"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..."
Pretty interesting huh? You should read it. This book makes neurobiology interesting. I find it interesting anyway, but this makes an interesting novel out of some questions on the nature of consciousness. It kind of looks at it from an alien perspective,, except some of the aliens are human. Or once were. As well, it takes the vampire myth and makes a solid attempt to scientifically explain vampires. It does a credible job too. I've always liked stories that take mythical creatures and try to explain them scientifically. It's been done with dragons. Now the vampire gets the treatment. Watts recreates the vampire as an extinct hominid predator, with superior strength, co-ordination and pattern recognition abilities. His vampire captain is a genuine psychopath, complete with cannibalistic tendencies and a fatal genetic flaw that causes him to go into life-threatening convulsions at the sight of right angles (just think crucifix). He is also practically immortal, being able to go into decades long hibernation when prey (human flesh/blood) is in short supply.
The book is bloody good, and I recommend it to anyone who is into hard SF.
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