#33 in Horror
Blindsight
- 354
- Pages
- about 6 h
- Reading time
- Seiun Award for Best Translated Long Work
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About the book
Blindsight is a hard science fiction novel by Canadian writer Peter Watts, published by Tor Books in 2006. It won the Seiun Award for the best novel in Japanese translation and was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novel, the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel, and the Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel. The story follows a crew of astronauts sent to investigate a trans-Neptunian comet dubbed "Burns-Caulfield" that has been found to be transmitting an unidentified radio signal, followed by their subsequent first contact. The novel explores themes of identity, consciousness, free will, artificial intelligence, neurology, and game theory as well as evolution and biology.
Reading order · Firefall
- BlindsightThis book
7.87.8 / 10 - Echopraxia
7.57.5 / 10
Where the score comes from
The sources average 7.8 across 785 ratings. With that many, the reader vote carries 81% of the weight and the score stays at 7.8 — the Horror average of 7.8 barely moves it.
| Source | Average | Ratings | Weight |
|---|---|---|---|
| Open Library | 8.2 | 68 | 9% |
| Hardcover | 7.8 | 717 | 91% |
Reader voices
The most-liked reviews on Hardcover (credited to their authors).
“This book uses the ‘first contact' genre (one of my favorites) with a totally opaque alien phenomenon to explore the themes of how opaque we are to ourselves and to others – and the price we pay as a result (other favorite themes of mine). There are downsides: it's dark, and features some bullshit sociobiology. Overall, though, I loved it.”
“Peter Watts wrote Blindsight in 2006, but it reads like a white paper for 2026. This is a clinical exploration, disguised as an alien first contact story, with the idea that intelligence does not require consciousness. The book posits that self-awareness is not a gift but an evolutionary bottleneck that wastes energy and slows down processing. In our current landscape of LLMs and autonomous agents, the foresight here is remarkable. We are increasingly surrounded by entities that solve complex problems without having any internal understanding of what they are doing. The story treats humanity …”
Frequently asked
What is Blindsight rated?
7.8 out of 10, from 785 reader ratings across 2 independent sources.
Is Blindsight worth reading?
Readers give it 7.8/10 from 785 ratings, which puts it ahead of 79 % of the Horror shelf.
How long does it take to read Blindsight?
About 6 hours at an average reading pace — 354 pages.
Where does Blindsight rank?
#33 in Horror on the current snapshot.
Which volume of the series is Blindsight?
Volume 1 of 2 in Firefall. The full reading order is one tap away above.
How long is Blindsight?
It has 354 pages — longer than 53% of the ranked books in Horror.
If you liked this
The same shelf — Horror — and a score of 7.8, the closest to this book.
