It signifies an unwelcome turn for an otherwise promising series. Their pilgrimage brings Dan Bruks, the fossil man, face-to-face with the biggest evolutionary breakpoint since the origin of thought itself. Blindsight was innovative, expeditious, and chillingly fulfilling Echopraxia is desultory, slow, and largely unrewarding.

And dead ahead, a handful of rapture-stricken monks takes them all to a meeting with something they will only call 'The Angels of the Asteroids.' A vampire and its entourage of zombie bodyguards lurk in the shadows behind.

To his right is a pilot who hasn't yet found the man she's sworn to kill on sight. To his left is a grief-stricken soldier, obsessed by whispered messages from a dead son. Now he's trapped on a ship bound for the center of the solar system. But he awakens one night to find himself at the center of a storm that will turn all of history inside-out. Taking refuge in the Oregon desert, he's turned his back on a humanity that shatters into strange new subspecies with every heartbeat. And it's all under surveillance by an alien presence that refuses to show itself.ĭaniel Bruks is a living fossil: a field biologist in a world where biology has turned computational, a cat's-paw used by terrorists to kill thousands. It's the eve of the twenty-second century: a world where the dearly departed send postcards back from Heaven and evangelicals make scientific breakthroughs by speaking in tongues where genetically engineered vampires solve problems intractable to baseline humans and soldiers come with zombie switches that shut off self-awareness during combat. Prepare for a different kind of singularity in Peter Watts' Echopraxia, the follow-up to the Hugo-nominated novel Blindsight.

Echopraxia books