give you that much—you've actually turned incompetence into a survival strategy."
—p.265

Heh... speaking as a boring old baseline human myself, I have to agree.

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The novel proper begins with one man in a tent, in the Oregon desert. (And yes, Oregon has deserts, even today—in the rain shadow east of the Cascade Range, a full two-thirds of the state is dry.) Daniel Brüks is a scientist, gathering data on the DNA of what wildlife remains and trying to find some that hasn't been contaminated by one or another recombinant, retroviral product.

Brüks knows about evolution... later in Echopraxia, we get this parable:

Look, Brüks wanted to say: fifty thousand years ago there were these three guys spread out across the plain, and they each heard something rustling in the grass. The first one thought it was a tiger, and he ran like hell, and it was a tiger but the guy got away. The second one thought the rustling was a tiger, and he ran like hell, but it was only the wind and his friends laughed at him for being such a chickenshit. But the third guy, he thought it was only the wind, so he shrugged it off and a tiger had him for dinner. And the same thing happened a million times across ten thousand generations—and after awhile everyone was seeing tigers in the grass even when there weren't any tigers, because even chickenshits have more kids than corpses do. And from those humble beginnings we learned to see faces in the clouds and portents in the stars, to see agency in randomness, because natural selection favors the paranoid. Even here in the twenty-first century you can make people more honest just by scribbling a pair of eyes on the wall with a Sharpie. Even now, we are wired to believe that unseen things are watching us.
—pp.180-181

Daniel Brüks' self-imposed isolation is soon interrupted, by unseen things that really are watching him... and then Echopraxia's momentum really accelerates. We soon find out that there's a new threat to Earth—a threat to all of the expanded humanities inhabiting Earth now, that is, whether they're vampires, zombies, Bicamerals or just plain old baseline human...

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I haven't been able to shake a strong feeling of déjà vu—the sense that I've read Echopraxia before, somehow, and it just got... redacted from my memory. Echopraxia came out in 2014, though, and I would certainly have reviewed it on Goodreads... wouldn't I?

You'd let me know. Wouldn't you?