Social engineering raised to the level of symphonic manipulation. And Watts suggests that being so keyed into the chain of cause and effect allows a vampire to use even small gestures to program the humans around her. With a vampire it is all calculation and reaction. The power of the vampire is the ability to perfectly mirror the minds of sentient beings without being encumbered by such low utility cognitive processes like empathy and creativity. Not so much for the science, which he more or less described completely in Blindsight’s afterward, but for the deeper questions of causality. When your plot includes walking and talking deux ex machina, you keep them off stage as much as possible.īesides, one senses Watts is far more interested in his vampires anyway. Personally I’m not sure, given the constraints of what Watts is describing that much can be done, dramatically speaking, with the inexplicable and near omnipotent Bicamerals than was done. And in regards to the hive-mind, the overall reaction seems to be that we don’t get a real sense of what they do, other than a few sort of beyond future tech exploits. In particular, the hard sf vampire Valerie seems to be almost unbelievably over-powered compared to the other characters, even outwitting finally the hive-mind bicamerals. I’ve noticed a mixed reaction to the novel mainly centered on the opacity of the characters’ actions.

Echopraxia suggests that the future belongs to predatory intellects, forces far more powerful than man, incapable of truly being understood by human beings. Bracing because his depiction of the future and the oddities who inhabit it continue to get better and better, his plots more complicated and more involving, his characters less like sock-puppets for his ideas and more like actual human beings (or whatevers).ĭiscouraging because Watts uses his considerable gifts, artistic and academic, in the service of a singularly depressing set of ideas gaining percolating up from fields as diverse as physics, neurology, and nihilistic philosophy. Reading Watts is a simultaneously bracing and discouraging experience.

Echopraxia plot