Echopraxia

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Peter Watts: Echopraxia (Paperback, 2015, Tor Books)

Paperback, 384 pages

Published June 16, 2015 by Tor Books.

ISBN:
978-0-7653-2803-8
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4 stars (1 review)

A follow-up to the Hugo Award-nominated Blindsight, Echopraxia is set in a 22nd-century world transformed by scientific evangelicals, supernatural beings and ghosts, where defunct biologist Daniel Bruks becomes trapped on a spaceship destined to make an evolutionary-changing discovery.

5 editions

Second guessing first contact

4 stars

The follow up to his 2006 "Blindsight", "Echopraxia" is yet quite a separate narrative from its predecessor. There is some connecting tissue, but this is quite a different tale, and you'd miss very little if you read it by itself.

The story is set in a triple aftermath. First contact has left humanity with species-wide existential angst; a separate set of crises have left the world (already reeling from climate apocalypse), struggling with a very science-fictiony, rather than horror, undead problem (two of them, actually); and more locally, a violent confrontation leaves the protagonist and a group of strange maybe-trans-human allies in a race across the solar system.

While "Blindsight" went outward, this book heads mostly inward, toward the sun, and a station upon which the world relies for its energy. And something's not quite right...

As with the first book, the tale here is one of disorientation. The protagonist …