So here we will discuss Blindsight
So here it is. It's the longest work/reading period we've had for this club so far, so hopefully you guys still remember this thing exists
Discussion Prompts:
Blindisght covers a lot of topical ground, so there's a lot of room for discussion. I'm only going to list a couple prompts here, but please open the discussion to any topics you feel may be interesting.
1. What exactly was Siri's true role in the mission? Has he succeeded in whatever his intended purpose was? Are his judgements and reports trustworthy?
2. One of the themes that gets mentioned, but not directly discussed so much is religion/religious symbolism. The theme comes up quite frequently in fact. What do you make of this?
3. Why do you love/hate this book, and what is it about it that makes you love/hate it so much?
Voting material for the next installment
We should open the material selection to new suggestions, but I've included the old ones below.
Golem xiv by Stanislaw Lem
Forbidden Planet
2001
The Day the Earth Stood Still
I, Robot (book)
kleinbl00 JakobVirgil eightbitsamurai mhr OftenBen plewemt elizabeth blackbootz flagamuffin Meriadoc minimum_wage
1) Siri's role was as an access character to give you someone to give a shit about amongst an entire ship full of misanthropic twits that I wanted to crush like bugs. Unfortunately I wanted to crush Siri like a bug also. His judgements and reports aren't trustworthy because the author wanted to make the point that nothing is trustworthy. That's his theme. My throat is still sore from having "theme" shoved down it over and over again. 2) Religious themes come up a lot because the author was in love with creating the vampire "species" and he couldn't get around them being repelled by crosses. That's it. 3) I hate this book so much. About a third of the way through you're led to believe you're in the hands of someone who knows what they're doing but by the time you're two thirds of the way through it's abundantly clear that the author is fumbling along, without a plan, so that he can throw his ultimate "fuck you audience" of having a doomed ship from a doomed planet encounter a superior species that is interested in exterminating the human race in as graphic a way as possible just to fuck with them but it doesn't matter because the human race has retreated into the television while the vampire species they resurrected, which is called "solitary" every other page, has somehow banded together to wipe out their sole source of food. Fuck. This book. In the neck.
So one thing I was confused about when I first read this book was regarding Siri's "intervention" with Sarasti, where Sarasti ends up going batshit. The other crew were in on it, except for the batshit part, but what exactly did they expect was going to happen, and what was the point of attacking him on Sarasti's part? Anyways, I liked the gradual exposition and understanding that the crew developed over the book, the way they revised their theories as things were discovered, and the fact that it stuck to having a scientific basis for every phenomenon or technology they encountered, even if it did flounder on that point at times. Many authors just give up and resort to science magic at some point, even in Rama.