Yesterday I finished Blindsight, Peter Watts' new novel. You can get the full text here. It's hard SF to the max -- inquiries into the nature of consciousness, mind-boggling worldbuilding feats -- but it also has some human-psyche work that I find simultaneously incredibly creepy and incredibly fascinating. The most human of the main characters is a woman who intentionally gave herself multiple personalities and is referred to as The Gang of Four. And the least human of the main characters is nowhere near as mindblowingly weird as his aliens are.
Reading Watts is like watching a tarantula eat a small bird. It's repulsive, but you can't look away. It's nature at its reddest in tooth and claw. It's direct, thoughtful, extrapolations of today's nightmares into tomorrow's.
It's impossible to put down.
