《Blindsight》简介：

Two months have past since a myriad of alien objects clenched about the Earth, screaming as they burned. The heavens have been silent since–until a derelict space probe hears whispers from a distant comet. Something talks out there: but not to us.

Who you do send to meet the alien

when the alien doesn't want to meet?

You send a linguist with multiple personalities carved surgically into her brain. You send

a biologist so radically interfaced with machinery that he sees x-rays and tastes ultra-

sound, so compromised by grafts and splices he no longer feels his own flesh. You

send a pacifist warrior whose career-defining moment was an act of treason. You

send a monster to command them all, an extinct hominid predator once called

vampire, recalled from the grave with the voodoo of recombinant genetics

and the blood of sociopaths. And you send a synthesist — an

informational topologist with half his mind gone — as an

interface between here and there, a conduit through

which the Dead Center might hope to understand

the Bleeding Edge.

You send them all to the edge of interstellar space, praying you

can trust such freaks and retrofits with the fate of a world.

You fear they may be more alien than the thing they've

been sent to find.

But you'd give anything for that to be true, if you

only knew what was waiting for them…

《Blindsight》摘录：

"I know your race and mine are never on the best of terms." There was a cold smile in his voice if not on his face. "But I do only what you force me to. You rationalize, Keeton. You defend. You reject unpalatable truths, and if you can't reject them outright you trivialize them. Incremental evidence is never enough for you. You hear rumors of Holocaust; you dismiss them. You see evidence of genocide; you insist it can't be so bad. Temperatures rise, glaciers melt—species die—and you blame sunspots and volcanoes. Everyone is like this, but you most of all. You and your Chinese Room. You turn incomprehension into mathematics, you reject the truth without even knowing what it is." "It served me well enough." I wondered at the ease with which I had put my life into the past tense...